**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:感謝 OpenAI,在 BGA 上玩遊戲時不再害羞
在 BGA 遊戲中聊天或不聊天:這是個問題!
在 BGA,我們始終牢記的最重要的一點是,棋盤遊戲是一種表達人類互動的方式。
這就是為什麼在 BGA 上你只能和其他人比賽,也是為什麼我們的基線是“與世界比賽” 。
除了下棋之外,我們認為與對手聊天也是玩棋盤遊戲的一部分。
這就是為什麼在 BGA 上,我們讓您(幾乎)可以在聊天中說出您想要的任何內容,而不是像其他遊戲平台那樣將您限制在一組預定義的交互中。
然而,對於我們社區的一小部分人來說,遊戲的“聊天”部分也是一種痛苦。
他們中的一些人太害羞而無法交流。
有些人與其他玩家不會說同一種語言,或者參與度不夠。
有些人可能有其他原因,但無論出於何種原因,我們 BGA 都關心社區的這一部分,並希望更多地整合他們。
感謝我們的母公司Asmodee的支持,我們在去年初與人工智能聊天機器人領域的領先公司OpenAI取得了聯繫,以開發高級原型,以便為他們的下一個產品找到商業應用。您現在可能聽說過:ChatGPT。
此次合作的結果是 12 個月的聯合開發工作,旨在為Board Game Arena構建新功能: ShyChat。
通過在您的BGA 個人資料上啟用ShyChat ,您將能夠 100% 專注於您玩的遊戲,而我們的 AI 引擎會負責與您的對手的對話。
感謝ShyChat背後的強大技術,我們的機器人將在您的 BGA 遊戲中回答您的對手寫的所有內容:在遊戲開始時給予適當的稱呼和“祝你好運”(每次都以非常獨特的方式,具體取決於上下文),當對手建議你可以採取更好的行動時做出適當的評論(禮貌地解釋他/她管好自己的事),甚至在你的對手以適當的方式說出不恰當的事情時為自己辯護(應用最好的減少衝突策略) .
但ShyChat不只是回答:它在適當的時候主動發言。
ShyChat 已經過訓練(“機器學習”技術)來識別某些遊戲情況,並且已經學會根據真實人類玩家在類似情況下所說的話以某種方式做出反應。
因此,ShyChat將代表您在適當的時候對遊戲進行評論,對遊戲進行一些有趣的評論。
如果你一次又一次地針對同一個對手,它會找到你這樣做的非常合理的理由(“對不起,我真的不想針對你,但我被迫這樣做是因為 XXX”)。
如果在輪到你玩的時候不得不快速退出你的電腦幾分鐘,它會告訴你的對手類似“我真的很抱歉,我必須花點時間做這一步”或者會和大家開一些玩笑來確保你的對手不會對你造成的。
除此之外, ShyChat還具有很強的可定制性,因此它可以完美滿足您的需求。
默認的“過度禮貌”將確保您桌上的每個人都始終保持良好狀態,而“被動攻擊”(僅適用於高級玩家)等其他一些設置會將交流限制在真正需要讓對手下放的情況下而您 100% 專注於遊戲本身。
“多語種”選項讓ShyChat假裝你精通所有可用語言,結合“交朋友”選項,它可以讓你在全世界毫不費力地交到親密的朋友。
我們只是想對“調情”選項做一個重要的免責聲明:這個選項將試圖以一種相當有效的方式引誘你的對手。
然而,即使我們的技術合作夥伴向我們保證 AI 正在“以符合 2023 年最高標準的方式”進行操作,我們也應該提醒您,最後,您應對您在 BGA 上所說的一切負責,即使消息是由ShyChat編寫的。
所以很明顯,這一步的一個問題是:為什麼不將其提升到一個新的水平並創建一個 AI 來處理你的遊戲動作,而不僅僅是聊天消息?
事實上,我們收到了大量來自 BGA 玩家的消息,他們對與人類玩棋盤遊戲很生氣:“他們太慢了”,“他們在做毫無意義的動作”,“你必須學習所有這些規則,並移動這些奇怪的東西”這些過於復雜的棋盤上的棋子”,“為什麼我需要做所有這些,而我只是想玩得開心?”.
好吧,現在我們必須承認該技術還不夠成熟,但我們正在開發一個名為“DumbBot”的原型,借助 AI,即使是非遊戲玩家也可以在 BGA 上玩遊戲。
我們希望您會非常喜歡這個新功能,並且想提一下,儘管有很多困難......
這個消息是由一個人寫的。