Paper: Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal: A Case Study on an Online Strategy Game
Summary:
This paper tries to find linguistic cues that can predict “betrayal” in an online game called “Diplomacy”. Diplomacy is an online war strategy with a little different order of actions. Here all the player perform their moves at the same time. This makes it very similar to the problem of “Prisoner’s dilemma”. For this reason, players make and break alliances. The main communication medium for the game is through messages. The authors collected messages between users to find out what type of language cues are used by the users before betraying alliance. The authors found that betrayers express more positive sentiment, politeness while less argumentation and planning in their messages. Based on these attributes authors create a model to predict betrayal which achieves about 57% cross-validation accuracy.
Reflection:
Authors’ choice of Diplomacy was a good source for analyzing the interaction of betrayer and victim. The authors in this paper are overly protective about the effect of time on their relationship which is surprising from the given result when they just ignore the status of the game in predicting betrayal. One of the results of the study that doesn’t make sense is that betrayer’s plan less while the victim’s do more. This is counter-intuitive in the sense if the victim plans more it is likely that they have a better grasp of different situations in the game. This begs the question: what is the effect of different level of experience in the game on betrayal? It is unlikely that a novice player (noob) will betray his alliances. Another thing noticeable in the tables in the paper is the absence of the value of the coefficient for both positive features and negative features in their prediction power. Although this paper provides some interesting insight into the behavior of a betrayer, it doesn’t seem to have any direct application in real life.
