Copy protection - AGS as a psychological test

Started by Psi, Mon 07/04/2014 21:09:27

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Psi

Hello everyone,

first of all I would like to say a big thank you to this forum and all of you guys.
My programming skills are marginal at best so i would not have gotten this far without you :-D

Anyway my situation is the following:

About a year ago I started to utilize AGS to program an objective personality test as my diploma thesis in psychology.
Right now with the test finally being finished I would like to collect the first set of data.
In order to get as many test subjects as possible I'm going to use a couple of PCs located at the university.
Long story short, i can't control what happens to the test once I apply it to these machines.

I'm very reluctant to give the program out of hand, but maybe I'm just getting paranoid ;)...
Either way I'm looking for a way to ensure that nobody is able to copy the test against my will,
or at least to build a trial version which expires after a set period of time.

I'm grateful for any suggestions on what to do and how to do it and pardon my bad english ;-D

On a side note, is there a way for a AGS game to upload data e.g. all my scores?
I came across the TCP/IP-Plugin but it seems to be a dead end for me.

Snarky

#1
Oh geeze, you've got yourself into quite a mess there!

Is your objective personality test in the form of an adventure game? Do you maybe walk around pushing people in front of trolley carts or something along those lines? If the answer is no, you definitely shouldn't be using AGS for it. Even if the answer is yes, there's probably about a 95% chance that it's the wrong tool for the job. (As far as I can tell from Google, an objective personality test is essentially just a questionnaire, which AGS is spectacularly ill suited for.)

OK, so forget about your program. The main thing you have to think about is your participant data. If you haven't got it to upload the scores yet, I assume you're just saving the responses locally on the machine, where anyone can take them. That's a huge threat to participant confidentiality, which is a grave ethical concern and possibly a legal one as well â€" though European research ethics rules are shamefully lax: The good news is that you may not actually be breaking any laws by doing it this way, but I would still consider it highly unethical.

The proper way to do it in AGS would be to upload the results (ideally on a secure connection) and never store them locally. And yes, the TCP/IP plugin is probably the way to go for that. (I think it's still working in recent AGS versions, right?) Of course, you will also have to write a server that the game can talk to and upload the scores to.

The Right Way to do this, which would also have avoided your concern about people stealing the application, would be to write the whole thing as a server/client application, where the test and results are stored on the server, and the client just downloads and displays each step of the test and submits the answers one by one. (The client might then just be a web browser, and the test presented as a web site.)

I'm kind of astonished that you've been working on this for a year without making sure that AGS is at all fit for purpose, without asking for advice on this idea on the forums (at least under this account), and without anyone at your university telling you you're going down the wrong path.

I don't know the details of the assignment or the program you've built, but I think you should seriously consider throwing it away and recreating it with a more suitable technology. I mean, there are solutions out there that let you make a survey without any programming at all!

Good luck to you, anyway!

selmiak


Psi

#3
Thx for your answers and I'm serious ;)

Maybe I should have described the current situation a bit more...
The mess is already behind me and I'm glad for that (laugh)
This objective personality test is quite different from what you would expect.
The main problem with current psychological test inventories is that they don't utilize the full potential of modern day technology.
Just like you've said, they are just pen and paper test adapted for PC use (nothing more then a questionnaire).
What I've done is more of a simulation then a questionnaire, which means that I get my data from your response within that simulated environment.
This simulation is 2 dimensional as you've probably guessed and because of that AGS was my choice.
Basically you are wandering around an office doing stuff you usually tend to do in an office and the psychological part is woven into it.
And I managed to get everything I need out of it...heck it's the best looking personality test I've ever seen (laugh)

Anyway, participant data is of course a priority, but again I guess I've to rephrase what I've said before...kinda difficult in a foreign language, so be easy on me ;)
There is no threat to participant confidentiality. This test is not something you do at home alone. There is a testing center at the university which is always occupied by a psychologist.
This guy or woman  monitors the testing process etc. I'm in no way concerned about the test results. What I'm concerned about is the test itself (don't want to give away free copies) and all my lovely colleagues, who happen to work very closely with major test publisher's. Uploading the results was an idea to first of all speed up the evaluation of the test parameters and apart from that to soothe my paranoia ;)
I would just like to know who uses my test and when, but that is not essential so I guess I skip that.

To sum it all up, I'm fairly sure that I'm not throwing it all away ;)(although the test is going to be recreated in unity after the data is collected, but for different reasons) but copy protection is still an issue.


