Predicting Color Blindness, ADD, or Learning Disorders From Game Data
An anonymous reader tips a story at VentureBeat about a company that helps game developers analyze data gathered from their games to detect cheaters. But now, the company says this data can also be used to determine other traits of the players, like whether they're minors, or whether they like to gamble. Their CEO, Lukasz Twardowski, expects such analysis will soon be able to reveal even more traits, like whether a player is color blind, has a developmental disorder, or has Alzheimer's disease.
"'Games are the richest and the most meaningful form of human-computer interaction. ...By tracking how they play games, we can learn a lot about people,' Twardowski explained. Hesitatingly, he added: 'That will be a huge responsibility for us later on.' ... Academics have begun to take games more seriously, as a window into the human psyche. Games are addictive and immersive and are built to command hours of our time and attention. What better testbed for myriad psychological and medical conditions? A good game pushes us to our limits, challenging us to use both the analytical and intuitive sides of our brain.
By Philip K. Dick?
Am I the only one whose first thought was of Ender's Game? In reality, I think the idea has been around for a while, and seems quite practical AND useful. To me the only surprising thing is that it hasn't been implemented yet. It seems like we should have had the technology to do something like this for a long time.
Detecting some of the problems early on can significantly help the child.
I'd like them to help developers crank out a "Douchebag Detector" sooner than later.
I wonder how they figured out hot to spot minors in video games???
You have earnt: Colourblindness!
Wear this badge of pride on your Steam Profile.
Something to "bear in mind" during military style games - it'd be an easy detector, right there (most likely)... I'd also like to add that though some of the colorblind (since there are varying degrees of it) cannot see the same things "normal folks" do in "lantern tests", there are other forms of those lantern tests that show the colorblind see differently - because they can see types of those tests (whereas by way of comparison, the normal sighted cannot). I wouldn't call it "seeing the world through rose colored glasses", but, definitely seeing it differently!
So in other words we leak information. Privacy is centered around the idea that we don't want others to know just how much we leak.
as someone who has some degree of ADD, I have to wonder how a video game would detect it. In general someone with ADD has less focus in many areas of life, but in many cases other activities can lead to a more solid focus, and in many cases, video games are one of those cases. Unless they intentionally make parts of the game extremely boring, I can't quite see that working.
Colorblind - someone who treats Blacks, Latinos, Asians and native Americans exactly the same as whites.
Or how about that they have the necessary skills to man a gunstar and save the galaxy :)
Death Blossom FTW!
Can you come up with some data to pre-screen DOUCHEBAGS from joining our servers?
Cuz.... i'd pay for that. i'd pay alot for that.
Limiting out kids. And brazilians. And russians. And other eastern block peoples works pretty good for keeping DOUCHEBAGS out of a gameserver.
But it's not 100% and takes alot of work. And it does screen out the few of those who are not DOUCHEBAGS.
A 100% and automated solution would be very nice.
I'm tired of DOUCHEBAGS ruining games.
Trolls, scammers, spammers, sexual predators, griefers, just plain fucktards. There's alot of them. And their fun seems to be ruining anything anyone else is doing. Even if they can only take a textual shit into your chat.
It needs to stop someplace. And that place is going to get RICH.
I'm sticking to Checkers.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This article made me think of TF2. Sometimes players would splat a photo of boobs on the wall. It's fun watching players stop to look an get sniped.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Trollist -- someone who baits Blacks, Latinos, Asians and native Americans exactly the same as whites.
The problem isn't that this personal information can be sniffed out... it's that there are no laws preventing its misuse...
Dear Customer,
We regret to inform you that your medical insurance rates will be increasing by 7.35% effective immediately due to a undiagnosed, but now pre-existing condition. Also, your car insurance will be going up by 3%, and your doctor wants to schedule a psychiatric evaluation.
Sincerely,
Your Gaming Company
P.S. We detected that you have an addictive personality and tend to be forgetful. Your monthly renewal fee has been adjusted upwards accordingly. You won't remember this.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
free thinking, a re-education consultant will be at your door shortly."
Yeah, unless the games are made explicitly for this I want no part of it. The thought of this applied to all games is horrifying.
I know in Dungeons and Dragons Online, they could predict with near 100% certainty that someone was color blind whenever they posted on the forums that they can't complete a puzzle in a quest because it's color coded, and that they were color blind, rofl.
Does not conform to the political fashion on Slashdot!
Wow! I am not really that surprised that they found a way to analyze the data. Wait till Adsense gets ahold of this technology. heh
Game servers running the actual backends of multi-player games and servers to do with PSN purchases and box updates
make up maybe 25% of what goes on in a sony playstation network datacenter. Most of the storage and CPU cycles go to
analytics. Similar percentages are to be expected for the XBox. Most of what people point out here has already been happening
for a long time. Really, by the time they tell you about something they've moved it from 'beta' to 'production' a long time ago.
