Privacy at the Academy

The Academy of Games is built to be a quiet institution. The default posture toward your data is restraint: collect only what is needed for the Academy to work as described, store it for as long as you keep your account, and give it back to you on request.

This document is a plain-language summary. It is not legal advice. A version reviewed by counsel may replace it in time; in the meantime, this page reflects how the institution actually behaves toward your data.

When you sign in, we record your email address and — if you choose Google as your sign-in — the display name and avatar URL Google supplies. We do not store a password; authentication is delegated to your sign-in provider.

As you use the Academy, we record the attestations you make, the endorsements you author, the archetypes you claim, the home school you choose, your Magister Ludi conversations, any materials and syllabuses you contribute to Castalia, and any discussion comments and replies you write. All of this is your own work; we keep it because the Academy could not function otherwise.

For product analytics we record a small set of funnel events — the steps you complete during onboarding, the moment you first claim a quest, the moment you first conversation with the Magister, and a handful of similar milestones. These events carry your Fellow id so we can measure the funnel; they do not carry the content of your work. We do not use third-party cookies, and our Plausible installation (if any) is cookieless and IP-anonymised at ingest.

By default, your monad is private. It is visible only to you. You may make it public from your profile, at which point your monad page (/fellows/<your-id>) shows your name, your bio, your archetypes, and the attestations you have gathered. You may revert to private at any time.

Materials and syllabuses you contribute to Castalia are public by default — the Library is a public space — but you can mark individual syllabuses private from their edit screens. Your Magister Ludi conversations are always private and are visible only to you.

The Academy works with a small set of service providers:

• Authentication. Google (if you use Google sign-in) and our email provider (Resend or whichever SMTP provider we have configured) — for the sign-in hand-off. These do not see what you do at the Academy after you sign in.
• Magister Ludi. When you converse with the Magister, your message and a structured summary of your Academy state are sent to Anthropic to generate a reply. The reply we display, the message you sent, and the structured envelope we received back are stored alongside the rest of your data. Anthropic processes your message under their privacy terms; we do not let them use the content for training.
• Federated games. When you link your Academy account to an external game, the external game receives a small token that establishes the link. From that point forward, the external game can submit signed attestations on your behalf. You can unlink at any time from your profile.
• Analytics. Our internal funnel is recorded in the Academy’s own database. When configured, the same events are mirrored to a cookieless Plausible instance for at-a-glance trend reading. No cross-site tracking, no advertising identifiers, no third-party cookies.
• Error reporting. When configured, server and client errors are sent to a Sentry-compatible endpoint to help us fix bugs. Stack traces and the URL of the failing request are included; the content of your work is not.

You may, at any time, ask the Academy for a copy of everything we hold about you. The profile page carries a button that downloads a single JSON file containing your account row, your archetypes and home school, your attestations and endorsements, your federated identity links, your Castalia contributions, and your full Magister Ludi conversation history.

You may, at any time, ask the Academy to delete your account. Deletion is final. It removes — by cascade through the database — your account, archetypes, home school, onboarding record, attestations, endorsements, federated identity links, and Magister Ludi conversations and messages. Materials and syllabuses you contributed to Castalia are either re-attributed to a tombstoned system Fellow (so other Fellows’ syllabuses do not break) or, if no such tombstone exists in your Academy instance, retained until you withdraw them yourself. We will explain which behaviour your instance exhibits when you initiate the delete.

If you are a resident of the European Union, the United Kingdom, or any other jurisdiction with comparable data-protection legislation, the rights above are the substance of what those legislations require. You may also ask us to correct a record we hold about you (most can be edited from the profile and discipline pages directly).

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. We do not have a hidden archive of deleted Fellows; deletion removes the rows. Analytics events are kept for up to twelve months; we revisit the retention window as the dashboard matures.

The Academy is not directed at children under thirteen. We do not knowingly accept Fellows under thirteen, and we will delete the account of any such Fellow we become aware of, on request from a guardian or otherwise.

For privacy questions, including export, correction, and deletion requests that the profile page cannot complete, write to the support inbox listed in your Academy instance’s launch documentation. We aim to reply within a few business days.