1 Comment

With the reporting on social media being able to predict pregnancy before the user does and advertising items based on mood gleaned from their recent posts, I would not be surprised if there are studies behind social media's closed doors to predict even more. Especially considering the large amounts of money they make from selling big data to advertisers.

I am behind on the literature, but I wonder if there are groups, both private or public, trying to operationalize social media posts and other online behavior to align to the popular personality test or other psychological assessment results like you had mentioned. Based on the whistle blower hearings with Facebooks's whistle blower, Frances Haugen, a lot of research is done by social media companies is being done behind closed doors and is not made public. How would people feel if they knew their social media platform was running psychological assessments and then selling that data to advertisers and other businesses with interest in then information, if this became a thing? There are currently issues with privacy with the current models of big data collection harvested by tech industries. How much more of an issue will privacy become before legislation is in place to protect folks? It is definitely an interesting topic.

On a side note, I feel like the "monetization" of games is really wrecking old games I have loved growing up. Seeing Diablo turned into a "free" mobile game with $100,00 plus ways to spend money to progress and get items in game, after the Activation take over and game designer exodus, really ruins it for me. Magic players talk about the product fatigue and the $999 dollar booster packs of fake cards for the 30th anniversary. The OGL situation in D&D was a huge blow to us third party and indie creators. I think when profit comes before fun, it really shows in a negative way for their products. Learning about what behavioral data and analytics they are pulling from players will be interesting. Hasbro mentioned during one of their corporate meetings mentioned data collection and D&D Beyond, but didn't get into the specifics regarding what kind of data they were collecting nor the depth of that data collection. I really like the point you made regarding the companies looking at competitive behaviors when designing these games and trying to maximize on them. It will be interesting to see what path big data and the gaming industries head down.

Expand full comment