Support NeoGAF

Toadthemushroom · Oct 11, 2017

In the latest from game design as a business science, The Register reports a few interesting tidbits from a talk at Virus Bulletin titled Exploring the Virtual Worlds of Advergaming, given by Chris Boyd at Malwarebytes:

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

On how advertising in mobile service games affects game design itself:

Developers are making use of heat maps to calculate the best location for placements. Game level design sits hand in glove with exposure to branding. For example, in first-person shooters, narrow checkpoints will be covered in posters. Overturned vending machines that offer the sole source of cover in exposed areas may be festooned with advertising. Players are obliged to stand up to shoot before crouching down to cover behind a branded logo multiple times in order to complete a level

The piece also mentions that 27 of the top 30 games on Google Play include adverts (and in app purchases, of course), and that a survey from Unity finds that 62% of players (I presume, on mobile), would regularly interact with adverts in games for an in-game reward.

On analytics to serve personalised adverts, we have this statement, which forms the thread title. Emphasis mine, and I presume it's referring to theTetris games on iOS and Android - those are the only mobile Tetris titles I can think of.

Terms-of-use policies for mobile games can be absurdly long. The linked privacy policies for Tetris run to 407,000 words, compared to 450,000 words for the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Tetris count would be even higher but for the 30 per cent of pages that were unobtainable. "This is a truly astonishing number of words to attempt to read, in order to play a simple mobile game," Boyd commented.

And if ad-blocking or filtering moves into augmented reality, something that wants to add digital elements to the real world – and developers are trying – there could be serious health issues with tracking, analytics and privacy.

What do you make of all of this? Do you think it might become a box to check for AAA publishers next year, following on from the more prevalent adoption of loot boxes or gacha mechanics? Or is this something that just wouldn't work on consoles, or on the console market, right now?

---

paperghost said:
hi, occasional neogaf poster and the researcher who did the talk.

to have a full idea of where your data goes, who it is used by (and how), and if they have opt outs which you may want to make use of, you need to visit the main privacy policy hub page which links to all of the third party services that provide ads or do analytics behind the scenes.

that would be this: http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACYAPPENDIX/US/en/PC/

in 2012, the page contained 53 separate links to companies offering a privacy policy of some form with associated content.

from 2016 onward, the page contains 212, spread across 4 sections. at time of research, they don't make it clear if only the mobile ad / analytics counts for mobile games, or all 212 (which is fairly common for mobile titles as many of the companies share data between themselves or are spin offs from the main org). this caveat was given in the talk, and in longer talks exclusively about privacy policies.

even if you only include the mobile section, that's still something like 75 policy links. of those, only roughly 19 worked and provided an opt out. of the rest, about 24 were DOA (404, redirects, popups / spam etc) and the ones left over gave no opt out.

many of those privacy policies are provided by hub advertisers, which requires you to read additional policies often hosted elsewhere. this research only includes policies linked as part of the 212, or i'd still be counting words up now.

i don't have the full stats to hand, but off top of my head, the policies from online advertising ran to roughly 230k words, with the other 3 ranging from about 40k to 80k. in total there are 406k words, because i visited each of the 212 linked policies and counted them out over a period of weeks.

406k words is a conservative final tally because of the 212 linked privacy policies, only 110 were actually functional. sixty six of those linked sites were 404 / broke / redirects, and 36 of them gave you no way to opt out from their advertising / analytics.

to have that many policies be linked, and send your data to that many places, yet have only just half of them working and readable, and roughly 30% of them be broken, with the other 17% or so having no opt out, is pretty bad.

if the sixty six broken pages worked, you'd easily be looking at adding on anywhere from roughly 400 to a few thousand words for each of those awol 66 privacy policies. most policies and EULAs i run into weigh in around a few thousand words each - even if you say each of the 66 were only 1,000 long, that's still an extra 66 thousand words of legalese to wade through.

the linked talk is a 25 minute whistle-stop tour of some of the more peculiar gaming marketing / privacy practices, and as a result the article doesn't cover the length of time spent working on, or nuances of, specific portions of the talk. meanwhile there are 40+ minute talks i've given elsewhere specifically about (say) the above and nothing else.

