How much information could a modern of future game get about the player?

News & General Discussion
1


Side Note: Westworld inspired this post, so looking for a picture I found that there is a Westworld VR experience (article link)

The concept is most games only pick up on joystick, mouse, keyboard, touch screen inputs from the player. VR and AR are opening up a whole new world of inputs from players.

For instance with facial expression recognition and a face cam or webcam you could probably track the emotional state of your players.

With VR you have the potential to track their head, arms and even whole body posture.

If you used Voice recognition you could not only provide more natural NPC interaction interface but also pick up on emotional state. This could be taxing for mobile and PC hardware but with cloud based voice recognition systems Siri, Cortana, Alexa, (?Google?), it should be possible to add this feature (if not already).

Also with cloud based Deep Learning AI how long before we see NPC characters that can hold a conversation.

Imagine a Deep Learning AI system that provides Voice Recognition and NPC generation. You set the type of personality profile, IQ, Sex, Age, Status, Humour, Politics/Faction, Mayer Briggs, Quirks, Hates, Loves and the cloud based system runs your NPC’s conversations. Once you have sent it your game world information pack e.g. history, setting, items, places, factions and intrigue.

But would these NPC’s need more information on the player to respond realistically, for example people respond to other people’s facial expressions, tone of voice, stance and probably a host of other non verbal cues that give them a feel about someone else.

Is the Uncanny Valley of Player to NPC conversation/interaction more than stilted dialogue selections. Do we need way more information on the player’s emotional state than WASD SPACE or Head, Hands XYZ.

Why would we need this level of boring player interaction, well not all great stories/experiences involve guns and hand eye coordination.

Imagine an MMO where you can have as much fun chatting with characters and uncovering intrigue and gossip as you can stomping around playing whack a mole with the trolls.

Or what if you could build a VR/Game based version of Westworld.

PS: Should we treat start treating our NPC characters better, once they start upgrading with Deep Learning AI it could be too late to reconsider?

2

http://developer.affectiva.com/v2_3/unity/

HoloLens

Thrills as we speculate wildly about Future Technologies!!!1!

3

Chatbots are not future technology and neither is deep learning AI, haven’t you seen IBM’s Watson Win Jeopardy (2011)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgYSv2KSyWg

4

All of it. The game could just check browser cookies. Or be associated with google. You can also be psychologically profiled while playing.

Uh, you can have this kind of experience today. And you could have it ten years ago. And probably before that. All you need is server with human players and make every player roleplay their character. You’ll have the world where you’ll be able to chat and gossip with everybody, and uncover intrigues. I believe neverwinter 1 and 2 had those kind of servers, some of which are running to this day. WoW had something similar. Intrigue aspect works very well in EvE online.

Basically, while an AI is optimal for this, this can be achieved by putting many humans into game world and convincing them to behave.

1 Like
5

The AI is only one aspect the main thing is the player input, detecting expressions, eye movements, hand and body gestures would all be key to presenting believable interaction. Otherwise you might as well be talking to sponge bob square pants.

6

How about we hire all the gold farmers to be enemy leaders in an MMO? Each person would be given direct control of an enemy leader and all the mooks under the him would function similar to an RTS. :stuck_out_tongue:

7

I believe that if your game doesn’t do that, and resort to interacting with the player through the text only, it’ll result in more believable and immersive experience. You should not be looking for player’s reaction, instead you should try to make the world believable. Players are not the characters they control, so trying to read them too deep will be a waste of time. Human brain is constantly looking for patterns and fills gaps in data. Meaning the less you present, the more impact you can have. Three lines of text can easily have the same effect as CG animation that probably cost half a million usd to produce.

Oh, it would absolutely work, except that you’ll need higher english proficiency than what gold farmers can offer. You’ll be essentially hiring actors to control in-game characters. It would work in MMO model. I’m not aware of anyone trying to do that, though (then again, i’m not a fan of MMOs). Kinda the same thing as Disneyland Mascot characters, only in digital form.

8

What if your game could monitor the heart, breathing rate and galvanic skin response and ideally you would want their brain EEG as well. With these inputs a game could dynamically search for and find a player’s Flow State.

Flow State:

It is what your players want and what you should be trying to give them. Unfortunately* we don’t have the input systems to dynamically adapt our games to each player’s ideal flow state.

*There might be a problem with this as games with human biometrics could become highly addictive.

9

I think this is an incredibly bad idea. Also see “self-stimulation experiments” on rats.

