A deceptive robot referee in a multiplayer gaming environment

Abstract

We explore deception in the context of a multi-player robotic game. The robot does not participate as a competitor, but is in charge of declaring who wins or loses every round. The robot was designed to deceive game players by imperceptibly balancing how much they won, with the hope this behavior would make them play longer and with more interest. Inducing false belief about who wins the game was accomplished by leveraging paradigms about robot behavior and their better perceptual abilities. There were participants who found the balancing strategy favorable after being debriefed, and others who showed less interest mostly because of their perceived level of unfairness. Trust, suspicion, motivation, and appeal were evaluated by altering the robot behavior during gameplay. Post-briefing results include the finding that participants are more accepting of the use of lying by our robot as opposed to robots in general. Factors pertaining to gameplay, this robot, and deceptive robotics in general are also discussed.