You Are Being WATCHED

Xbox Live isn’t just for multiplayer. It lets developers track how we play and what we enjoy — and it’s helping them make games better.

Have you ever been speeding through the streets of Paradise City and felt a ghostly presence in the passenger seat, then the eerie sound of a spectral biro ticking an invisible box as you steer your vehicle around a lamppost? How about unconsciously flicking your eyes around buildings for CCTV as you race around in a match of Halo 3 Slayer? More and more often, online games are tracking what you’re up to, where you’re dying, and what you’re being killed by.

Reams of statistics are flowing from the games you play and into the shadowy HQ of the gaming development elite. Here, like somebody watching the glowing green cascade of The Matrix, they gauge just how much fun you’re having and how to ensure you have even more. “It actually looks more like Hugh Jackman’s hacking scene in Swordfish,” counters Left 4 Dead writer and Valve mouthpiece Chet Faliszek. “There are fancy boxes spinning around on the screen and we all dance around them while drinking wine. Plenty of wine.” Okay. Whatever. Nevertheless, the subtle art known as “telemetry” is here to stay.

The crown prince of this practice is Bungie — the outright master of something called the “heat map.” A heat map is a top-down view of a level, with areas of increased violence marked in splashes of yellow, blue, and red. During development, these are used to watch where game testers and beta participants die, by whose hand, and with what weapon. The results enable both campaign and multiplayer maps to be streamlined before release. During Halo 3 development, for example, certain areas of heat maps were littered with multiple brown splodges indicating kills made by puny grunts. Research revealed that when put behind the wheel of a vehicle, the runts of the Covenant litter received huge, erroneous spikes to their A.I., transforming them into steady-aimed Master Chief–targeting killing machines. This monitoring continues post-release, and now Bungie is so far ahead of the game that its statistic harvesting even provides personal heat maps at bungie.net for you to analyze your own tactics and battle know-how. It’s just like 1984, only with a few more sticky plasma grenades.

Halo 3 — "Assembly": The central hub clearly hums with the bleeps of deleted shields, but it seems that most gamers instinctively avoid the western part of the map — save for a few loner kills here and there.

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