Are scientific mini-games click bait?
And other ethical considerations for SMGs
I’m back with Issue #10 of the Gaming Journal Club (needs a better name)! And a nice surprise after coming back from vacation, more than 50 of you have somehow managed to find and subscribe to Just One More Turn. So, a huge thanks to YOU, who give me the resolve to keep on writing!
Hello JOMT Reader!
In the last post, I talked about using the reach of popular games, like Borderlands 3, to get its players to contribute to science (Borderlands Science). Large scale participation in science using games doesn’t usually happen because they don’t generate enough interest; so incorporating a scientific mini-game (SMG)1 in a popular game was the answer.
One very important thing that I didn’t mention and was pointed out in a comment to the post, was the ethics of “hiding” an SMG in a popular game, and whether consent is required when a part of the game will be used for something else. In other words, when you’re playing a game for fun, is it ok for a part of the game, even if it’s optional, to be used for science without the players knowing?
In the marketing world, you know this as click-baiting: the practice of misleading (baiting) users to click on something with a promise that is never fulfilled. But the click-baiting case for SMGs is less clear: is it unethical to not get consent if the SMG is part of the game and contributes science at the same time?
Today’s post looks at the potential ethical issues of SMGs, drawing on discussions published about digital biomarkers. I’ve written about digital biomarkers in the past, and to refresh your memory, the FDA defines them as
a characteristic or set of characteristics, collected from digital health technologies, that is measured as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or responses to an exposure or intervention, including therapeutic interventions.
The authors of the paper that inspired this post (linked below) discussed the ethical issues surrounding measurements, analysis, data ownership, privacy and security, and equity of digital biomarkers. We can apply very similar ethical considerations to SMGs, so grab your beverage of choice as we explore the ethics of SMGs.
Privacy and security
For digital biomarkers that say something about your health and condition, protecting that data is one of the most important considerations. Where this digital biomarker data is stored and who has access to it needs to be clear. This data, in the wrong hands, could be analyzed and used in ways that don’t benefit you.
For SMGs, privacy and security mean something different. Most SMGs don’t collect data about you, as a player, and are only interested in the results of the mini-game. But those results still have to be transmitted, leaving the door open for personal data to be transmitted along with the results of the game. Developers will need to make sure that only the results of the mini-game are transmitted; if more personal information is required, that should be made clear when buying and playing the game.
Informed consent
This post started with a question about whether SMGs could be considered a form of click-bait and whether developers need to get informed consent when asking players to play their SMGs.
The case for informed consent for digital biomarkers is clear: users need to consent to have their health information measured, stored, and analyzed. But the consent can’t be buried in legalese — it should be clear to anyone what data is being collected, who has access to it, and how it is going to be used.
Informed consent for SMGs is less clear, since for the most part, there is no personal information being collected or used. But your play time is being used for something else other than having fun in the game. Could it be made clear before you interact with an SMG? Absolutely. Is it necessary to make it clear? I’m not sure.
Part of the success of an SMG is how many players play the mini-game. Would knowing that the SMG is part of a scientific research program prevent players from playing? It’s a question I’d like to ask some of the developers of games like Borderlands Science because it can affect whether these types of games are developed in the first place. Game developers may choose not to develop an SMG after weighing the cost of development against an estimated number of players explicitly consenting to playing an SMG. It’s possible that Borderlands Science was successful because there was no explicit consent.
What I can safely say is that SMGs are not click-bait. Most SMGs incorporated into popular games are being developed as optional content. For those that play the SMG, the rewards are tied to the main game, so the time invested in playing the game isn’t just being used for science. There is no nefarious attempt to bait you into playing the SMG and not rewarding your time for it. As far as I can tell, guidelines for developing SMGs caution against such practices, and instead, implore developers to make the SMG feel as seamless as possible with the main game.
Data ownership
Data as it related to digital biomarkers, especially if it is collected at home, should be owned by the person associated with the digital biomarker. That is, Fitbit doesn’t own my personal information that it is collecting. It’s a little less clear in a research setting though, as it could belong to the participants, researchers, or to the study sponsors.
It’s just as murky for SMGs because your time invested in playing the mini-game could lead to a major discovery. Who owns the piece of data that led to the discovery? Is it the player who invested the time to play? Or does it belong to the research group who developed the game? What about the game publisher?
There is one parallel we can draw, where data analysis of a scientific problem was distributed through a widely accessible software, similar to how SMGs would be accessed in a popular game.
SETI@home, a project that was born out of UC Berkeley, was a screensaver program that you could download.2 Whenever the screensaver was active, the program would use the idle computer to analyze data to look for extraterrestrial life (SETI stands for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). The UC Berkeley research team promised that users would be credited and listed as a co-discoverer if the data packet their computer analyzed led to a discovery.
SMG developers can take a similar approach, crediting player time for major discoveries. It may provide additional incentives for skeptical players to try an SMG.
Data usability
Accurate and reliable measurements of digital biomarkers is of the utmost importance because they can directly affect our wellbeing. But beyond that, the digital biomarkers need to be clinically valid — patients and healthcare professionals must be able to rely on these digital biomarkers to make appropriate health-related decisions.
Because the way scientific data is presented in an SMG may not be directly usable for researchers, someone has to map the game data back to real data for analysis. Any mistake in that process could lead to the wrong conclusions. That margin of error increases as the degree of abstraction between the SMG and real data increases.
Final remarks
Incorporating SMGs into popular games is still in its infancy. But there are plenty of things to consider, not all of which were listed above, that should be a part of the development process. Here’s to hoping that developers can learn from other industries as they explore spreading science to the entire gaming community.
If you’re interested in the article that inspired this post, you can read it for free here: https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig.0000519
If you liked what you read, please consider giving this post a like and sharing it with your community! If there are other ethical considerations regarding SMGs that you’d like to see discussed, let me know in the comments below!
I realize the unfortunate coincidence that the abbreviation is shared by a weapon, the submachine gun. But now that I’ve used it, I’m sticking to it.
Sadly, the classic version of SETI@home linked above and the new iteration of the project have been halted, apparently because their data collection source, the Arecibo Observatory, was decommissioned after suffering some catastrophic damage. I remember getting NO WORK done as I was too distracted by the mesmerizing screensaver when I had it installed. RIP SETI@home :(
I figure that if the mini-game is designed well, players won't mind that their time is being used for something other than the game. Also, people like being useful - maybe such a mini-game can be good for marketing!