Conspiracy Theory: game companies track your answers and use them for research!

OK, stick with me for a second here, but let's have some fun by pretending something is true.

What if! game companies--developer, publisher, or both--use psychology in their games!? More specifically, in games where the player is asked to provide an answer and so forth.

What if they track your responses?

What if they are actually carefully crafting their questions to see what kind of personality you are, and collecting this data?

I mean, games where you provide answers, and especially games where these answers determine the outcome of the game, or determine what kind of person your character is, will give a lot of insight into what kind of person you are.

Did you choose to play as a female character, but are actually male? Maybe you are more in touch with your feminine side.

Did you choose to help the villagers fend off the bandits instead of siding with the bandits? Hmmm, heart of gold, you have.

With how many games either have or require an online connection, what's to stop developers from just constantly mining every single choice their customers make in their games?

What do you guys think? Just crazy enough to be true? Too crazy to be true? Or...obvious?

I would think that that would be a total waste and wouldn’t give you any reliable data to work with. You’d get people who answer those questions in every possible way just to see what happens, those who answer those questions on how they imagine that their ‘character’ would answer, etc.

That's what being a Scientist gamer is all about. Game Developers are Scientist and we the gamers are their Guinea Pigs for their research.

To be honest, if Game Developers are spying on me, I hope they find me interesting for their studies and as long as it doesn't impact my lifestyle, they can study me as much as they like.

Apparently Ubisoft is already sort of tracking us; in an article, they said they were "surprised" how many of us chose to play as Kassandra instead of the male character.

Makes you wonder what else they're tracking.

Yes and no. The infrastructure is there in pretty much any game that gives the player choice and agency to collect data like that. Whether or not they would through is really a question of "is this data of any use to anyone" or not. Some games are very up front about tracking answers to game choices, like the Telltale games and other similar types of games. Does knowing which NPC you decided to save give Big Brother any useful information about you that can be monetized in any way? Probably not.

-Byshop

TellTale games record your choices and compare them to everyone else who has played.

What else was the data used for? We can only speculate.

This is the age of big data where we collect as much as possible even if we don't have an end goal. At the very least we can probably sell it in aggregate.

I mean, I know they can easily track things like player choice, time played, and so forth. But I can't see any of this sort of information being used for nefarious reasons. If anything, I think companies look to see how many people actually finish their game and what portion of people play the game is such a way. I've read something about achievements/trophies being created at least partially for the purpose of devs/publishers being able to see how far most people actually get in the game. Some data might help them with the way they make future games. Or maybe most of it is just for curiosity's sake, I really dunno.