Riot Games is employing an unusual tactic to identify and observe players who don’t play by the rules.
The League of Legends dev is giving a psychology survey to players who violate the terms for naming their Summoner or in-game avatar. Affected players are to take a survey upon logging in and take a follow-up survey after playing 50 games.
Riot defines a violation of their rules as:
Selecting a Summoner name that is falsely indicative of an association with Riot Games, contains personally identifying information, infringes on the proprietary or non-proprietary rights of third parties, or that is offensive, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, sexually explicit, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable.
– from League of Legends‘ Terms of Use
Players worry about what the game company intends to do with the data. The questions on the survey are a bit personal, even asking about real-life altercations.
Nobody knows for sure what the outcome of this experiment could be or exactly what its purpose is. The League of Legends survey is actually a modified version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and The Aggression Scale, the latter of which was created to measure aggressive behavior in middle school students.
Both surveys were originally used by schools and doctors to inform them on psychological action. But Riot Games is a video game company, so what gives?
Presumably, Riot could be gathering data on players to decide on an action based on the results. Or maybe they think self-awareness will encourage self-discipline in players?
It’s hard to say. Without more visibility from Riot Games, “maybe” is all we have right now.
Image sources: gamecrate.com; motherboard.vice.com
