Plato said: "You can discover more about one person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation".
That was the first thing we remembered at BGA when we got contacted by the famous service RealClearPolitics for a study about the links between the way you behave during a board game, and the way you behave in real life.
The results of this study - to be published next week in Social Science Research Journal - are quite astonishing since they came to confirm what Plato said 2500 years ago! You can really guess many things about someone just by watching him/her playing a game: personality type, general attitude, social skills, but also wishes, secret thoughts, consumer profile and ... political vote!
This unusual study leads of course to extraordinary new possibilities for BGA. This is why we'd like to share with you some exchanges we had with Tom McIntire from RealClearPolitics about this.
**BGA: What is the main result of this research?
**
Tom McIntire: Being a boardgamer myself, I was pretty convinced that the link between the way you play and the way you behave in real life is important. I was expecting to discover a good correlation between certain game habits and certain psychological patterns. The main result of this study is to confirm that this link exists ... but what was very surprising is how strong the correlations are.
The most astonishing results concern politics. One of our main objective was to find a correlation between the way players behave in a game, and their political opinions. In most cases, we managed to get a success rate of 80% in predicting the vote of a given player on BGA. In certain circumstances, for example if a player played more than 100 games with at least 30 different opponents, our success rate is even over 90%!
**BGA: How is this even possible?
**
TM: We created an algorithm that detects some specific game situations on Board Game Arena and surveys the reaction of the players. The moves, but also the reaction time, and what they write in the chat.
Some game situations are really close to real life situations, and like in real life, you can have many different reactions: aggressive, passive-aggressive, diplomatic, and so on. We used an artificial intelligence based on a neural network that has been trained to recognize these different reactions and categorize them. This way, if you watch the same player playing different games during a few hours, you are able to build a pretty accurate portrait of his/her mind.
Afterwards, we contacted directly a sample of 500 users of BGA to confirm or infirm what we found out about them.
**BGA: Why did you choose BGA for this study?
**
TM: BGA is hosting +16.000 games each day, and all games take place on servers where we can install our algorithms and our AI. If we had tried to do this in real life, it would have taken hundred of years to reach the same results.
**BGA: What other things did you manage to know about the players?
**
TM: The results are incredibly accurate in many domains.
For example, we managed to get good results at predicting basic information like the age of the players, their gender, their level of education or their revenues.
But what is very interesting is that the best results we got was on the personality aspects. We got extraordinary accurate results for predicting for example the mood, the sociability, the rationality of a player. These informations are very difficult to gather otherwise, even with personality tests. What is exciting is that unlike with a personality test, a player on BGA doesn't even know that he/she is being analysed, which makes the results even better!
**BGA: what could be the possible applications for this?
**
TM: There are practically no limits to the possible applications.
Of course, our main interest at RCP is to predict votes for the next elections. We already created a joint-venture company with Board Game Arenea named "Meeple Mind". The goal is to analyse data from all games played on BGA, categorize players depending on their political opinions, and sell the possibility to political candidates to target people they need to reach. Typically, a candidate from a left wing party will want to send a different message to the right-wing people he/she needs to convince, and to the left-wing people he/she needs to reassure.
But we won't stop at that. For example we are capable to predict who in the whole BGA database would be your best husband/wife according to your personality (or to predict your probability of divorcing your current partner if he/she is also a player). We are also studying the possibility to detect the personalities who are the most likely to commit a crime and automatically send a police surveillance drone when the probability reaches a certain treshold. These two examples show how great it will be for mankind to exploit such a tool!
To conclude, Board Game Arena would like to thank RealClearPolitics for partnering with BGA for that study. As players, we want to promote the board games by any possible ways, even the unusual ones, and it was a really good surprise for us to see that board games and technology can make the world even better.
To be continued!
愚人节: 我们可以通过桌游猜到你投了谁的票!
柏拉图说: "你可以在一小时的游戏中发现更多关于一个人的信息, 而不是在一年的谈话中。
这是我们在 BGA 上记起的第一件事, 当我们被这家著名的网站RealClearPolitics联系，为了研究你在棋盘游戏中的行为方式和你在现实生活中的行为方式之间的联系。
这项研究的结果将于下周发表在社会科学研究杂志上, 这是相当惊人的, 因为他们将证明柏拉图在2500年前所说的话是对的!
