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How Games Companies Get, and Use, your Child's Data
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How Games Companies Get, and Use, your Child's Data
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Overview
00:00:11
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening, and welcome to the Dopamine Slot Machine, the podcast that discusses the video games that your children are playing. What you need to know about them? How do they aim to get your kids hooked?
00:00:22
Andrew Wilmot
What can you do to make sure that your child has a safer relationship with the video games that they play? My name is Andrew. I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer. And it has been a little while, hasn't it? It's been a couple of months since the last episode went up.
00:00:35
Andrew Wilmot
um And that's You know, we we did record a number of episodes and for various reasons, including, unfortunately, technical difficulties, funnily enough, ah these episodes did not make it to publication. But I am here right now and I believe, i'm fingers crossed, everything's going to go smoothly and you will be hearing this very shortly.
00:00:56
Andrew Wilmot
So whilst it's been a quiet couple of months on the podcast front, it's certainly not been a quiet couple of months for me, no sir.
Addictive Design in Children's Video Games
00:01:03
Andrew Wilmot
So I have been speaking up and down the country from Worcester to Jersey, both virtually and in person on addictive design in children focused video games.
00:01:12
Andrew Wilmot
One particular highlight was speaking to a room full, you know, we we sold over 70 tickets ah of health and education professionals. I had the fantastic moment. was stood with ah David Sidwick, ah police and crime commissioner for Dorset, a head teacher and a pediatrician.
00:01:29
Andrew Wilmot
when a journalist came over to speak with us. And they introduced themselves, obviously very high-powered roles. ah I'm David Sidwick, I'm the Police and Crime Commissioner for Dorset. I'm the head teacher, I'm a paediatrician. And I just turned around and say, I'm Andrew and I play video games. And that obviously is enough to give me a platform to stand up here and speak to all of you lot.
00:01:49
Andrew Wilmot
Now, one thing that came up a lot in these conversations and talks i was giving, where people would follow up on and really want to know more on, is...
Data Collection in Battlefield 6
00:02:00
Andrew Wilmot
how is the data collected for our children? Now, we've spoken about the way that these big platforms are effectively turning every single user into an unwitting member of a focus group constantly, every day.
00:02:12
Andrew Wilmot
But what does that actually look like? Now, very timely, I saw a tweet. Is still called tweets on X.com? Doesn't really matter. ah From the developers of a game called Battlefield 6. You might have heard of the Battlefield series. It's a fairly major one.
00:02:28
Andrew Wilmot
And, you know, this is a very major game. It's a big game. It's popular. In fact, i'm I'm sure that there are plenty of children who are probably playing it right now as I'm recording. Anyway, so they were saying that they... This is a little bit surprising, actually.
00:02:44
Andrew Wilmot
So they were saying that in short... They had found in their data that in short-range engagements... Battlefield 6 is a shooting game. So by short-range engagements, I mean, you know, the players are close to each other in-game.
00:02:57
Andrew Wilmot
ah controller players were beating had a slight edge over keyboard and mouse players. Well, that's surprising to the general wisdom is that keyboard and mouse has a higher fidelity and so it's better for shooting games. so And that's probably why they put this out as a way of justifying some balance tweaks they were doing.
00:03:12
Andrew Wilmot
um For reference as well, Battlefield 6 has what's called cross play. So ah people who are on PC can play against people who are on consoles. And that's why you get keyboard and mouse versus controllers.
00:03:25
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I'm not saying that collecting this data to use for balance tweaks is inherently a bad thing, right? I don't think that a game aiming to be balanced is necessarily awful. I think it can improve the gaming experience in a positive way.
00:03:40
Andrew Wilmot
I also, for the record, think that deliberately imbalanced games very much have their place too. But what is really interesting about this is it reveals just how much information they're getting here.
Monetization Strategies in Battlefield 6
00:03:51
Andrew Wilmot
So we're not talking about the results of a game, right? um You might be imagining that the data that they're collecting is, oh, ah keyboard and mouse players generally beat out controller players or vice versa, as it happens to be in this case.
00:04:06
Andrew Wilmot
No, that's not what they're saying. In each match, particularly larger ones, you might have hundreds or thousands of engagements between players. And those would lead to a variety of different results, most of the time involving a kill, but a lot of the time not, right?
00:04:22
Andrew Wilmot
That's the information they're getting. So within a game, ah just from this tweet, they are showing that in each game, they're collecting thousands of data points. A player might have dozens and dozens of engagements in a singular ah game, let alone across a multi-game play session.