BY2K · Oct 11, 2017

Tetris Company ain't kidding around, it seems.

playXray · Oct 11, 2017

For example, in first-person shooters, narrow checkpoints will be covered in posters.

What do they mean by will? Do they have examples of this? How widespread will this be?

Com_Raven · Oct 11, 2017

playXray said:
For example, in first-person shooters, narrow checkpoints will be covered in posters.

What do they mean by will? Do they have examples of this? How widespread will this be?

I was also confused by this, but I assume they are talking about mobile games. If so, I couldn't say if this is the case, but I would be hard pressed to think of any AAA FPS (and I play a lot of those) where these scenarios would happen.

Toadthemushroom · Oct 11, 2017

BY2K said:
Tetris Company ain't kidding around, it seems.

I'd place this solely on EA.

Xanathus · Oct 11, 2017

The article doesn't cite or link the Tetris privacy policy that they claim is 407,000 words. The only privacy policy I can find for Tetris on Google Play links to http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACY/US/en/PC/ (even on mobile) which is obviously nowhere near 407000 words.

Please be more critical about bold claims before blindly spreading false information.

Ouija Luigi · Oct 11, 2017

I honestly wouldn't mind real world advertisement in AAA games, if the context is there and it's in game rather than some pop-up. If you have a game set in the real world I wouldn't care whether a billboard read coca-cola or pepsi instead of some made up brand. In fact, seeing some older advertisements for still current products in, let's say, the mafia series would be neat.

But if they'd intend to have an orc sipping fanta in the next LOTR Shadow of - game, that would be bullshit.

Of course if something like this would be implemented, it would be invasive and immersion breaking. So I sincerely hope they wouldn't do it.

Jebusman · Oct 11, 2017

Xanathus said:
The article doesn't cite or link the Tetris privacy policy that they claim is 407,000 words. The only privacy policy I can find for Tetris on Google Play links to http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACY/US/en/PC/ (even on mobile) which is obviously nowhere near 407000 words.

Please be more critical about bold claims before blindly spreading false information.

The way they use "linked pages" sounds like they're also counting all the pages that the Tetris TOS links to, as part of the total word count.

Toadthemushroom · Oct 11, 2017

Xanathus said:
The article doesn't cite or link the Tetris privacy policy that they claim is 407,000 words. The only privacy policy I can find for Tetris on Google Play links to http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACY/US/en/PC/ (even on mobile) which is obviously nowhere near 407000 words.

Please be more critical about bold claims before blindly spreading false information.

Thanks. Added to the OP. btw - it wasn't the article that claimed it, but rather the intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, who gave a talk on the subject of advertising in video games.

TannerDemoz · Oct 11, 2017

Didn't counter strike do this back in 2007?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/counter-strike-source-in-game-adverts-screenshot-gallery

Toadthemushroom · Oct 11, 2017

Jebusman said:
The way they use "linked pages" sounds like they're also counting all the pages that the Tetris TOS links to, as part of the total word count.

Also added to the OP. That makes sense to me - in order to understand the terms of service and privacy policy, you'd have to read the privacy policies of the advertising companies that EA links to:

Third party advertising companies may combine the information collected in the context of delivering an ad to you via our Products and Services with other information they have independently collected over time and across different websites. Many of these companies collect and use information under their own privacy policies. A representative list of ad serving companies that operate their own networks on our sites and online and/or mobile products and/or services as well as how to opt out to the extent applicable can be found at privacyappendix.ea.com.

To learn more about some of these ad networks' practices, or to opt out of third party targeted advertising, you can visit https://www.networkadvertising.org, https://www.aboutads.info/choices/, http://youradchoices.ca/, or https://www.youronlinechoices.eu. Note that opting out does not mean you won't see ads; it just means that the advertising you see may be less relevant to your interests.

Dreamwriter · Oct 11, 2017

playXray said:
For example, in first-person shooters, narrow checkpoints will be covered in posters.

