Slashdot Mirror
Google Files Patent to Monitor Gaming For Ads
Tookis writes "In a recent patent filing, Google has proposed a real time profiling of players of online games such as World of Warcraft. Soon players of such games may see in game ads directly designed to appeal to their persona. Last month Google filed a patent in both Europe and the US which outlined plans to psychologically profile people simply by their style of play in popular online games. 'From the patent; "User dialogue (e.g., from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterize the user (e.g., literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterize the user (e.g., cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc)." Taking this a step further, Google also believe if a player likes to explore their new virtual world, that they would be interested in the real world, as such would target the player with travel ads.'"
How I act when I play online is pretty different my normal behavior, and I suspect that it's the same way for most people. We play these online games because they let us escape from our normal problems & fears, so why would they expect our behavior in a fantasy land to parallel our real lives?
We've noticed that you're playing a female character. Perhaps you'd like to *BE* a woman, all the time? Here's some links to popular transvestite and sex-change informational sites. Enjoy!
Evil does no Google! But this is the US, and Google does no evil. Er... right?
Awesome.
Seriously, though, this makes me wonder if people who truly roleplay are going to be served ads based on their in-character dialogue -- could lead to some interesting (and profitless for the company being advertised) ads being served.
Not that there's much roleplaying in most popular games anymore, other than the above-mentioned example.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/19
What kind of ads do cheaters get?
Monstar L
http://www.katunk.com/dillta/
I will be "polite" until I encounter an in game add.
I will then become "profane" for a short period of time.
Am I the only one who is sick of:
a) being advertised at during things I ALREADY FUCKING PAID OUT THE NOSE FOR?!?! (Movies, games, etc)
b) yet more additions to the Patent Minefield. I seriously fear that if I ever try to be innovative, I'm going to wake up in the (proverbial) hospital with my (proverbial) bits and legs blown off and a couple million dollars in "doctor's" fees.
I can't see adverts happening in-game for RPGs. Although WoW does have a lot of gold advertisments going on ingame (some conspiracy theories suggest Blizzard are linked to these companies).
Valve I could doing this, they sell their soul for any form of revenue.
The analysis to do this could be run by the client, as it observes your usage, then uploaded. Sounds like spyware or crapware if they do it.
Because once it starts as a joke, it'll catch on for real, and we'll be stuck with branded items in every MMO from here to eternity. People actively fight it because of this thought.
Honestly... I don't think I care. I'm sure it'll be annoying at times, but aren't some advertisements annoying? If advertisement agencies would just learn to make interesting/funny/informative ads instead of the drivel they produce, they wouldn't have so many people trying so hard to ignore them.
Need for Speed is a good example of in-game advertising that isn't too annoying. They have Burger King and Best Buy stores all over town, and Cingular cellphone service in-game. It doesn't take away from the game, it doesn't slow you down, and it's a constant reminder of the product. (Heck, I didn't play those games much and I remember all 3 of them!)
The biggest problem is that they just can't get their minds onto a different track. Here's a good idea they apparently haven't realized: Make computer wallpapers that are 90% cool, with a logo in the other 10%. People will rush to put them on their desktops. A few have made skins for Winamp/etc, but there's still not much of that. It's a one-time artist/scripter cost, and winamp.com will even host the thing afterwards for years. Make it good enough and it'll even advertise itself by being in the top % on the site. Why not take it a step further and make WindowBlinds skins?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...we've noticed that other people who like shooting people purchased the following semi-automatic rifles."
u-bend
We have enough illiterate, moronic ads from Gold Sellers in WoW thank you very much. I can't seem to go an hour or so without getting a whisper from a level 1 character whose name seems to be a random string of chars saying "hi plz meet you, you buy gold, you buy now! sucky sucky ten dollar!" Obviously the last part is fictional, but I'm irritated. I can't wait to get whispers from idiots in game telling me to spend my money on their shitty product.
It's already in CS 1.6, and I find it annoying, but I can deal cause at least ti is just games off steam ads, like TFC2 and Portal. If I buy future games and it is plastered with Coke, Ford, and GAP ads or crap like that I will just return it. Ads are just wasted space fr something else. Now I do remember a CS map that had a bunch of phony ads a while back that were funny. that was ok cause it was part of the map. They made fake billboard ads for a town.
Today's Tomorrow is Yesterday's Future! --- "Where Ever You Go, There You Are" -- Diablo 1
I have Bipolar, good luck keeping your tracking on me straight!
Seriously WTF though. How the hell can profiling like this even be legal when you consider all the info Google already has? These guys know more about people that the government does.
I like muppets.
How do they plan on collecting this data? personaly I dont like spyware, maby they should send me ads about how to remove there own spyware
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Don't let the blindingly bright holiness of the 'Don't Be Evil' company blind you from the obvious.
This patent is just taking existing knowledge and technology and applying it "in video games" much the same as the "...on the internet" patents.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Sweet merciful crap, I play games to get AWAY from this sort of drivel. How much longer before I have to move into a cabin in the mountains to get away from irritating advertising I DO NOT WANT TO SEE!!
I use adblock with my firefox for a reason, it makes the internet soooooooooo much more enjoyable.
If games (ESPECIALLY Singleplayer ones) start coming with BS that serves you ads while you play, I swear I will dedicate my life to reverse engineering the software to REMOVE such abominations, even if it is purely for my own use.
It ain't because I do not like tv. Well I don't, the recent drive to reality tv is one I could do without, but mostly it is because I just don't have time for the ads. Since tv programs are interrupted by them and I just don't have the patience to wait the 5+ minutes before the program resumes I just don't watch anymore.
Radio? The same story. Apart from the fact that I just don't like a lot of modern music, I also just don't want to have 5+ minutes of ads before the news and 5+ minutes after and that is if you don't count the station jingles as ads. Just how much ads do you need to play some music?