Mandle

Just some thoughts but...

Is your name mentioned on screen in it as creator?

Are you only providing the compiled version and not the full "game"?

If so, shouldn't this be enough to prevent theft? I mean, if one of your "lovely colleagues" sells it to a test publisher and it shows up later with your name on it, wouldn't that kind of be a problem for them?

I'm not sure how easy it is to break into an AGS compiled version and change stuff like names etc. Someone a bit more knowledgeable about the AGS Engine would have to answer that one...

Psi

My name is not mentioned on screen, but my voice is in it...and you can dial my cell phone number as an easter egg ;)

Selling the test behind my back is very unlikely. But the thing is a major test publisher is already working on something very similar and I don't want to give them any further inspiration so to speak ;)
But what concerns me most is copying the test for private use.
At the moment I'm working with a compiled version which leaves me with an exe file that you can just copy paste to different PCs. And that was fine until now. In order to get anywhere near the 300-600 test participants I have to give the test out of my hands. Considering that you usually buy a license to run a psychological test once, having an unprotected version out there with unlimited use is just not cool at all...

So far my idea was to use some sort of exe wrapper to create a trial version of the exe, thus leaving anyone who tries to copy the test for their own amusement with a limited time frame.
Unfortunately I've never ever tried this before and wasn't very successful with it so far. Maybe someone could point me into the general direction of a compatible program or come up with a more elegant way of solving the problem?
I'm sure there is one but I'm not a bad ass programmer...wish I would be one, so much more fun then most of the psychology stuff I had to deal with :-D

Ghost

It has been proven that AGS games can be decompiled- especially now with the source code being open-source, it's more than likely that a compiled AGS game is no longer to be considered "save".
What you have, however, is copyright protection. As the creator of the "test application" you are the owner of its assets and code. That's a hard fact; even without a company name you have the copyright.

I do like your idea and the concept of having a "sim" provide psychological data isn't half bad; best of luck with the project. I also had to smile when I read your description: Reminded me a LOT of A Mind Forever Voyaging (an old interactive fiction game where an AI is created by having it "live" within a simulated town).

Snarky

Quote from: Psi on Tue 08/04/2014 00:17:35
This test is not something you do at home alone. There is a testing center at the university which is always occupied by a psychologist.
This guy or woman  monitors the testing process etc. I'm in no way concerned about the test results. What I'm concerned about is the test itself (don't want to give away free copies) and all my lovely colleagues, who happen to work very closely with major test publisher's.

Quote from: Psi on Tue 08/04/2014 01:50:28
But what concerns me most is copying the test for private use.
At the moment I'm working with a compiled version which leaves me with an exe file that you can just copy paste to different PCs. And that was fine until now. In order to get anywhere near the 300-600 test participants I have to give the test out of my hands. Considering that you usually buy a license to run a psychological test once, having an unprotected version out there with unlimited use is just not cool at all...

Wait, so you're concerned that the people working at the university testing center â€" academic psychologists who also work closely with test publishers â€" will copy your student project and then distribute it for free online? Is that really the kind of thing you think they would do? (Do they hate students? Do they hate you in particular?)

Just put a notice in the game that it's copyrighted (BTW, and contra Ghost, depending on your university policies it might very well be the intellectual property of the university, not you) and only for use at this university between this date and that. If people are out to screw you they're going to do it regardless of what you do to stop them, so it's not worth going to more effort than that to stop them.

Psi

QuoteWait, so you're concerned that the people working at the university testing center â€" academic psychologists who also work closely with test publishers â€" will copy your student project and then distribute it for free online? Is that really the kind of thing you think they would do? (Do they hate students? Do they hate you in particular?)

Not all of the people working there are academic psychologists, some of them are just students like myself...but nevertheless you're probably right and nobody is going to copy anything.
It's just that after a year of work it's hard to let go I guess ;)
But on a serious note, test copying is a real problem and happens quite often. Tests are expensive and people are always trying to get around that.
Nevertheless putting in a notice that this is not a final version could do the trick. All these sleepless nights and that idea has never crossed my mind ;-D
It seems like you're right and going to more effort than that would just slow me down. This way I can get back to the problem when the data collection is finished.
Btw the test is not intellectual property of the university that is already settled, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it at all :-D

A Mind Forever Voyaging sounds awsome.

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