What do they mean by will? Do they have examples of this? How widespread will this be?

Homefront

Pandy · Oct 11, 2017

Jebusman said:
The way they use "linked pages" sounds like they're also counting all the pages that the Tetris TOS links to, as part of the total word count.

Which, in terms of having a full understanding of what it is you are agreeing to, is fair game.

Xanathus · Oct 11, 2017

Jebusman said:
The way they use "linked pages" sounds like they're also counting all the pages that the Tetris TOS links to, as part of the total word count.

Even if you included the total number of words in the pages linked by the TOS, it is still much much less than 407000 words. The only way that number could even possibly be reached is if you included the links recursively all the way, and that would mean that they are including words from completely unrelated sites INCLUDING words from the official Adobe Flash Player site.

The entire basis of this assertion is bogus.

Wiped89 · Oct 11, 2017

Weird. I don't remember a single advert in any game I've ever played, with the exception of F1 2017 because that has authentic track and car adverts.

I obviously don't play the right games.

Drek · Oct 11, 2017

Xanathus said:
Even if you included the total number of words in the pages linked by the TOS, it is still much much less than 407000 words. The only way that number could even possibly be reached is if you included the links recursively all the way, and that would mean that they are including words from completely unrelated sites INCLUDING words from the official Adobe Flash Player site.

The entire basis of this assertion is bogus.

That depends. Are the links incorporated by reference as part of the legal document? If so what do those documents incorporate by reference?

This is rabbit hole of legal contracts and it is entirely valid to count everything the language of the TOS incorporates and everything the language of those incorporated documents then incorporate, etc. etc. on as long as it goes because if you breach the TOS you can be sure the lawyers pursuing that breach will use and reference them.

60EffPeeEss · Oct 11, 2017

I played a shitload of Shadowbane, an MMO, back in 2004~ and thereabouts. The game went free to play after a while, and was absolutely free of any revenue source for ages. Ubisoft started picking up the tab for the server costs and everything, as they were publishing it.

They tried to figure out ways to make money, and decided to make you watch an advert every time you died. Mind you, this is in a game where it was all PvP based, so if you were sieging an enemy city, you needed to get cleansed of any death penalty, healed up, repair your gear and get the fuck back to the siege to continue it. Ads led to massive delays and lots of client crashes.

The community threw a massive shitfit and plenty of people quit. Player numbers plunged and the game truly died its last death.

edit: Probably the only funny advert I've ever seen in a game was having to see Burnout Paradise absolutely splattered with adverts for Obama's election. I'm not even anywhere near the U.S, so it was odd to see.
tl;dr If I'm ever forced to partake in ads to do anything in a game, I'm quitting it and never coming back to it. Even product placement pisses me off, like banners for energy drinks or any other turd like that.

Xanathus · Oct 11, 2017

Drek said:
That depends. Are the links incorporated by reference as part of the legal document? If so what do those documents incorporate by reference?

This is rabbit hole of legal contracts and it is entirely valid to count everything the language of the TOS incorporates and everything the language of those incorporated documents then incorporate, etc. etc. on as long as it goes because if you breach the TOS you can be sure the lawyers pursuing that breach will use and reference them.

So if one of the links goes to Wikipedia it would be valid to incorporate the entirety of Wikipedia as part of the word count? If you actually click on the links you would see that each of them only links to a very short and small page. People here are blindly agreeing with this article because it fits the narrative that they want to believe and are falling for click-bait because they want to be outraged.

Blyr · Oct 11, 2017

Toadthemushroom said:
What do you make of all of this? Do you think it might become a box to check for AAA publishers next year, following on from the more prevalent adoption of loot boxes or gacha mechanics? Or is this something that just wouldn't work on consoles, or on the console market, right now?

