SRG SSR

CheeseMaster

An online video game created for the Dataland show, broadcast live on the four main SSR TV channels. Viewers were invited to take part and collectively fight against an AI.

The goal of this game, offered during the Dataland, show, was to raise viewers’ awareness of the traces they leave on the internet. The show, produced by SRG SSR, was broadcast live simultaneously on four SSR TV channels and in the four national languages. It was therefore necessary to develop an online game capable of hosting thousands of players at the same time and collecting data without their knowledge.

During the show, viewers from the four linguistic regions were able to take part in four mini-games and produce as much cheese as possible in a fictional factory. The better they mastered the mini-games, the more cheese their factory produced per minute. And the longer a game lasted, the more cheese it produced overall. All players were grouped together and had to produce more cheese than a machine during the broadcast. The game thus depicted a battle between humans and an artificial intelligence.

Through this experience, the Dataland operation aimed to raise awareness about the traces left by online activity, but also about the data that players unknowingly reveal. The four mini-games, thanks to data processing designed by Institut de recherche informatique of the HES-SO Valais School of Management, made it possible, for example, to determine whether a player was left- or right-handed, their age, or even their location.

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Images du jeu vidéo sérieux "Un pas après l autre" réalisé pour StopSuicide par DNA Studios entreprise suisse spécialiste du jeu vidéo et apprentissage numérique 01

L’impact du projet

CheeseMaster and the TV show Dataland were created as an extension of Datak, a serious game about Big Data commissioned by Radio Television Suisse. The goal was to make the findings of a six-month investigation into data usage accessible to a broad audience.

During the live broadcast on Switzerland’s four main national TV channels, more than 15,000 people played CheeseMaster. At the end of the show, the journalists revealed that the true aim of the game wasn’t to beat an artificial intelligence — but to show just how much data could be gathered from players.

Right after the reveal, all collected data was deleted live on air by our team. The data included players’ locations, whether they were left- or right-handed, their leadership tendencies, age, and a wide range of technical details about their devices.

Fin du jeu vidéo sérieux Hals- und Beinbruch pour apprendre l'allemand en milieu hospitalier

Data collection

The game was broadcast before the Dataland show as a teaser, and then offered to viewers from the four linguistic regions. Thousands of players joined forces to produce more cheese than the machine. Thanks to them, we were able, among other things, to determine that only 2% of players read the terms and conditions, because a points bonus was hidden there.

Fin du jeu vidéo sérieux Hals- und Beinbruch pour apprendre l'allemand en milieu hospitalier

Labeling

This game measured players’ reaction times. It recorded how quickly each player tapped on the correct cheese wheels. This made it possible to determine the players’ ages.

Players revealed their age without providing their date of birth. On average, they were around thirty years old. The oldest players came from the canton of Uri (41 years). In general, players from German-speaking Switzerland were slightly older than those from the other linguistic regions.

Marketing

This game, called “Marketing,” consisted of locating the players. The only time they actively shared their data and were aware of it: they had to either accept the automatic sharing of their location or manually enter their position on a map.

Cutting

This game determined whether a player was right- or left-handed based on how they distributed the falling cheeses. Right-handed players generally distribute from bottom left to top right, and left-handed players do the opposite.

Across all linguistic regions, just under 20% of players were left-handed. And they have good reason to celebrate: on average, they achieved better results than right-handed players.

Inspection

The fourth mini-game consisted of sorting incorrectly labeled cheeses. Some labels were intentionally colored so that colorblind players could not see the number and would therefore reject the cheese by mistake.

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