**UPDATE:
April fools' day**
Thanks for all your nice comments, and sorry for those who searched this feature everywhere 😉
To chat or not to chat during a BGA game: that is the question!
The most important thing we always keep in mind at BGA is that board games is a way to express human interactions. This is why on BGA you play only against other humans, and also why our baseline is "Play with the world".
Beside playing your moves, we consider that chatting with your opponents is part of playing board games. This is the reason why on BGA we let you tell (almost) anything you want in the chat, instead of limiting you to a set of pre-defined interactions like other gaming platforms do.
However, for a fraction of our community, this "chat" part of the game is also a pain. Some of them are too shy to communicate.
Some do not speak the same language than the other players, or not enough to participate. Some may have other reasons, but whatever the reason we, at BGA, care about this part of the community and would like to work on integrating them more.
Thanks to the support of our parent company Asmodee, we have been put in touch at the beginning of last year with OpenAI, a leading company in the domain of AI chatbot, to work on advanced prototypes in order to find commercial applications to their next product which you have now probably heard about: ChatGPT.
The result of this collaboration has been a 12 months joint development effort to build a new feature for Board Game Arena: ShyChat.
By enabling ShyChat on your BGA profile, you will be able to focus 100% on the game you play, while our AI engine takes care of the conversation with your opponents.
Thanks to the powerful technology behind ShyChat, our bot will answer to everything written by your opponents during your BGA game: give the proper salutation and "good luck" when game starts (each time in a very unique way, depending on the context), makes the appropriate comments when an opponent suggests that you could have played a better move (politely explaining him/her to mind their own business), and even defend yourself if your opponent says innapropriate things in an appropriate way (applying best conflict reduction strategies).
But ShyChat do not only answer: it has the initiative to speak when appropriate. ShyChat has been trained ("Machine learning" technology) to recognize certain games situations, and has learned to react in a certain way based on what real human players have said in similar situations. Thus, on your behalf, ShyChat will comment the game when appropriate, doing some interesting comments on the game. If you target again and again the same opponents, it will find you very good rational reasons to do it ("Sorry, I really do not want to target you, but I am forced to do it because of XXX"). If have to quickly quit your computer for few minutes when it is your turn to play, it will tell your opponents something like "I really sorry, I must really take my time on this move" or will enjoy everyone with some jokes to make sure your opponents will no be made at you.
In addition to all of this, ShyChat is strongly customizable so that it matches perfectly your needs. The default "over-polite" will make sure everything is always fine with everyone at your table, while some other settings like "passive-aggressive" (available for Premium players only) will limit the exchange to what is exactly needed to devolve your opponents while you are 100% focused on the game itself. The "multilingual" option allows ShyChat to pretend that you are fluent in all the available languages, and combined with the "make friends" option, it will allow you to make close friends in the whole world with absolutely no effort.
We just would like to do an important disclaimer about the "flirting" option: this option will try to seduce your opponents in a rather effective way. However, and even if our technical partner ensured us that the AI is doing it "in a way that matches the 2023 highest standards", we should recall you that at the end, you are accountable of everything that has been said by you on BGA, even if the messages has been written by ShyChat.
So obviously one question at this step is: why not move this to the next level and create an AI that takes care of your games moves themselves, and not only of the chat message?
Indeed, we are receiving tons of messages from players on BGA that are annoyed by playing board games against humans: "they are so slow", "they are making unmeaningful moves", "you have to learn all these rules, and moving these strange pieces on these overcomplicated boards", "why would I need to do all that while I just want to have fun?".
Well, for now we must admit that the technology is not mature enough, but we are working on a prototype named "DumbBot" that will allow even non gamers to play on BGA, thanks to the AI.
We hope that you will enjoy this new feature a lot, and would like to mention that against all odds... this news has been written by a human.
ShyChat:感谢 OpenAI,在 BGA 上玩游戏时不再害羞
在 BGA 游戏中聊天或不聊天:这是个问题!