00:04:40
Andrew Wilmot
And so these players are, whether they understand it or not, are effectively constantly being focus grouped to create what the developer is viewing as the ideal gaming experience.
00:04:53
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I'm not going to not going to ah guess at how this might be being used in this specific game, but what I will say is that Battlefield 6 has recently come under fire for its extremely heavy use of microtransactions.
00:05:09
Andrew Wilmot
So like a lot of popular games these days, they they include seasons. So in the sort of live serviceification, so you're not just buying a game, you are buying into a hobby that's going to go on for years and years and years, and they're going to keep being able to sell you stuff.
00:05:21
Andrew Wilmot
Um, In the season, you can buy... and this is you know This is a £60 game. ah So buy a battle pass, which gets you all of the you know the key key elements for a season. And and this varies from $10 to $20, depending on the version that you get.
00:05:41
Andrew Wilmot
um By the way, to get everything in the current Battle Pass, I did see a post saying that ah you know somebody did the maths. So if you were to buy everything you added in-game the most ideal way, it would actually cost about $140, £100,
00:05:59
Andrew Wilmot
hundredgen forty dollars hundreddgepounds ah but the total cost, depending on the way you approached it, if you want to have every skin and item added, you'd have to buy all the different battle pass bundles separately, you're looking at $500, £370.
00:06:16
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, come under that flak for just how anyway so it's come on flat for just how much microtransactions are included in this game. and This is just season one, uh, seasons last generally about three months. It varies from game to game. Uh, so if you wanted to buy everything to have all this, kind and this is already a game that you've paid money for. This isn't a free game. And we talk about the risks of free games. This is a paid game. You'd go pay 60 pounds to pick it off the shelf today.
00:06:47
Andrew Wilmot
That'll last you three months. And so this is so heavily monetized, uh, I'm not going to speculate on the ways they might be using the level of information gathering that they've already demonstrated that they do, that they've publicized that they do.
00:07:04
Andrew Wilmot
I'm not going to speculate on how that is going to be used to optimize the sort of the the user flow into paying for these microtransactions. um But I would be astounded if there wasn't a similar level of optimisation being done on its users to extract as much money out of them as possible.
Comparison with Gambling Industry
00:07:27
Andrew Wilmot
want to take things back a few years. i recently reread an absolute favourite book of mine, Addiction by Design by Dr Natasha Skull. And this is one of my biggest inspirations as books go. It is it is about ah the rise of machine gambling in Vegas. And there's a fantastic chapter on live data as in tracking players across the casino on the games they're playing and getting information about them and so that a number of behavioral analytics software suites were developed to help the gambling industry understand their players better specifically to be able to extract as much money out of them and the sort of the first uh examples of this appeared in the 80s really with
00:08:14
Andrew Wilmot
with sort of stamp cards that you could then collect and and and track from there. In 1997, and I'm quoting directly from a dictionary design here, the managers at Foxwoods, a spoiling Native American casino in Connecticut, envisioned a cashless environment when patrons used the Wampum card as an all-purpose transaction debit card for all expenditures in both the resort and in the local community.
00:08:38
Andrew Wilmot
This vision of the entire local community as a site for the collection of live data extends the reach of player tracking beyond the physical boundaries of the casino. And then later on, she talks about how a game developer she spoke with in 2000 speculated that newer tracking cards will not require insertion machines for recognition to take place.
00:08:54
Andrew Wilmot
Being able to seamlessly track the migration through a given landscape. That is very much what is done with tracking tokens at The wider web, right?
00:09:06
Andrew Wilmot
um If you've got a Google Analytics, Google Ads account, you can see where the users are coming from and the way they move through your website. you can ah You've got similar tools in Facebook.
00:09:17
Andrew Wilmot
Without even talking about the tools that big tech are using themselves, they're selling the ability for companies to use these tools on their users as just standard business practices. There's bit in the book where it's quoting from the advertising brochure of a piece of software from about 2008 where...
00:09:37
Andrew Wilmot
but the The software's website suggests that casino managers can, quote, and I quote, know more about players than they know about themselves. At the top right of the screen, casino floor managers may click to get live data to view a specific person's play at any given moment.
00:09:55
Andrew Wilmot
It talks about one specific type of software ah software called Compodigum. but ah said That's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it? ah Compadime, there we go, Compadime, where it boasts nearly 20% additional revenue within eight months of using its software.
