[AlexandrB]

> ...how many hours of games they've played or how many photos they've viewed...

That part jumped out at me too. This probably means they're recording the name (or even hash?) of every executable you run and comparing to a list of known game .exe files. In addition they're recoding how long you have been using each executable (if not start/stop timestamps).

I'm not a security expert but it seems like this kind of information could be correlated with (for example) Tor exit node traffic to unmask a Tor user or other fun surveillance uses.

[WorldMaker]

Hashing .exe names is way too much work. Since Vista Microsoft has provided an opt-in way for a game installer to optionally flag "Hey, I'm a game". This was used for the mostly useless "Games Explorer", but also little bits of other functionality.

Also, the Microsoft Store has an entire category called "Game" and can just use that.

Worst case though, by "game" it might just use the Window's Xbox app's determinant for shortcuts like Win+G which is essentially, from what I gather, "Does it use DirectX? y/n".