在 BGA,我们始终牢记的最重要的一点是,棋盘游戏是一种表达人类互动的方式。
这就是为什么在 BGA 上你只能和其他人比赛,也是为什么我们的基线是“与世界比赛” 。
除了下棋之外,我们认为与对手聊天也是玩棋盘游戏的一部分。
这就是为什么在 BGA 上,我们让您(几乎)可以在聊天中说出您想要的任何内容,而不是像其他游戏平台那样将您限制在一组预定义的交互中。
然而,对于我们社区的一小部分人来说,游戏的“聊天”部分也是一种痛苦。
他们中的一些人太害羞而无法交流。
有些人与其他玩家不会说同一种语言,或者参与度不够。
有些人可能有其他原因,但无论出于何种原因,我们 BGA 都关心社区的这一部分,并希望更多地整合他们。
感谢我们的母公司Asmodee的支持,我们在去年初与人工智能聊天机器人领域的领先公司OpenAI取得了联系,以开发高级原型,以便为他们的下一个产品找到商业应用。您现在可能听说过:ChatGPT。
此次合作的结果是 12 个月的联合开发工作,旨在为Board Game Arena构建新功能: ShyChat。
通过在您的BGA 个人资料上启用ShyChat ,您将能够 100% 专注于您玩的游戏,而我们的 AI 引擎会负责与您的对手的对话。
感谢ShyChat背后的强大技术,我们的机器人将在您的 BGA 游戏中回答您的对手写的所有内容:在游戏开始时给予适当的称呼和“祝你好运”(每次都以非常独特的方式,具体取决于上下文),当对手建议你可以采取更好的行动时做出适当的评论(礼貌地解释他/她管好自己的事),甚至在你的对手以适当的方式说出不恰当的事情时为自己辩护(应用最好的减少冲突策略) .
但ShyChat不只是回答:它在适当的时候主动发言。
ShyChat 已经过训练(“机器学习”技术)来识别某些游戏情况,并且已经学会根据真实人类玩家在类似情况下所说的话以某种方式做出反应。
因此,ShyChat将代表您在适当的时候对游戏进行评论,对游戏进行一些有趣的评论。
如果你一次又一次地针对同一个对手,它会找到你这样做的非常合理的理由(“对不起,我真的不想针对你,但我被迫这样做是因为 XXX”)。
如果在轮到你玩的时候不得不快速退出你的电脑几分钟,它会告诉你的对手类似“我真的很抱歉,我必须慢慢来”或者会和大家开一些玩笑来确保您的对手不会对您造成伤害。
除此之外, ShyChat还具有很强的可定制性,因此它可以完美满足您的需求。
默认的“过度礼貌”将确保您桌上的每个人都始终保持良好状态,而“被动攻击”(仅适用于高级玩家)等其他一些设置会将交流限制在真正需要让对手下放的情况下而您 100% 专注于游戏本身。
“多语种”选项让ShyChat假装你精通所有可用语言,结合“交朋友”选项,它可以让你在全世界毫不费力地交到亲密的朋友。
我们只是想对“调情”选项做一个重要的免责声明:这个选项将试图以一种相当有效的方式引诱你的对手。
然而,即使我们的技术合作伙伴向我们保证 AI 正在“以符合 2023 年最高标准的方式”进行操作,我们也应该提醒您,最后,您应对您在 BGA 上所说的一切负责,即使消息是由ShyChat编写的。
所以很明显,这一步的一个问题是:为什么不将其提升到一个新的水平并创建一个 AI 来处理你的游戏动作,而不仅仅是聊天消息?
事实上,我们收到了大量来自 BGA 玩家的消息,他们对与人类玩棋盘游戏很生气:“他们太慢了”,“他们在做毫无意义的动作”,“你必须学习所有这些规则,并移动这些奇怪的东西”这些过于复杂的棋盘上的棋子”,“为什么我需要做所有这些,而我只是想玩得开心?”.
好吧,现在我们必须承认该技术还不够成熟,但我们正在开发一个名为“DumbBot”的原型,借助 AI,即使是非游戏玩家也可以在 BGA 上玩游戏。
我们希望您会非常喜欢这个新功能,并且想提一下,尽管有很多困难......
这个消息是由一个人写的。