00:10:13
Andrew Wilmot
And this is also interesting, those that install a data warehouse directly on their premises are armed with up to this information, thus are able to cope with the atomic level data across the enterprise in real time.
00:10:24
Andrew Wilmot
Now, what that's setting there is standard in video games for children. Fortnite absolutely has this. ah Battlefield 6 almost certainly has this.
00:10:34
Andrew Wilmot
Any game that your children are playing will have this to some degree. And the big games, where the folk like your Roblox, your League of Legends, will have all of this information in-house and be able to view and adjust the playing experience in almost real time.
00:10:53
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I'm not just going to quote the entire book to you, although absolutely this book is like the Bible for understanding the way companies ah use behavioural modification.
Behavioral Algorithms in Gaming
00:11:03
Andrew Wilmot
ah But there's one last section I want to explain here.
00:11:08
Andrew Wilmot
So player value algorithms set calendars and budgets to predict when and how much a player can be expected to gamble, generating behaviour modification reports that suggest what kinds of solicitations he or she might respond to.
00:11:21
Andrew Wilmot
A gambler overdue for a visit gets a mailer followed by a telephone call. We get him motivated back and in an observed frequency pattern, CEO e o Gary Loveman told a journalist.
00:11:33
Andrew Wilmot
They even developed a way to calculate a player's predicted lifetime value, or how much he or she is likely to lose to the franchise over his or her lifetime, with customers deemed most profitable receiving special treatment, including quicker responses from telephone systems that are programmed to bounce incoming phone numbers off a customer database, and place calls in the queue according to their value tier.
00:11:53
Andrew Wilmot
In this way, every player is accounted for and gets something, depending on their value to the property they're playing. Similarly, Bally uses the customer data it gathers as the basis for player-centric bonusing.
00:12:04
Andrew Wilmot
Unlike game-centric bonusing, in which machines randomly reward whoever is sitting at them, the player-centric system categorizes individuals by their unique spending profiles and rewards them with bonuses accordingly.
00:12:16
Andrew Wilmot
That is very similar to the techniques that are used in video games. So to use an example that I've talked about a few times in matchmaking, but particularly in big games, you might see that some players drop off after a certain loss streak.
00:12:32
Andrew Wilmot
Now, ultimately, whilst there is not a direct relationship between the amount of time somebody spends in a game and the amount of money they spend, there is a correlation, right? if If I spend 30 minutes in Roblox, I'm unlikely to start spending huge amounts of money buying Robux.
00:12:47
Andrew Wilmot
However, if I've been sort of drawn into these virtual worlds and I'm spending... five, six hours a day, which a surprising number of children do, then I'm far more likely to be spending money in this environment.
00:13:01
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, so if you see that a player is likely to drop off after a certain losing streak, then you can adjust the matchmaking algorithm so that, or account for this in the matchmaking algorithm, so that the sort of final game where you know that they're likely to drop off if they lose this one, ah they're paired against comparatively weaker players. They're more likely to ti either to get that win or nearly get that win, which is also extremely powerful psychologically.
00:13:26
Andrew Wilmot
For similar reasons, actually, Fortnite, if you go start to game a game Fortnite right now, you go set up a new account, um you you tell it that you've never played Fortnite before, it won't pair you against real players because you'll get demolished.
00:13:41
Andrew Wilmot
And also, they they say this is to establish a sort of baseline level of competence so that they know where to place you when pairing against other players. That's what they say. What they're actually doing is they're pairing you against bots.
00:13:53
Andrew Wilmot
They're pairing you against bots so that you have a very good chance of having some, ah even if you don't win the entire game, having engagements that you do win. So it starts to pull you into the game by giving you those first early wins.
00:14:09
Andrew Wilmot
So right from the get-go, Fortnite is adjusting the way it presents you matches to maximize the amount of time that you spend in-game and to encourage you to spend further time in-game, to pull you in.
Normalization of Data Practices
00:14:24
Andrew Wilmot
And this is something that has been learned directly from the gambling industry. Now, I'm going to stop quoting verbatim from this book, but elsewhere, it talks about how the real game changer was being able to collect ah hundreds of data points ah from gamblers across a number of months.
00:14:43
Andrew Wilmot
So getting, ah tracking them across various visits across various locations. Going back to Battlefield 6, where that singular data point, the engagements, they'll be tracking hundreds, thousands of different types of data points across players and doing that constantly.
