There are a ton of gaming websites out there. One which I’ve never heard of is gameanyone.com. It appears to be more of a content aggregate site, mainly a place to post gaming related video links from YouTube and the like, alongside it having its own discussion forums, apparently. At least, this is what I can guess based on what I’ve seen, as the site doesn’t really explain itself at all.
In fact, I’ve never heard of it at all before today. My friend Prince Watercress, however, had heard of it mentioned in Let’s Play videos by one person he follows, but had never used it himself. This is a bit odd considering that he apparently has an account there. One he didn’t make, yet has a large assortment of content which he has shared present on there
Confusing? Very. Let’s get into this.
Sometime this morning my buddy Watercress gets a direct message on Twitter from fellow Let’s Player “newfiebangaa” asking Watercress to remove his sharing of newfiebangaa’s “Let’s Play Dark Cloud 2 Part 1” video from the service.
The thing is, Watercress never shared the video on this site. Indeed, he has never heard of it before today, at all! Yet there it is, on the site, with pretty much everything he has shared over the past 8 months on there. His avatar, his name, his info, all with a caption at the top which says:
This account was generated by someone who thought these videos would make a great addition to the GameAnyone collection. The videos on this account are being embedded with the official YouTube API. If you are the owner of these videos, and would like to gain control of this account to manage or remove your videos, you may Takeover Your Account.
Okay, so, generated by “someone” who thought these videos would make a great addition? Right… embedded with the YouTube API blah blah, that’s there so someone can’t claim the videos are “stolen” (they are just being linked to.) It ends with an interesting bit of text talking about being able to “takeover your account.” We’ll come back to that.
Needless to say, Watercress was pissed. Who wouldn’t be? Not only was this account not actively made by him, but was sharing content he would share (both his and that of others,) basically making it impersonation, but for whatever reason the site has a function of only one person being able to share a given video on it ever, which means this account having shared the video by newfiebangaa means he (newfiebangaa) couldn’t share his own video to the site – a video he had made and wanted to share on it! All because Watercress had shared it before via his own methods and this account automatically updated with this new content.
Seriously, it looks like the site is designed for content creators to share what they themselves make, but it uses Twitter, YouTube, and who knows what other services to gather any relevant content from people to create these accounts.
Watercress isn’t the only one to discover they had phantom, auto generated accounts here, however – chuggaaconroy is another one, as well as FreezingInferno. This isn’t isolated at all. Not by a longshot. I actually checked to see if I had an account here as well and no, thankfully, I don’t – I guess I haven’t hit their radar as someone who does Let’s Play content (since I don’t, only sharing Watercress’s stuff regularly.)
That being said,. there are a few videos that Prince Watercress himself had made which are on his gameanyone profile, but most of it is content which he shared made by others.
Watercress has used the contact form to ask them WTF is up with this, which means I will be following up on this as soon as I get word back from him on what they said, but there’s one last aspect of this which needs to be addressed – why?
Look at the accounts. These are completely system generated or at least, a human decides to “clone” a given person, basically re-creating their other online accounts, branding, etc, and creating a profile for them on gameanyone, complete with various achievements, level rankings on the site, what have you. If you didn’t know these were user generated, you would think they were legit, which is apparently what happened when newfiebangaa went to share his video on the site – the phantom Watercress account had shared the video, meaning he couldn’t, and he naturally thought Watercress had shared the video himself because the account looked so legit. Legitimate enough to make him question Watercress about it, bringing it to his attention.
Here’s where the “magic” of the scheme happens – once you’re aware of such an account, and see that you can claim it, what are some people going to do? Go ahead and claim it, and maybe damn well actually use it. After all, content has already been placed, images and branding pulled in, awards given, you did no work yet have an account filled with effort. Why not use it, right?
That’s the idea I think the people behind the site are going with which, quite honestly, is fucking horrible. You don’t do that shit, it’s almost a kind of like holding someones online identity, in a very subtle way. If an account is generated like this, you basically have to “opt-out” of it existing, rather than the traditional method of choosing to join a site. Here you have to choose to not be a part of it and go through effort to make this happen which, while I can’t speak for others mentioned above, Watercress isn’t bothering with – he’s directly asking them what the fuck they think they are doing.
I can’t wait to see what they say in response.
For those curious about the page, check out an archive I made of it here: http://archive.is/YohgH
It seems any service starting out that makes use of videos in some way get really desperate and starts doing stupid stuff, like the various things that the creators of Vidme (a site that died) had attempted. More than getting people to use their account its also about tricking people into thinking that the site is active, that way all the tiny YouTubers will probably see it and think they’ve got a chance to be seen or something. Its going to end up screwing them over at some point.