Lootboxes have been around long, long before mobile, so it's not really a "recent development" in the gaming space, maybe to consoles, but its been in MMO's for a long time

Also, no adverts won't work in full games for in-game rewards, bc as someone who regularly plays mobile games and "watches" (watching consisting of clicking the ad and then setting my phone down to browse something else while I wait) it's typically things like premium currency, and the way adverts are handled in games, it just wouldn't fly in paid games

I mean it's interesting to think we might actually be heading towards our dystopian Black Mirror future where ads pause and make a really loud annoying sound if they can detect you aren't looking at them, but in reality I just don't think it'd fly, especially because of the difference in content and way mobile games are handled compared to console games..

I'll play a mobile game when I'm out and need something to kill time, so tapping an ad and letting it run for 30s or however long is nothing, I don't actually care what they're advertising, it's just the button for free premium currency, but in a full game where stopping to watch an ad would be disruptive to the play experience and a large annoyance, and I doubt many people would use that feature

I see it heading more the path as it currently is, with "in world" advertising, like real world products advertised in-game, which is probably having some kind of subconscious effect on my buying habits that i'm unaware of, but it ultimately is negligible and doesn't have any real significant impact on my playing experience so I don't pay attention to it

Toadthemushroom · Oct 11, 2017

Xanathus said:
So if one of the links goes to Wikipedia it would be valid to incorporate the entirety of Wikipedia as part of the word count? If you actually click on the links you would see that each of them only links to a very short and small page. People here are blindly agreeing with this article because it fits the narrative that they want to believe and are falling for click-bait because they want to be outraged.

Are they? I've found the responses to be well considered, rather than kneejerk reactions. Heck, a chunk of the responses are picking apart some of the claims made which is obviously healthy scepticism.

Either way, I don't think that stat was thrown into a conference talk to create what you think it has. I also thought I'd give the speaker (and The Register) the benefit of the doubt in this case.

paperghost · Oct 11, 2017

hi, occasional neogaf poster and the researcher who did the talk.

to have a full idea of where your data goes, who it is used by (and how), and if they have opt outs which you may want to make use of, you need to visit the main privacy policy hub page which links to all of the third party services that provide ads or do analytics behind the scenes.

that would be this: http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACYAPPENDIX/US/en/PC/

in 2012, the page contained 53 separate links to companies offering a privacy policy of some form with associated content.

from 2016 onward, the page contains 212, spread across 4 sections. at time of research, they don't make it clear if only the mobile ad / analytics counts for mobile games, or all 212 (which is fairly common for mobile titles as many of the companies share data between themselves or are spin offs from the main org). this caveat was given in the talk, and in longer talks exclusively about privacy policies.

even if you only include the mobile section, that's still something like 75 policy links. of those, only roughly 19 worked and provided an opt out. of the rest, about 24 were DOA (404, redirects, popups / spam etc) and the ones left over gave no opt out.

many of those privacy policies are provided by hub advertisers, which requires you to read additional policies often hosted elsewhere. this research only includes policies linked as part of the 212, or i'd still be counting words up now.

i don't have the full stats to hand, but off top of my head, the policies from online advertising ran to roughly 230k words, with the other 3 ranging from about 40k to 80k. in total there are 406k words, because i visited each of the 212 linked policies and counted them out over a period of weeks.

406k words is a conservative final tally because of the 212 linked privacy policies, only 110 were actually functional. sixty six of those linked sites were 404 / broke / redirects, and 36 of them gave you no way to opt out from their advertising / analytics.

to have that many policies be linked, and send your data to that many places, yet have only just half of them working and readable, and roughly 30% of them be broken, with the other 17% or so having no opt out, is pretty bad.

if the sixty six broken pages worked, you'd easily be looking at adding on anywhere from roughly 400 to a few thousand words for each of those awol 66 privacy policies. most policies and EULAs i run into weigh in around a few thousand words each - even if you say each of the 66 were only 1,000 long, that's still an extra 66 thousand words of legalese to wade through.

the linked talk is a 25 minute whistle-stop tour of some of the more peculiar gaming marketing / privacy practices, and as a result the article doesn't cover the length of time spent working on, or nuances of, specific portions of the talk. meanwhile there are 40+ minute talks i've given elsewhere specifically about (say) the above and nothing else.