Basically, you are not supposed to try to make digital junkies or hypnotize people.
Your goal is not to give people what they want, but to entertain them. One way to entertain is to show ideas, worlds or concepts people haven’t seen before. Because they never saw them before, they don’t want them. But they will like the new experience.

Games are supposed to inspire, show new things, and allow player to explore ideas - in addition to being entertaining. Trying to blindly trigger release of serotonin is essentially an attempt to make a digital equivalents of drugs. Personally speaking, I would not want anyone with such ideas to be allowed to work in the industry.

10

Odd that in an industry dedicated to getting people to play, analysing data, and even introducing F2P games with pay to go away progress bars, Zynga anyone.

Did anyone actually play early Zynga games, it was like playing a really slow powerpoint where you could pay to speed up the progress bar. They used advances and I would say misused the science of psychology to addict players to their skinner boxes.

It’s amazing how much data big companies have on people, they use this data to sell you goods.

Could that data be misused or abused and would they buy more personal VR data from F2P games companies or Facebook/Oculus?

With VR and mobile devices that can watch the players. How long before it starts to happen anyway.

If games companies can make more profit when they utilise, biometric feedback from their players as well as all the other data they already mine, they will use it to make more sales.

VR and AR devices are fitted to your head, with the right sensors they could probably monitor your eyes, mouth, heart rate, breathing rate, even basic brain eeg.

To start with this info can help alleviate stress or motion sickness, so games can slow down or reduce the fear stimulus to fit the player’s emotional state. But they could also be used to hit that sweet spot of Flow State for players, where they lose themselves in the game.

@neginfinity Your are right to be concerned as some future Zynga like companies might produce addictive F2P games that use this technology.

Imagine a future where you are walking down a street using AR or in VR and all the adverts are designed and targeted for you in 3D. In a way we already have that with the internet advertising but how better would the advertisers be if they could monitor your vitals, track your eyes to know what really interest you.

On the other hand we could just have great VR games that give great Flow State.

11

https://www.neowin.net/news/yahoo-patents-a-smart-billboard-that-spies-on-you-to-bring-personalized-ads

12

And in my opinion this is not what games should be.
http://progressquest.com/

Someone will make an adblock for the headset or the people will downright refuse to wear them all the time. (Does anyone remember google glass?)

1 Like
13

Well much more of that information is gathered by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and the Financial Transaction processors when you buy the game. Really, the game maker need only be concerned if the game is being played. Most games aren’t after purchase, even if a refund or review is not done, just as most clothing bought is never worn. If a game maker wants that other data it is more sensible and economical to buy it from a marketing data warehouse.

14

Anyone considered using a C.H.I.P ($9 micro PC) to read a player’s brain EEG data?

https://vimeo.com/191816562

http://blog.nextthing.co/this-c-h-i-p-powered-art-project-can-read-your-mind/

15

Well I was purposely dorking with my thoughts on a brain EKG (is that what they are called?) after I had reconstructive face surgery and the nurse knew I was messing with my brain waves and told me so. I was just seeing if they could see anything if I purposely tried to alter my brainwaves as I was not sure.

16

But if you strap your QA team into brain EEG readers or better yet MRI brain scanners you can get a better idea of what they think of your game, you, the company and any questions you ask them!

17

True, they can read more than I thought from those. They are useful but to be more effective it’s best to let them wonder in a try at their own leisure rather than scheduling them and standing over their shoulder. I guess they would need a full-time EEG technician to wire them up when they felt like playing the game.

18

Can’t remember where I read this, but there was an article from an ex exployee of a mobile company where he said the company had a huge database dedicated just to user data and they tracked everything there.
The creepy thing was that he even said the company went so far to create fake facebook accounts that would send you a facebook friend request to get access to the full set of your profile data(things you normally wouldn’t give to a mobile app).
He said it was a common operation in the businness.

EDIT
Found it: “We Own You” – Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer – TouchArcade

19

Should more game developers and companies be up to speed on the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Work → Issues | Electronic Frontier Foundation

As a game developer having more player input can allow me to adapt a game’s difficulty to suit the player. Not become a spy prying into their lives.

That’s why I raised this issue, at what point when digital devices and games are getting closer to the individual do we as an industry need to acknowledge people’s privacy.

And the thing is these data spying companies are making a profit from selling the data on to third parties, then the data is often hacked open and is all over the internet before you can change your credit card details.