你真的可以通过看着他/她玩游戏来猜测很多事情: 个性类型, 一般态度, 社交技巧, 还有愿望, 秘密想法, 消费者个人资料和.....。
政治投票!
这一不寻常的研究一定会给 BGA 带来非凡的新的可能。
这就是为什么我们想与您分享一些我们和来自RealClearPolitics 的Tom McIntire关于这项研究的一些想法。
BGA: 这项研究的主要结果是什么？
Tom McIntire: 作为一个 桌游玩家, 我很确信, 你的打法和你在现实生活中的行为方式之间的联系是重要的。
我希望能发现某些游戏习惯与某些心理模式之间的比较强的关联。
本研究的主要结果是确认该关联性存在..。
但令人惊讶的是, 相关性是如此之强。
最令人吃惊的结果是关于政治问题。
我们的主要目标之一是寻找玩家们在比赛中的表现与他们的政治观点之间的联系。
在大多数情况下,我们预测一个给定的BGA玩家的投票率时,成功的达到了80% 的准确率。
在某些情况下, 例如, 如果一位玩家与至少30个不同的对手进行了超过100场比赛, 我们的准确率甚至能超过 90%!
BGA: 这怎么可能呢？
TM: 我们创建了一个算法, 检测在BGA上的一些特定的游戏情况, 并调查玩家的反应。
包括行动, 反应时间, 还有他们的聊天内容。
有些游戏情境非常接近现实情境, 并且就同现实生活中一样, 你可以有很多不同的应对措施: 积极进取, 被动进取, 外交等等。
我们使用了一种基于神经网络的AI, 它已经经过训练来识别这些不同的反应并对它们进行分类。
这样, 如果你在几个小时内观看同一个玩家玩不同的游戏, 你就能给他/她的头脑建立一个非常准确的肖像。
之后, 我们直接联系了样本中的500位BGA用户 , 来确认我们是否正确的发现了他们的想法。
bga: 你为什么选择 BGA 进行这项研究？
TM: BGA 每天举办 +16.000 场比赛, 所有的游戏都在服务器上进行, 我们可以在那上面安装我们的算法和 AI。
如果我们想要在现实生活中做到这一点, 将要花上几百年的时间才能得到同样的结果。
BGA: 你对玩家有什么其他的了解？
TM: 在许多领域, 结果都非常准确。
例如, 我们成功地预测了诸如玩家的年龄、性别、教育水平和收入情况等基本信息。
但非常有趣的是, 我们得到的最好的结果是在关于人格个性的方面。
我们得到了非常准确的结果, 来预测一位玩家的情绪, 社交性, 逻辑性。
否则,即使参与性格测试,这些信息也是很难获得的。
令人兴奋的是, 与性格测试不同的是, BGA 上的一个玩家甚至不知道他/她正在被分析, 这使得结果更加出色!
BGA: 这有什么可能的应用？
TM: 对可能的用途几乎没有限制。
当然, 我们对 RCP 的主要兴趣是预测下届选举的选票情况。
我们已经与棋盘游戏公司BoardGameArenea创建了一个合资公司,名为 "米宝之心"。
其目的是分析所有在 BGA 上玩的游戏中的数据, 根据他们的政治观点对玩家进行分类, 并将可能性卖给政治候选人, 以达到他们需要的目标。
通常情况下, 左翼党派的候选人会希望给右翼人士发出一些不同的信息来说服他/她，给左翼人士来让他/她放心。
但我们不会止步于此。
例如, 我们有能力预测在整个 BGA 数据库中谁是你最好的丈夫/妻子根据你的个性 (或预测你离婚的可能性, 如果你目前的伴侣他/她也是一个玩家)。
我们也正在研究是否有可能发现最有可能犯下罪行的人, 并在概率达到某一阈值时自动给警察发送监视信息。
这两个例子展现了人类开发这样一个工具会多么有用!
最后, BGA非常感谢 RealClearPolitics 对 我们在本研究中的大力支持。
作为玩家, 我们希望通过任何可能的方式来促进桌游发展, 甚至是一些不寻常的方法, 这是一个非常棒的惊喜, 让我们意识到桌游和技术可以使世界变得更美好。
未完待续!