00:15:03
Andrew Wilmot
So we're not talking hundreds of data points across a number of months. We're talking thousands, tens of thousands across an individual play session.
00:15:11
Andrew Wilmot
It is so much more powerful now than it was now. when this whole idea of behavioral modification to encourage compulsive play, and let's not beat around the bush here, what the gambling industry was doing here is encouraging addiction. I'm not going mince my words here. And that is what, when we in and tech implement these these designs, are doing is encouraging addiction.
00:15:38
Andrew Wilmot
I found the... um bit about sending mailers to gamblers who haven't been there for while, who are overdue for a visit, really interesting, because that is exactly what you get with push notifications.
00:15:49
Andrew Wilmot
I don't need to tell you about, like Duolingo, if you've missed a day, if you haven't been for a while, it'll even, it'll keep sending you push notifications, but it'll even, and this is really interesting psychologically, send you a notification saying, you normally ignore these notifications, have you given up learning a language?
00:16:07
Andrew Wilmot
And and the the specific language changes, but it's ultimately a shame message to try and pull you in that lost of our last hurrah. And it it's very much based on your previous in-app behavior.
00:16:18
Andrew Wilmot
Duolingo isn't the only app that does this. um i I have a number of ah trading apps, like trading stocks and shares. And I use these. I'm not not actively trading.
00:16:31
Andrew Wilmot
I use these as a... very fee free way to make long term investments in a tax advantaged wrapper. But what they're trying to do, they're always trying to get to convert me from being that sort of passive investor, into someone who is actively trading using the more costly products ah like Contract for Differences because that's where they actually make the money from.
00:16:53
Andrew Wilmot
And so they very frequently are sending me notifications that are trying to encourage me to come check my portfolio, to encourage me to make trades. And this is done in two ways. It's done under the guise of...
00:17:05
Andrew Wilmot
ah keeping me up to date. So, oh, you automatically said you wanted to get notifications when a stock in your portfolio moves 5% in a day.
00:17:16
Andrew Wilmot
Well, never signed up for that. They signed me up automatically. That's the default. Most people would never change that. But also the, oh, you haven't checked your portfolio in a while. You should probably check and see how it's going. And so, Again, these lessons that were learnt and developed in Vegas are now applied across big tech. it's not just video games, by the way. It's everything. Vinted will do this.
00:17:39
Andrew Wilmot
I had a fantastic moment at a talk I gave recently where ah a doctor before me spoke how she had gotten rid of... And she said this jokingly. Got rid of all social media. And the only thing that she maintains is, I quote, a vinted addiction.
00:17:53
Andrew Wilmot
Now, she said this tongue-in-cheek, but... so much of the way vintage is designed is based off of lessons learned at facebook with the infinite scroll with the time to push notifications uh with sort of capitalizing on that fear of missing out now what was learned in vegas has been applied and refined at facebook and is now ubiquitous in technology it is everywhere
00:18:22
Andrew Wilmot
And so it does make me think, what am I shocked at now that's going to be ubiquitous everywhere too? but A few months ago, Roblox brought in the ability to create these adverts that their users, and remember 50% of Roblox users are under 13.
00:18:39
Andrew Wilmot
are rewarded for watching. So you're paying ah children to watch adverts, but you're not paying them with money, which would, of course, be very illegal. You're paying them with in-game tokens, rewards, power-ups, so on and so forth.
00:18:54
Andrew Wilmot
So for a child who is already really invested in this digital world, their digital self, they're going to get a lot of value out of that. But it actually costs Roblox nothing to provision. So simultaneously, getting children to invest another way into the Roblox ecosystem, getting another way to extract value from them and making their platform even more addictive at no cost to themselves.
00:19:18
Andrew Wilmot
And I found this incredible. But is that going to be the norm in 10 years time? ah Are we going to have... I don't know, is Instagram going to encourage our children to watch adverts so they get a boost on the algorithm to help get them more likes, shares, etc., get more visibility? I don't know.
00:19:38
Andrew Wilmot
Nobody send that idea over to Zuckerberg, please. ah that That would be awful if they actually did implement this.
00:19:46
Andrew Wilmot
Infinite scroll was controversial 10 years ago. I think we forget this. Along with other things that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and worries about how it was influencing elections and the ability to target things.
00:20:01
Andrew Wilmot
Everything's got worse since. The data collection is so much more intense than it's ever been. And I know we've got the GPDR, right? But that doesn't stop this.
