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Gaming Companies Put The ‘T’ in GTA

AI Ethics?

AI ethics is one of the most unspoken aspects of the AI industry. I didn’t know about it until recently when I did some internet-digging. Everyone has talked about the inevitable robot-takeover without realizing how probable it is. I learnt about it when I came across an interesting article where a former Google AI ethics researcher was fired because of her involvement in a research paper which talks about ethical issues caused by advancements in the AI-language industry. Essentially, AI ethics are a “code of conduct” that formally addresses the ethical concerns involved in artificial technology.


Video Games are Playing You

Something that isn’t obvious to the casual observer is the amount of information they tend to give out with every second of the game they play. A single game may involve over a thousand button presses or controller/mouse movements that are indicative of some sort of decision that mainly stems from the player’s personality. Most of these decisions are small and insignificant, but the bigger ones — whether they help a character in need, what kind of buildings they choose to build or destroy — can reveal implicit information about a player.


For example, American researcher Nick Yee investigated the relationship between how gamers would play World of Warcraft and their corresponding personalities. World of Warcraft is an online multiplayer game that mainly relies on role-play, where players can choose between many character classes and interact with other players. They can choose to customize their avatar by adding weapons, changing their physical appearance, armour, etc. Using a famous taxonomy to study psychological personality modelling known as OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), Yee found that the choices gamers make while creating their avatars appropriately correspond to their real-life personality. After analyzing the data, he found that introverted players were more likely to go on solo quests and indulge in fishing and cooking, whereas extroverts were more likely to participate in raids and other massive-group activities. Data also showed distinctive differences in other personality traits such as conscientiousness and whether the player is family-oriented or not.


Using neural networks and machine learning algorithms to analyse the data and variables, researchers could predict life motives such as romance, independence, accomplishment, etc. World of Warcraft is a game that allows a lot of self-expression due to the millions of different ways you could possibly play the game. Through these initial studies, researchers strongly believe that they could predict ethnicity, political orientation and sexuality through more extensive research.


We can actually see a similar pattern in social media and other tech platforms. All of our “insignificant” decisions are contributing to the algorithm’s development. But one of the main differences between social media and video games is that we are mostly conscious of what personal information we give out on social media, whereas we are only aware of a small portion of the data that we give to video game companies for data mining. When gaming, we aren’t aware of the information we give out, instead we are trapped in a magical reality where it’s all too good to be true.


In my opinion, this raises the question of whether AI might be engulfing us. Does technology know more about me than I thought it did? Not only is the data collection concerning, but also what game developers do with it. The player representations they create are used to promote player-specific targeted adverts. They also sell this information to other companies (not necessarily gaming companies) to allow them to promote their products in a targeted manner.


The main reason why this takes place is because of ease of adaptablitiy. It only makes sense that the game adapts to the player and creates challenges and quests that are appropriate for them. However, this restricts gamers from exploring all the alternatives that the game can offer. Nowadays gaming companies are aiming for more profit and have become less concerned with entertainment.


You may think that how we game and what is interpreted from it is not important. I can guarantee that most of my gamer friends think that way.

However, some supported my case:

“Yeah i mean like in dota 2, during one tournament, they tried out this AI team who absolutely trashed all the real players. It defeats the purpose of a game being difficult and the humane aspect of making mistakes”

“Ethical concerns can enter in the future when hyper realistic games come into play, like life simulators, because then AI can easily be used for data mining, which then could be a problem”


Some didn’t mind:

“I don't really care if they were tracking my keys cuz it's what is used in gameplay analysis and is helpful sometimes”

“At the current extent where AI is being used in games, it really just helps make the games more interactive, less boring, more challenging, and more detailed”


And some just got used to it:

“As for targeting games at me, let's be honest, every social media platform, even Google, Amazon do this, so it's least expected that a game would do it too.”


Where do we see the domino effect? As mentioned before, gaming companies have reasonable inferences about the personalities of millions of gamers all over the world. This helps them create specific target advertisements and promote them where they will be able to gain maximum revenue. They also tend to make in-game purchases of the most frequently-purchased and highly-demanded items higher in price. Does emptying your pockets for a game seem reasonable?


Be cautious, but don’t stop gaming!

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