Liminal Space - Incorporating Real Life into Games - Extra Credits

By now, most of you have probably had a game greet you by your real name without you having entered it yourself. How is it doing that? Well, it's scraping your data from somewhere. And as more of our systems end up with more and more of our data, we have to ask ourselves, what are the ethical and design ramifications of games doing this? This episode is brought to you by Audible. Go to audible.com/extracredits with a Z to start your free 30-day trial. Your NES and your Sega Genesis, these were dumb machines. They performed a single simple function, to run the code on the cartridges you put into them. Of course, that's not the case with our Xbox Ones, our PS4s, or our Switches. Today, those systems hold a huge manifold of data about us. If you've ever entered credit card info into one of them, they have a name and an address. If you've linked your email account, they hold that, too. If you've connected your Facebook or your YouTube accounts, there's probably a ton of

personal data that can be gleaned there. And this doesn't even take into account all of the information they have on your playing habits, from your trophies, hours played on each game, completion rate, and such, or the information that's stored about who you play with and who your friend group is. Now, a lot of that data isn't accessible to game developers, but some of it is, and it's almost frightening what a developer, one way or another, can scrape about you if they choose to do so, especially if you play games on your PC. So, let's talk about the ramifications of this, because especially in the indie game space, I've seen people start to explore what can be done with this collected information, and there are some genuinely cool possibilities. When you wake up and you check your email in the morning to find that the mysterious AI character from the game you've been playing has left you a note with information that'll help you progress, that's a pretty powerful moment. When one of your friends logs on and hops into your game, except it's not really your friend, it's just the game using their handle. That can lead to all sorts of genuinely breathtaking,

heartbreaking, or revelatory moments. But, there are a lot of dangers there, too. There are, of course, the obviously terrible examples where games start putting in targeted ads based on your purchase history or the like, but I think there are less obvious possibilities worth considering here, too. The ones that might unfortunately come up when people are genuinely trying to make better, more immersive experiences for you to play. Imagine that scenario I described before where a game emails you. What if your gaming account isn't tied to your real email address? Or worse, what if in its data scraping, the game somehow gets the wrong address and emails like your dad or your significant other? That is going to be one confusing email they get in their inbox, and hopefully it doesn't read like a ransom note or a threat or something, which kind of leads me to my first point. When making use of real-world data, we have to be incredibly careful that anything we do won't be mis- construed as real by somebody not playing the game. The goal here is, of course, to make the game

more immersive for the player. I mean, they've already bought in. There's a sort of tacit agreement involved in playing the game, so they're most likely okay with elements of the game popping up in their real life in cool little ways. But, we've got to make sure to prevent confusion with those real-world elements, or they could potentially have some disastrous ramifications, which also leads me to our second point. Please, please do not have your game do anything that could be misconstrued as criminal, or that would suggest the possibility of real-world criminal activity to somebody not playing the game. I feel like that should go without saying, but here we are. Now, let's take the second scenario, the case where the game impersonates somebody you know. I'm hesitant to say that we should never do this, because I'm just incredibly reluctant to cut off any avenue of design, much less one that could deliver such huge emotional stakes, but this one rides incredibly close to that line. There are just too many things that could go too wrong. I mean, we could destroy friendships. Imagine if your friend hopped into your game and then

acted like a complete jerk, went way over the line, and then you confront them about it later and they claim to know nothing about it. This just gets bad in a hurry. Or, maybe they don't act like a jerk. Maybe they just act weird or they stay silent when you try to talk to them. You could get really worried for that person if you don't immediately recognize they're just a trick of the computers. We also have to be careful of who we pull from people's friends list. Imagine if an ex of yours suddenly hopped into your game, one who you still have feelings for. Or, imagine if the game pulled in somebody you'd lost, a parent or a grandparent who for years had just been sitting idle in your friends list, the person you've never been able to bring yourself to delete. Then, imagine them suddenly joining your game. There's just no reason to put somebody through that. So, I think games that do this sort of data dredging will have to notify the player at the outset, at least at first. I know it takes away some of the impact and blunts some of the emotional effect, but it also helps

to mitigate how much damage might be done, and that's essential. And, in some ways, I hate losing that surprise, that revelation that the game knows me, not as some impersonal and generic player, but actually knows who I am in some strange way, and that it's like tailoring itself to me. Perhaps in time, as these features become more common, it's possible we won't need any warning. For the time being though, we need to alert the player if we're going to dig through their data, and platform holders are also going to have to start getting involved by giving players more control over their data. All personal data should default to share with no one, no matter how innocuous. I mean, do I really care if a game can see what trophies I've gotten just so it can make some crack about how I need to get good at Dark Souls? No, but it doesn't matter. That's got to be the player's choice. Games should also be able to ask for permissions much in the way as when you sign into something with Facebook and it asks for permission to access data. But that needs to be the player's choice to opt into, not something that

they've got to go through arcane menus to opt out of. If a game opened up and said, "Hey, game would like to access your trophies and your play times." I would almost certainly say, "Yeah, sure. Go for it." And then I would know what I was getting into. I could okay these things on a case by case basis, limiting the potential negative effects. This new horizon of design where we scrape data about you to make your game more personalized, more intimate has enormous potential. These games could provide us with moments that'll stick with us for a lifetime. So, I don't want to simply close that door or say, "Let's never go there." But it is really important that we explore these possibilities with our eyes open. That we give the player the opportunity to control their experience and respect them as they do so. We cannot just jump into this new avenue of design thoughtlessly. More than ever, this is the place where we must remember the player comes first. See you next week. This episode was brought to you by Audible, the leading provider of audiobooks with an unmatched selection

for you to choose from. Audiobooks are great for making travel or traffic or chores that much more enjoyable. This week, for any of you Extra History fans, our recommendation is Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie. There is so much more to Catherine than our series of videos could contain and this book can help you start to fill in those gaps. Go to audible.com/extracredits with a Z because it Don't worry about it. Anyway, go there and start your free 30-day trial. Mhm.