Applying Semiotic Engineering in Game Pre-production to Promote Reflection on Player Privacy

Abstract

The gaming industry moves billions of dollars annually. However, there are still challenges to be overcome, such as player privacy, a need that has become evident with the emergence of new personal data protection legislation (e.g., GDPR, LGPD, CCPA). In this case, solutions that address privacy in the game creation process are increasingly constant. Traditional software engineering processes focus on non-functional requirements and differ from game creation processes in some elements. In this article, we propose an epistemic approach in which we use concepts from Semiotic Engineering to instigate the designer, through questions, to think about the player’s privacy in the game’s pre-production phase.