So yes, your game moves are recorded and analyzed. Your preference for the sniper role and your sneaky hiding in dark
corners in multiplayer Killzone games waiting to strike is duly noted. You're a devious bastard. Your reduced reflexes on the
weekends are also noted, you're probably getting high that's why. Also your burning through a lot of children on SIMS tells
us about some of your unfulfilled needs, sorry if you find that appalling but some SIMS suffer a lot of abuse.
The future is bright and expect to see more like Playstation Move and the Kinect in your lives. There are plans to move these
to the desktop. The great advantage of the Kinect and others is we can obviously detect exactly who is playing the game
thanks to facial recognition, but we also analyze how you move down to your facial expression when the game asks you to
do something unsavory. The consumers of this data are many and most are confidential.
Thanks for playing and see you on Facebook!
It is reasonable that they could detect colorblindness, but that's not a prediction...
Why is Snark Required?
as a teacher who gets to work with add students and other un/diagnosed kids, having an insight into their learning issues would be great help for me and them. os the thing such that it would be a bonus feature and free addon. information should be freely accessible by the user. the information would be constructive.
..can be easily identified as the first thing they do in a game after trying to move it to go into the menus and try and change the settings.
When they can't, they either spend 8hrs being hopeless or quit and take the game back for a refund.
I'm afraid that if the current trend continues, the only thing games will be able to predict is the degree of mental retardation. No, really - it pains me to watch games get simplified and consolified generation after generation. Think Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory vs Splinter Cell: Conviction. Having recently played through both I was surprised to see that the rather aged former one is easily one of the best and most satisfying games I've ever played, while Conviction, despite still being a good game, simply pales in comparison as a plain, linear shooter with just some stealth elements.
... form of human-computer interaction."
Really? I thought it was JPEGs...
xbox live has been predicting things about my mom for years
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I am not colorblind or such. But in TF2, I have colorblind mode on to show an icon above players who are coated in Jarate. This is much more readable than looking at them. So it should not mark me as color blind just because of that tihing.
There are profits to be made!
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
May be because most game developers are men and have not found what it takes to engage women in games. May be women could be lured in by cow clicker and its clones. But that as of now, using games to understand the human psyche is likely to leave half of human race as inscrutable. But that is just the status quo. Nothing new.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>Child has games and the internet and can Google or otherwise deduce that his yuppie helicopter parents are collecting data about him through his games.
>Male child because girls don't play video games until they're old enough to use video game playing to whore for boys' attention
Yellow Card: Inappropriate use of the word whoring . Whoring means the use of sex to get something other than attention, sex social power or babies. Those are the normal and legitimate uses of sex.
Carry on!
>Child gets edgy and rebels and goes outside, away from supervision, and acquires a bicycle on the black market
Editorial note: black market bicycles are the best.
>Comes back home a half-hour late for dinner with a scrape on his knee, yuppie parents flail their arms and declare their kid "out of control." >Take him to shrink and drug him with off-label prescribed antipsychotics
>Kid docile for over 10 years
>Kid shoots the fuck up out of an Aurora, CO movie theater soon after that
America, fuck yeah!
--Ethanol-fueled
Why was the word "Predict" used in the title. "Observe" is the correct word. One doesn't "predict" colorblindness. One observes that the individual is colorblind. They're describing the detection of conditions that already exist like colorblindness, ADD, douchebaggery, age and preferences. Maybe if they added Alzheimers. But there's a growing body of evidence that Alzheimers is a lifelong degenerative brain disorder that can be observed decades before it becomes a medical diagnosis.
Only around 50 some posts when we tell you what ought to get you extremely enraged!! I was expecting at least
300+ replys and a lot more outrage. So you're okay with what is essentially an automated psychological and
physiological evaluation just as long as you're entertained.
Fine, you, excluding the ones here who showed some intelligence and outrage here, deserve what you're getting
because in future this will have real life consequences for you. Like you would care, lol. I detest you robots.
I 'predict' that the headline writer is not fluent in English.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
This "11-person team, primarily comprised of 20-somethings developers" contends they " can tell if you are a girl or buy, smart, dumb, old and youngcan tell if you’re a gambler or not, if a kid is color blind and confusing red and green. All this, just from a game." One has to believe that they have made numerous observations and reached conclusions but almost certainly they lack lengthy verifiable experiments to establish efficacy. I don't doubt that much they say can be shown to have value, there just needs to be more scientific rigor applied. The article is short on descriptions of what data they are seeing and how this relates to their assertions.
So maybe in the future you'll authenticate by playing a short game.
Boss: "Hey, what are you doing! I'm paying you for work, not for play!" ..."
Employee: "We temporarily lost the network, and now I have to re-authenticate."
Boss: "Ah, OK, go on. However I wonder why we have so many network problems lately
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.