I run an ad-filter on my pc to filter ads, google including.
I have a NO-NO sticker on my door wich in the netherlands is the legal way to force ad companies to not post ads in your physical mail box.
GET THE FUCKING PICTURE! I DO NOT WANT YOUR GODDAMNED ADS!
It ain't even the principles of ads that upsets me but that the majority of them are so damned annoying. I suppose an annoying ad you notice you work better, I am probably the only person in the world who absolutly refuses to buy products related to annoying ads (or so ad-companies seem to think), but they annoy me.
And now they want ads in games. Right.
Google has the motto "do no evil". Am I the only one who realizes that the slogan of an ad company is not worth a goddamn thing?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I propose we all chip in to create broad patents on all manner of annoying things, and then refuse to license them to anyone.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
"We see you are being owned, could we interest you in a Logitech controller?"
"You've been playing for 13 hours straight, click here to see free information on pressure sore care and heart disease."
"Wow, your reflexes really suck! How about some Red Bull?"
"We've noticed you always play the Axis in BF1942. Could we interest you in some Nazi memoriabilia?"
"GTA fan, click on this ad for a special offer from Glock firearms."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
...but then I realised that getting served adverts like "Upgrade your Zerglings TODAY" and "Scourge now two for one at all hatcheries" would actually be pretty cool.
I quit!
The idea that my every move is being tracked and could incur advertising will certainly take the fun out of a MMORPG for me. Sure, I know that the server is watching my every move, but I know it generally doesn't care. What I do is harmless and has no effect in the real world. It's nice. Now I have to worry that every step I make will trigger ads. It would be a real shame if it came to that.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
If this gets implemented, it could mean free online gaming. The makers of online games want to make money, right. They normally make money by charging their users. If they can make money from advertisers, then they might stop charging the users. Of course, they might not, but market realities say that if there are two equally good games, one of which shows you adverts and charges you, and one of which shows you adverts but is free, people ain't gonna be playing the first one.
Fortunately it's still trivial to block these ads, though I think it's about time to escalate the arms race with a mod to prohibit people who are not on your friends list or in your guild from whispering you. If a game company wants me to pay $15 a month for their service they'd damn well better not serve me any ads. If they want to serve me ads, they'd damn well better not charge me $15. If they want to do both I wouldn't be inclined to use their service.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I usually play several different characters and they can have diferent play styles :)
Not that i want them cataloging my chat,movements, and attacks in the first place. Oh well, when worse comes to worse make a game of seeing if i could change the type of ad by altering my playstyle.
I could see in-game ads for games in contemporary settings, like GTA, but in World of Warcraft, they'd just look silly.
This is an issue for Hollywood - advertisers can't do product placement in historicals, which makes them unpopular. (Although if you look very closely at Marie Antoinette's closet, you'll see a pair of Converse All-Stars.)
Better yet, I can't help remembering some CS servers where most of the conversations involved people:
- calling each other gay, faggot, cock-sucker, and the like,
- calling each other "fucking camper" and/or "fucking cheater", (remember the keyword "fucking)
- telling each other how good their mom was in bed,
- trying the most underhanded sexist pickup lines on anyone whose name sounded, no matter how improbably, like it might be female. (And to some people even Chtulhu sounds feminine.)
Etc.
I shudder to think what ads would google keyword matching serve there. Condoms? Gay dating sites?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The way I see it, there's enough accumulated "content" in the world already to keep me occupied for the rest of my life. Hell, I own enough yet-to-be-played video games and unwatched DVDs and tapes to keep me busy for the next five years. I don't really give a shit about new loaded-to-the-hilt-with-ads movies, TV shows, games, etc. If Hollywood finally slides into the Pacific tomorrow, I shant shed a tear.
It's just pure data mining.
But if you're google, you are going to turn everything into an attribute, and you have the luxury of running your classifiers over gigantico training sets to pick out minute details and correlations. And you can settle for low support values; all that matters is that some profitable subset of people targeted by a campaign respond to it. So if that target is to "reach" 1% of the market, and 10% of the people in the training set have a correlated action and responded to a survey a certain way; and if of those 10% you have 10% support of a correlation --- well that's good enough for google-scale ads to be considered potentially successful!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I would hope Blizzard would have the sense not to put adds in game... Would you care if they put a little banner add on the forums? In game behavior profiles could easily be used to target adds to forum users.
To take it a step further, they could associate the IP address you login from with your user account. Then combine your in game behavior profile with other data related to your IP address. Then sell the data to other companies that might use IP address to target banner adds.
New definition of the term googley ie. "something is just not quite as it appears and more research needs to be done ie. that work contract is all a bit googley, I'll need to get a lawyer to check it", "the product is a bit googley, I'll need to do a bit more research so I don't get stuck with a dud.", "that patent is all a bit googley and check around and see who actually came up with the idea first".
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It's just one small conspiracy theory away from linking to law enforcement. We've all read fiction where the rulers (government or industry) watch everyone's every move, to root out dissent and "criminal" behavior. What if they could get their subjects to willingly volunteer their time and money in order to build up their own personality profile?
Too bad I'm a terrible creative writer, this sounds like an interesting story. Yeah...story...
"Google also believe if a player likes to explore their new virtual world, that they would be interested in the real world, as such would target the player with travel ads."
Uh oh, now you're letting your marketdroids do your thinking for you - BAD! Oh Google, how little you understand MMO gamers if you think a propensity to spend hours in our chairs exploring every last niche in a virtual world translates into a desire to get up out of our chairs and go outside. Bzzt. In fact it indicates the opposite. But since marketdroids live in opposite-world (after all, they believe their "work" is actually producing something of value), I suppose we can understand why this is happening.
Oh wait, they said they aren't evil.