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Classifying Players For Unique Game Experiences
togelius writes "Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers. Researchers at the Center for Computer Games Research have now mined this data to identify the different types of player behavior (PDF). Using self-organizing neural networks, they classified players as either Veterans, Solvers, Pacifists or Runners. It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories. These neural networks can now quickly determine which of these groups you belong to based on just seeing you play. In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."
What? I own Tomb Raider Underworld and I wasn't informed my game behavior would be collected by some remote data mining app. I'm kinda shocked.
I guess that explains why the game would cut off any downloads on my Xbox while playing, which is something only multiplayer games normally do.
Welp, that's it. I kinda liked the demo for the new Batman game and was considering buying it, but I guess Eidos is even worse than I thought. I won't be giving them my money now.
What are you afraid of exactly? Is it the principle of collecting (probably anonymous) data? Why do you buy the game then - you support a company and might be paying for the next round of monitoring? Did you ever question the alternative use of the data that was collected - what kind of porn you like or something like that? Personally, I don't think there is some kind of big market for game data bound to a specific game...
or did you just read "privacy" and "monitoring" and started running around like a retarded chicken?