Niculae, Vlad, et al. “Linguistic harbingers of betrayal: A case study on an online strategy game.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04744 (2015).
This research paper explores linguistic cues in a game ‘Diplomacy’ (a strategy game) where players form alliances and break those alliances through betrayal. The authors have tried to predict a possible betrayal based on following attributes: positive sentiment, politeness, and structured discourse. However, in my opinion there can be other factors like body language and facial expressions of a player which can also determine a possible betrayal.
The authors have collected data from 2 online platforms. The dataset comprises of 145k messages from 249 games. Diplomacy is unique in a way that all players submit their written orders and these orders are executed simultaneously; there is no randomness. Hence the communication of the players depends only on the communication, cooperation, and movement of players.
In sec 3 of the paper, authors talk about relationships and stability and how interactions within the game define the relationship between players. The authors have used external tools for sentiment analysis and politeness classification. The authors have built a binary classifier to predict whether a player is going to betray another player.Such computations might give satisfactory results in a game scenario; however, they cannot be extended to real-life scenarios.
In the end, the paper explores relationships in a war based strategy game which doesn’t quite relate to the real world and looks quite unrealistic.
