Humans display a few consistent behavioral phenotypes in two player games (2016)

Envious (30%) -- defeat opponent

Pessimist (20%) -- maximize min payoff

Optimist (20%) -- maximize max payoff

Trustful (20%) -- cooperate

Undefined (10%) -- everyone else, lump of players with no strategy to define them as a group

- Diamonds: achievers who collect all possible awards and treasures

- Spades: explorers who travel the game world and try everything in it

- Heart: people who engage in socialization

- Clubs: people who engage in competition

Note that these are more behaviors than phenotypes but most players have preferences among them.

Edit: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02015

"Socially relevant situations that involve strategic interactions are widespread among animals and humans alike. To study these situations, theoretical and experimental works have adopted a game-theoretical perspective, which has allowed to obtain valuable insights about human behavior. However, most of the results reported so far have been obtained from a population perspective and considered one specific conflicting situation at a time. This makes it difficult to extract conclusions about the consistency of individuals' behavior when facing different situations, and more importantly, to define a comprehensive classification of the strategies underlying the observed behaviors. Here, we present the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in which subjects face four different dyadic games, with the aim of establishing general behavioral rules dictating individuals' actions. By analyzing our data with an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we find that all the subjects conform, with a large degree of consistency, to a limited number of behavioral phenotypes (Envious, Optimist, Pessimist, and Trustful), with only a small fraction of undefined subjects. We also discuss the possible connections to existing interpretations based on a priori theoretical approaches. Our findings provide a relevant contribution to the experimental and theoretical efforts towards the identification of basic behavioral phenotypes in a wider set of contexts without aprioristic assumptions regarding the rules or strategies behind actions. From this perspective, our work contributes to a fact-based approach to the study of human behavior in strategic situations, that could be applied to simulating societies, policy-making scenario building and even for a variety of business applications."

The actual title is "Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games". I shortened it to fit and replaced dyadic with "two player".

Games with good stories and gameplay are the same to me as novels, if not better. In that they allow me to experience things otherwise not possible. Like running for dear life when Dhaka is chasing you in Prince of Persia; or decimating a whole village in Skyrim and having that dark big hole in your chest for what you did carry on until you load the game again.

But the most recent learning from myself has been from Divinity 2 Original Sin. Great game. There you have a main avatar and 3 other players, equally qualified in every sense, and you control all 4. The only difference between the avatar and the rest is one's identity tied to the avatar.

At some point I realized my ranger and melee are pretty strong while wearing nothing but tattered loin clothes; while my avatar, a jack of everything cool and carrier of all the gear he could not even wear sucked. This was an epiphany for me in team spirit. I was hoarding everything cool for my avatar. This had 2 effects. Firstly, it starved the rest of the team from getting good, relevant gear. Secondly, the rest remained laser focused on a couple of skill trees while my avatar, or "I", was hoarding all the cool skills wanting to become a god of all the things or something. So I gave away some epic gear to my ranger and melee units and they got buffed a lot. And I also trimmed the avatar into a single well defined role (pyro summoner) and now I have a pretty strong team.

I am pretty sure this pattern would have had a longer lasting effect on my personal and professional development as well, had I not felt it on my skin like that. Everyone knows you're supposed to share or not to be greedy but I wonder for how many that has been a matter of "life and death".

It gets super interesting once the power relationship changes in the game and the formerly weaker player can now kill the other player. Will he/she remain cooperative? Will you be backstabbed? A study in psychology and great fun.

An example is the famous marshmallow experiment. It’s framed as a test of self-control and rationality, but what if the proctor is lying to you? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.