Gaming is a lens for human behaviour, and we’re barely scratching the surface
I have spent the better part of fifteen years inside gaming and esports, and the thing that still surprises people outside the industry is how little of what happens in a game is about the game.
By Roald Van Buuren
A match of Counter-Strike or a game of EAFC is a few hours of mechanical input wrapped around thousands of decisions about trust, risk, status, cooperation, and who to blame when it goes wrong. Every one of those decisions is logged. We have built, almost by accident, the most heavily instrumented environment for studying human behaviour that has ever existed, and we mostly use it to sell battle passes.
Outside of gaming, behavioural science runs on surveys, lab studies, and inference. People are asked what they would do, while researchers accept that what people say and what they do are different things.
Games remove that gap; nobody fills in a questionnaire about how generous they are under pressure. They either share the last health pack with a stranger or they don't, and the system records it. You see revealed preference at a scale and granularity that no focus group or panel could ever produce, captured passively, continuously, and at the moment of the decision rather than weeks later in someone's imperfect memory of it.
For years the industry has treated all of this as exhaust. We measure the things that map to revenue, daily active users, session length, conversion, churn, and we let the rest evaporate. Sentiment gets reduced to a thumbs up or a star rating. Community gets handed to a marketing function and measured by follower count. The actual behavioural substance, how people treat each other, when a group tips from welcoming to hostile, which early signals predict that a player is about to leave for good, has barely been touched. Saying we are scratching the surface is generous. In most studios the surface has not been scratched at all, because nobody has been asked to look.
This matters far beyond product analytics, and here is where I want to be direct about why I think it is worth building a company around. For a large and growing share of young people, a game's community is not a side feature of their social life. It is the social life. It is the first place outside the family where they work out where they fit, who they can rely on, and what kind of person they are when adults are not watching. Sociologists used to call these third places, the cafes and clubs and street corners that sat between home and school and gave people somewhere to belong. Most of those have disappeared for teenagers over the last two decades, especially since COVID. A Discord server attached to a game or a Roblox experience has taken their place, and almost nobody is treating that shift with the seriousness it deserves.
The honest version of this argument has to include the dark side, because pretending it isn't there is how you lose sight of reality. Anyone who has spent ten minutes in a competitive lobby or a large Discord server knows that these spaces are not automatically good for the people in them. The same properties that make a gaming community a powerful place to build belonging, intensity, anonymity, constant presence, also make it a powerful place to learn contempt. Harassment, pile-ons, and the slow normalisation of cruelty are not edge cases in online communities; for many young people they are the default weather. A community is one of the most formative environments a young person will pass through, and right now we are leaving the formation almost entirely to chance.
I do not think the answer is more moderation in the old sense, more rules and bigger ban hammers applied after the damage is done. That treats a behavioural problem as a policing problem, and it always arrives too late. The answer starts with something much less glamorous, which is the ability to actually see what is happening inside a community while it is happening. A studio cannot make a community healthier than it can measure. If you cannot tell the difference between a server that is energetic and one that is turning toxic, between a player who is quiet because they are content and one who is quiet because they are halfway out the door, then everything you do about it is guesswork dressed up as strategy.
This is the gap ELO exists to close, and it is why I describe what we are building as a data intelligence business rather than a community tool. We turn the behavioural signal that games already produce into something a studio can read and act on, the health of a community over time, where sentiment is moving and why, which dynamics predict that people are about to leave or about to turn on each other. The measurement is not the mission in itself. It is the precondition for the mission, because you cannot deliberately build positive communities, the kind that genuinely give a fourteen-year-old a place to belong, until you can see clearly which way a community is tilting and intervene while it still matters.
The behavioural data has been sitting there the whole time. What has been missing is anyone treating it as the serious thing it is, and anyone willing to use it for something better than extracting another few percent of monetisation. Gaming is the clearest window we have ever had into how people actually behave, and the communities built around games are where a generation is learning how to treat each other. Both of those things are too important to keep leaving on the floor.