Arknights: Endfield Playtime Tracker vs Gameplay.Science

Arknights: Endfield Playtime Tracker records playtime automatically by checking every five seconds whether Endfield.exe is running. Its browser dashboard at 127.0.0.1:27182 shows a live timer, session history and a NOW PLAYING banner; when the game closes, a Windows toast reports the session time and total playtime. It also creates a readable playtime.txt log, with sessions grouped by date. Data is kept locally in JSON, and interim session details are saved every 60 seconds so an incomplete session can be finalized on the next startup. The dashboard retains up to 100 sessions. Detection depends on the game executable being named Endfield.exe. The tracker requires Windows and Node.js, uses built-in Node.js modules without external dependencies, and setup uses batch files, with a VBScript launcher option. Users can set an initialOffset to account for playtime before installation; the default is zero. The local dashboard is not accessible from other machines. The tracker is free to use and modify.

Gameplay.Science is an open-source web platform for independent research on video games using behavior data donated by players. It is designed to support studies without requiring direct participation from game platforms. Players can contribute digital trace data through Steam or Discord connections, account integrations such as Steam or Xbox, or GDPR requests. Account linking lets a participant sign in and authorize automatic access to gameplay data. UK and EU players can request data held by a gaming company under GDPR and share it with researchers. The project aims to cover how long people play, what they do in games, and who they interact with. A study using the platform describes Steam authentication through OpenID, public Steam gameplay details, and hourly collection of each game’s incremental playtime. That study says data was stored on encrypted servers accessible only to the research team. Steam and Xbox are listed as supported ecosystems.