Cultural & Legislative Changes
00:20:14
Andrew Wilmot
It... And neither ah really does the fact that digital citizenship in this country is 13, and that's the age that a child can consent by themselves without parental involvement to giving their information over to these companies. So if everything's getting worse, how actually can we solve this? Well, the first and obvious answer is always we need to change the culture around giving kids devices and we need to change the culture broadly with our approach in tech.
00:20:43
Andrew Wilmot
If we did nothing else but gave children a desktop in a family space, so it was really visible if they started spending six, seven, eight, nine hours a day on it,
00:20:54
Andrew Wilmot
and they can't take that desktop with them on the bus, in bed, in the bathroom, in school. That alone would shift the needle massively here, simply because there would be an upper limit to just how much time children can spend in these environments.
00:21:10
Andrew Wilmot
It would completely remove the ability to send push notifications, which is, again, the equivalent of a gambler getting a mailer followed by a telephone call ah when they've not been to the casino in a while,
00:21:24
Andrew Wilmot
It would remove push notifications as a factor completely.
00:21:29
Andrew Wilmot
Legislation-wise, it's it's tough. In the UK, we we we were going to put forward a piece of legislation, or a piece of legislation was going to be put forward by a Labour backbencher. So member of the government who is not a minister, so not directly involved in the sort of cabinet decision-making element of government for our international listeners,
00:21:50
Andrew Wilmot
ah to raise the age of digital citizenship to, i believe it was 16, might have been 18. And what that would do is mean that it was up to parents whether or not roadblocks, et cetera, et cetera, whether they consented for their children to give their data over here. But problem is parents, when was the last time you read a terms and conditions?
00:22:13
Andrew Wilmot
When was the last time you read an end user license agreement? I'm going to say probably never. I've taken glance through a few of them, but I'm not reading through them all.
00:22:28
Andrew Wilmot
And even the GDPR, which is a massive headache for businesses. If you are a business that has a legitimate purpose, perhaps not what myself and you listeners might define as legitimate purpose, but what the government and the business would define as legitimate purposes for having this information, then there are ways to get it. And as long as you process it and manage it according to laws and regulations, you can use it in this way.
00:22:55
Andrew Wilmot
don't know. I've sort of come to the end here, come to the end of my stream of thought. And quite often when I'm talking about these topics, I just feel so deflated
00:23:06
Andrew Wilmot
Prediction by Design is an extremely hard book to read for several reasons. One, it's very academic. it's very high level. It is, it's not a textbook, but it sometimes reads like one.
00:23:19
Andrew Wilmot
Two, it's talking about an industry that destroys lives. And the stories in it, the way the way it impacts children actually really got me there. We're talking about casinos having ah daycares in them.
00:23:33
Andrew Wilmot
crèches for kids whilst the parents were away gambling for hours. But the thing that really bothered me is seeing just how many similarities there were between casino design and casino development and the way the games our children and play have changed in the past 25 years.
00:23:56
Andrew Wilmot
That said, we've got a lot of reasons to be optimistic. Smartphone free childhood is continuing to make waves both in the media, with with schools, with politicians. And at this point, I can't tell you what the solution is going to be. But if you are not involved with smartphone free childhood, or maybe things got a little bit quieter over the summer and you haven't been involved in a while, take this as an opportunity to get back involved, get back engaged.
00:24:22
Andrew Wilmot
Start that argument in the the school WhatsApp group. i did ah I did one of those the other day because is ah the change is only going to come from us.
00:24:34
Andrew Wilmot
We have warning signals, warning signs from the past, from the way that casinos have developed and refined the addiction-creating mechanics, the addiction-creating processes.
00:24:46
Andrew Wilmot
We have warnings there. That is now being done to our children. if we can If we can stop the data gathering, that is just one element to it. But we also know already what mechanics work, and they can keep using them.
Conclusion & Future Content
00:25:01
Andrew Wilmot
right, so on that note, well, if you or your family have been issues impacted by any of the issues that we've spoken about in today's episode, please do get in touch with us at thedopamineslotmachine at gmail.com.
00:25:15
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I'm not going to promise a next episode anytime soon, but I've got a few good ideas in the pipeline, a few good talks coming up, and, you know, watch this space. This has been the Dopamine Slot Machine.
00:25:27
Andrew Wilmot
Thank you, and see you soon.