Toadthemushroom · Oct 11, 2017

Thanks for stopping by, Chris, and for providing in-depth details about the privacy policies.

It's a shame The Register didn't go into more detail on your talk - what little they did refer to sounded very interesting. I've largely avoided mobile titles as a service, so even the parts about how FPSes are designed to maximise eyes-on-adverts was interesting (and of course no less concerning).

I can't say I'm keen on this new age of game design, where data, analytics and engagement drive major parts of games. Focus testing (to varying extents) was always a thing, but games rarely felt like a precise science and had a lot more character because of it. And that's before you look at games which are more addiction simulators than something you can win or lose at...

paperghost · Oct 13, 2017

Toadthemushroom said:
Thanks for stopping by, Chris, and for providing in-depth details about the privacy policies.

It's a shame The Register didn't go into more detail on your talk - what little they did refer to sounded very interesting. I've largely avoided mobile titles as a service, so even the parts about how FPSes are designed to maximise eyes-on-adverts was interesting (and of course no less concerning).

I can't say I'm keen on this new age of game design, where data, analytics and engagement drive major parts of games. Focus testing (to varying extents) was always a thing, but games rarely felt like a precise science and had a lot more character because of it. And that's before you look at games which are more addiction simulators than something you can win or lose at...

apologies for the delayed reply but no worries!

funny someone mentioned homefront because i gave that game a name drop in one of the talks. there's a bit where you get led through a corridor with a few energy drink vending machines, and then you walk into a sort of exposed area to fend off enemies - and the only decent piece of cover is an overturned vending machine with a logo on it. so of course depending on difficulty level / random deaths etc, you could theoretically end up popping up and down to return fire with an energy drink logo in your face like 20 or 30 times or something without realising it.

watching walkthroughs of that section is pretty interesting, as although there are a few other bits of cover there, almost everyone i saw play gravitates to the central face full o' drink machine. i did myself, come to think of it...

M3d10n · Oct 13, 2017

Xanathus said:
So if one of the links goes to Wikipedia it would be valid to incorporate the entirety of Wikipedia as part of the word count? If you actually click on the links you would see that each of them only links to a very short and small page. People here are blindly agreeing with this article because it fits the narrative that they want to believe and are falling for click-bait because they want to be outraged.

How does that crow taste?

BriareosGAF · Oct 13, 2017

This is very interesting research and welcome to see, thank you. And especially for the extra context from one of the primary investigators. As a privacy/advertising Luddite Im used to being lampooned for reading EULAs, etc, but I find it fun to see how e.g. the Nintendo Switch EULA binds you to arbitration unless you send them a physical letter, etc.

paperghost · Oct 13, 2017

BriareosGAF said:
This is very interesting research and welcome to see, thank you. And especially for the extra context from one of the primary investigators. As a privacy/advertising Luddite Im used to being lampooned for reading EULAs, etc, but I find it fun to see how e.g. the Nintendo Switch EULA binds you to arbitration unless you send them a physical letter, etc.

cheers. one of the most interesting things we're looking at is VR / AR. most hardware makers are moving into the ad space, or buying up ad / mobile movie clip networks. even adobe is now in on the action and VIVE has an incredibly in depth ad network / SDK setup being built (you can only currently sign up and use it in china though).

popping ads for food / drink vouchers in virtual cinemas is gonna be big, and using tech that previously would connect to your phone in malls to display targeted ads on digital displays will eventually be hooked into AR apps. at that point you'll be wandering around stores trying to avoid people waving their phones around to get cheaper deals. so that'll be fun i guess.

i'm also looking into signing up to a VR ad network and seeing how easy it'll be to insert a (dummy) rogue ad. it's the easiest thing in the world on a standard ad platform and i doubt VR networks will be any more stringent. at a guess, ad banners touting phishing links or just someone trying to give someone a seizure will be a real issue down the line.

Support NeoGAF

Terms of use for mobile Tetris almost as long as entire Lord of the Rings trilogy

Member

Membero Americo

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Banned

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Banned

Member

Neo Member

Member

Neo Member

Member

Member

Neo Member

Similar threads