Crazy to think that this stuff can potentially end up tied to your identity and used for advertising, or even (in theory) other purposes like credit worthiness or a job suitability assessment.
“For example, a recently patented profiling method uses play traces to de- termine whether a user is frugal (e.g., indicated by saving in-game money even in the face of attractive spending options), fiscally responsible (e.g., indicated by investing carefully and focusing on strategically important purchases), or wasteful (e.g., indicated by taking financial risks, spending money quickly, and buying items not relevant to the goals of the game) [19]. The method also aims to evaluate whether a player is “trading-conscious”, i.e., fit for certain finan- cial trading products, and to detect an “eagerness to go after new products or services” based on how players develop their in-game character. Even non-financial aspects of a game can allow insights into a user’s money- management style. The above patent, for instance, proposes to assesses a user’s level of frugality based on ammunition expenditure patterns in first-person shooter games (e.g., rate at which bullets are fired, percentage of hits, pre- cision shots and controlled bursts vs. wasteful use of ammunition) or based on the user’s performance in driving games and flight simulators (e.g., aggressive driving, overspeed, crash frequency) [19]. Such links between gameplay and real-world spending behavior have also been reported in the scientific literature. Correlating the results of an online survey with log data from the popular sandbox video game Minecraft, for ex- ample, Canossa et al. [37] found that money-conscious players tend to build fewer sleeping accommodations for themselves and prefer to use cheap in-game materials, such as stone, sand, and iron instead of precious materials, such as diamond”
Your comment imply that a game was designed with such data gathering in mind and on top of that, the client purchase data specifically targeting a person of interest(for the job suitability situation).
I don’t know if you ever program in games, such thing is not trivial, ie. frugal, trading sense etc, to keep tracking of. Most game with such state is there to track from the play test or players to know how to balance their in game economics, thus profiling a single player’s behavior would need completely different requirement/threshold or data mining. (usually they only have numbers to compare where you are in game, and what resource you have so far.) Depending on the region, selling data on user without specific consent is illegal.
On the other hand, if a player applying for a job, what can the HR do to acquire such information? Like, “what’s your favorite game?” “have you played this DataminingRPG before and for how long?”.
And on 3rd angle, if you knew well ahead of time this profiling could happen, then just bot farm an account the fits all their metric would be fine, no? Like how you would prepare for interview questions and answers.
And last, modding/cheating. Ie. for example, when I played AC:Odyssey, like barely past tutorial I knew that the grinding for resource is heavy. So I search for CheatEngine table to help me cut play time, that the actions I did in game would not make sense at all from designer’s data metric. I upgrade all legendary gears, I rarely keep anything that’s not purple, while the game keep throwing you blue stuff that matches or slightly above your level. For their in game data gather, my data would be useless.