When George Orwell wrote the dystopian novel 1984, he laid out a possible future in which the government watches everything in a heavy-handed approach to population and thought control. Big Brother was always watching, a concept that still sends chills down the spines of every privacy advocate out there. Thankfully, 1984 never came to be.

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But as it turns out, Big Brother is watching; not in an effort to control you but rather to learn from you. You're not just playing videogames anymore. You're actively providing feedback about what parts you like and which you don't. How you play could ultimately help shape the future of videogame design. BioWare is just one of numerous development studios and publishers that have begun collecting anonymous player data. No identifying information is tied to the information harvested, so you don't have to worry about things being traced back to you. You're just a data point amongst millions. I spoke with Casey Hudson, Executive Producer for the Mass Effect "The only data that we get are in terms of events -- little things that happen in the game," explained Hudson. "Let's say if we want to know whether players skip lines of dialogue, we can have that become a little event that gets sent up. It's all completely anonymous, so all we get is raw numbers for how many times these kinds of events occur. Then we can start getting ratios and comparing proportions and things like that. It becomes this mass of numbers, and then we have to try to figure out how we would interpret that."This is a process that is new for BioWare with Mass Effect 2 , one that Hudson hopes will aid the team in designing future games. "When we were looking at the Achievements for Mass Effect 1, that's where we realized that there are some really interesting player behaviors there that it would be nice if we could answer more questions for ourselves. [Then] we could understand what's going on and how people play our game.""Sometimes you'll design something and think that it's going to be used in a certain way and people will use it in a completely different way. And if you didn't know that, then you would just keep making that system the same as you did before. But once you know what players like and what they don't like, based on the way that they're playing it, then you can make more of the good stuff and less of the stuff they weren't interested in."This data is used for top-level design and isn't anything that could have been used in the making of downloadable content, or even to alter Mass Effect 2 for PS3."There are some things regarding difficulty and weapons and things like that and those are easier to tune, but there won't be a huge opportunity to include this stuff for the PS3 version. It's about how you design a game from the ground up.""Ultimately it doesn't always give you the answers, but it sometimes raises questions or gets you to ask the right questions…More people played the soldier class than all of the other classes combined. If you know that, then you can start thinking about future games. Is that good? Is that a problem? Should we look at the other classes and start thinking about ways to make them selected as often as soldier? As part of asking these questions, we can design games in the future a lot better."