April fools: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

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sourisdudesert
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April fools: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by sourisdudesert »

Image

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!
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Boardgame_shri
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Joined: 28 September 2015, 16:44

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by Boardgame_shri »

Happy April Fool's Day folks. Nice Try :lol: :P
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Pelleseren
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Joined: 04 August 2016, 18:53

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by Pelleseren »

You had me going at first, but ou decided for the obvious reveal at the end :)
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joshjohnson
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Joined: 17 October 2016, 01:10

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by joshjohnson »

Man. BGA. Y'all are fantastic. Can't wait to find my perfect wife on BGA thanks to this wonderful service.

Let the "real" games begin!
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Otithes
Posts: 85
Joined: 31 May 2016, 19:18

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by Otithes »

Ugh :? I know this is meant to be funny, but you broke your own rule: no politics, remember? I come here to get away from the news, and now I have to see this picture when I log on. Please make it go away :(
Last edited by Otithes on 01 April 2018, 05:43, edited 1 time in total.
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cellophanity
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Joined: 19 February 2018, 11:47

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by cellophanity »

April Fools day come early? :shock:
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Sturgeon
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Joined: 27 September 2016, 18:03

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by Sturgeon »

I am not a fan of this and am seriously considering shutting my account down.
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5pencer
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Joined: 19 July 2017, 04:12

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by 5pencer »

April Fool :D
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travbot
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Joined: 01 February 2012, 01:30

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by travbot »

I hate April Fools Day. Put that into an algorithm. :o
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Scattercat
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Joined: 22 June 2013, 05:18

Re: We can guess for who you vote with board games!

Post by Scattercat »

Cute gag, but please, this is my sanctuary for distraction and relaxing. I don't need That Orange Bastard's face on my home screen every time I click over. :-(
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