Before moving to Toronto, I lived with an avid gamer who owned a GameCube, PS3, XBox 360 and many more consoles. I was horrified the day he told me about the X-Box Kinect and how the government and other third parties could use it to spy on us. He seemed nonchalant about it, and simply turned it off, so no problem. Reading Alex Dean Cybulski's "Enclosures at Play: Surveillance in the Code and Culture of Video Games" opens my eyes to the reasons my room mate seemed indifferent towards surveillance. It is because "modular programming architecture, data structures for dynamic simulation and the visibility of arcades have fostered the surveillant potential of video games, and that these traits have been leveraged by the contemporary video game industry to create surveillant games designed to monitor, measure and mine play for data from users." (p.427)
So the Kinect is just one component of video game surveillance. The video game scoreboards, the visibility in arcades and internet video game culture all lend itself to surveillance. One thing that concerns me about the surveillance is our lack of control and our complicity. Users cannot opt out of surveillance tools like the achievement trophies (p. 429), and even if they could, they tend to find in-game surveillance engaging and rewarding (p. 430), so maybe we are part of the problem. As easy as it is to single out gamers, I recently discovered how Windows 10 sent user data to Microsoft regardless of privacy settings, yet I have not done anything to change my privacy settings or mitigate the surveillance so like gamers, I am complicit even though I do not really have control. I wonder if the lack of control plays a role in our complicity. Let me know your thoughts.
References
Cybulski, A. (2014). Enclosures at Play: Surveillance in the Code and Culture of Videogames. Surveillance & Society, 12(3), 427-432.
Geddes, J. (2015, August 17). Windows 10 User Data Sent To Microsoft Even When Privacy Protection Is On. Retrieved October 26, 2015.
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