Activision Blizzard pays employees for health tracking
Company gives $1 a day in gift cards to employees using a pregnancy-tracking app that allows HR to monitor aggregated data

Activision Blizzard is paying its employees to use health-tracking software and then monitoring the information being tracked.

The publisher was featured today in a Washington Post article about Ovia, a pregnancy tracking app companies are incentivizing their employees to use. The piece reveals that Activision Blizzard has been compensating its employees for using health monitoring technology since 2014, when it began encouraging the use of Fitbit activity trackers.

Since then, the company has expanded the effort to include tracking of mental health, sleep habits, and diet, as well as autism and cancer care. Activision Blizzard VP of global benefits Milt Ezzard told the Post that the general reaction from employees to these programs "has gone from, 'Hey, Activision Blizzard is Big Brother,' to, 'Hey, Activision Blizzard really is bringing me tools that can help me out.'"

"Each time we introduced something, there was a bit of an outcry: 'You're prying into our lives,'" Ezzard said. "But we slowly increased the sensitivity of stuff, and eventually people understood it's all voluntary, there's no gun to your head, and we're going to reward you if you choose to do it."

For Ovia, Activision Blizzard offers $1 a day in gift cards to employees using it. The app allows women attempting to conceive to record numerous personal details from when they begin trying to conceive, through pregnancy, and after birth. That includes sleep schedule, diet and weight, as well as when they have sex, their mood, and the appearance of their cervical fluid. Women can also detail complications of pregnancy, miscarriages, and other information.

Activision Blizzard pays Ovia to access some of that data in an anonymized, aggregated format, including average time it took for employees to get pregnant, percentage of high-risk pregnancies, C-sections, or premature births, and how long it took new mothers to return to work.

For companies like Activision Blizzard, Ovia offers its services as a way to lower medical costs and increase productivity. Women tracking all of this information could potentially be more likely to conceive without expensive infertility treatments, and may be less likely to require costly premature births or C-sections. (A complicated birth in the US can run up a hospital bill in excess of $1 million.)

"I want them to have a healthy baby because it's great for our business experience," Ezzard said. "Rather than having a baby who's in the neonatal ICU, where she's not able to focus much on work."

Privacy advocates have raised concerns that such tracking apps could be used to discriminate against employees who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant, particularly in companies where there are few enough pregnant women at any one time that it would be possible to identify individuals in the data given. Ezzard told the Post that Activision Blizzard averages around 50 employees tracking pregnancies at any one time. Between Ovia and other incentivized health-tracking programs, Ezzard said Activision Blizzard saves about $1,200 per employee in annual medical costs.

Another privacy concern lies with security. As the Post had previously reported, ovulation-tracking app Glow's security was such that anyone could access a user's information (including daily alcohol consumption, when she'd had sex and in what position, or whether she'd had an abortion) if they had her email address. Another such app, Flo, was sharing its users' personal data with Facebook until a Wall Street Journal report exposed the practice earlier this year.

Ovia said it does not share or sell data to social media sites, but its terms of use explicitly give it permission to sell aggregated personal information to third parties or use the information it collections for external and internal marketing purposes.

The difficulties of researching gaming disorder and addiction
Dr Pete Etchells says there is an endemic problem with psychological research, as confirmation bias shapes the literature

The games industry could and should play a larger role in understanding gaming addiction, according to psychologist and author Dr Pete Etchells.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz at EGX Rezzed, the Bath Spa University reader said the games industry should "definitely" be involved with academic research into problematic behaviour around gaming, and could even provide funding.

While academics have called previously for greater collaboration from the games industry -- particularly around granting access to valuable objective data -- it has also been argued that research needs to be "absolutely free of the gaming industry" when it comes to funding.

Any industry-funded research which found that loot boxes were harmless, for example, would quite rightly be called into question. However, Etchells suggested that while there is certainly a "perception issue," there are ways to "immunise you to a certain extent" against these problems.

"One thing that psychologists are starting to do more and more of is something known as pre-registration where you say: 'I'm going to do this study, and this is how I'm going to analyse my data' before you actually collect the data. You make that publicly available, so people know when you collect your data that's what you were always going to do with it, rather than doing the analysis behind closed doors and do it five million ways to find the answer that you or your investors want.

"It's not a perfect solution, it's not going to completely inoculate you against conflicts of interest, but there are these things that you can do to make research more open and transparent that I think would be a really important first step."

Here Etchells taps into one of the key problems impacting psychological research at present. Speaking earlier on-stage with Rock Paper Shotgun deputy editor Alice Bell, he outlined the endemic issue of confirmation bias where psychology researchers analyse data multiple ways looking for the answer they were expecting. It's a cultural issue, said Etchells, where psychologists presume if the answer is different to the one expected, they say, "Well I analysed the data wrong, but if I do it this way, maybe that works."

"If you do that enough times, you might throw up a false positive where you show an effect when none exists," said Etchells. "But that's the point where you stop and say: 'There's the effect. I knew it was there,' and that's the one you report... I don't think for the most part anybody is doing it deliberately [except in a few extreme cases]... In general people are trying to do the right thing, and do the research as best they can, but there is an unconscious bias about how we're brought up to do science and do data analysis that is having a real impact on what the state of literature looks like."

It's a problem exacerbated by the industry's position to not share data with researchers about player behaviours. Etchells highlighted a longitudinal study he conducted a few years ago on the question of violent video games. It found there was a small association between aggressive behaviour and playing violent games at ages eight and nine, and some conduct problems at age 15.

The link was "really quite small" however and the "absolute risk was tiny." Importantly, the study -- like many others done in the field -- was unable to account for external factors such as family and home environment.

"Because the research is quite ambiguous and there is this flexibility in it, there's no concrete definitive answer either way," said Etchells. "So there's always going to be people either side of the debate saying 'yes, they do cause problems' and 'no, they don't'. It just means that it can't quite resolve itself in the public eye."

Even further still, researchers don't even really know what sort of games people are playing, or how much time they are really spending in those games. Ask any medical doctor how much people drink or smoke, and they'll tell you about the flaws of self-reported data.

"We really don't have a clear idea as research scientists what games people are actually playing on a day-to-day basis... Microsoft and Sony all have that data, and game developers have that data, and it would be nice to even just get a snapshot of what people are doing," said Echells.

The debate around gaming addiction was given real life last year when the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced it would be including 'gaming disorder' in its latest draft of the International Compendium of Diseases.

Currently the draft is under review and by no means finalised. However, critics have said it is premature to consider a clinical diagnosis of 'gaming disorder' and that there isn't conclusive enough evidence.

Speaking last year with GamesIndustry.biz, Dr Vladimir Poznyak -- coordinator for the WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse -- said formalising 'gaming disorder' as a condition would provide cohesion and coherence to treatment of problematic gaming behaviour.

In response to this argument, Etchells said that while he was sympathetic to how a clinical definition could open the doors to formal treatment and facilitate financial support for people suffering, it also creates problems of misdiagnosis.

"I don't think anybody is saying there aren't some people for which this is a demonstrable problem," he told us. "I think the issue is if this is done haphazardly -- and we don't have a clear idea on what this thing specifically looks at the minute -- then we risk doing things like over-diagnosing, sticking people in treatment centres who maybe show some problems but when it's not actually a clinical diagnosis, and I think that's where things like stigmatisation of gaming comes in... It's just that it's too premature. We've not got a clear enough angle on what it is yet in order to direct treatment research in an appropriate way."