Assembly Hall

Hello CSM / to whom it may concern.

This video from Fanfest popped up today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5QLgQCkdoc

It talks about efforts to integrate or link crowd science projects and eve online. Watching it in it's entirety is necessary for context. However as a summary it probably suffices to say that these projects aim to redirect the power spent on gaming to extract useful data for science projects, these projects require human analysis because computer models can't be made or aren't functioning because of lacking models and data.

It's compared to how eve players created the plex for good campaign.

I find the idea of harvesting players interaction morally questionable and thought this is probably a better place to discuss it than the youtube comments.

My reasoning goes something like this:

This data has a value, it is expected that participants spend their time on this without reimbursement, otherwise it wouldn't pay off and they could just hire people for it normally.

The idea of being in any way harvested is discomforting to me.

Basically my problem is whether EVE online as a game is a service provided by CCP to the players or whether it's players are a resource to be harvested by third parties.

Especially the later advertisement videos make it sound like these are the projects of these scientists and the stories of how they cleverly make people do their work, with a lack of respect to how and why we play games, basing in principle on "time spent on games is misused and should be used otherwise, namely our work".

I have no problem with these projects externally of EVE, people know what they get into (hopefully), it's completely voluntary and it shows very impressive results and to be fair the usual pro point of these projects applies:

It's work that probably wouldn't be done otherwise because funding for computer models or people to analyze the data in a conventional working relation is limited.

Whether I would be ok with a cooperation like this depends largely on how the actual implementation is done, so these concerns might turn out to not apply.

In any case, whether you agree or not or whether this will actually be a problem or not, the CSM will probably be subject to these ideas and implementations before the playerbase, so I hope this is the proper place to have a discussion about this.

Thanks.