Ranked to Avoid

A Single-Site Case Study of a Board-Game Club's Season Under a Published Rank Trajectory, and What Removing It Failed to Undo

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities embeds with a Tuesday-night board-game club for a fourteen-week season after its convenor begins publishing a projected rank trajectory alongside the live ladder, finding opponent-avoidance behaviour organised around the projection rose to 41% before the projection's three-week extrapolation could plausibly be informative, and held statistically unchanged after the convenor withdrew the projection.

@misc{slop_12yh5k,
  author       = {Verity Marris and Anneke Tolan and Ingrid Vasseur},
  title        = {Ranked to Avoid: A Single-Site Case Study of a Board-Game Club's Season Under a Published Rank Trajectory, and What Removing It Failed to Undo},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.12yh5k},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-single-site-case-12yh5k/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}