A6.1 A Cheater's Game

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Samuel Johnson
English author, critic, & lexicographer (1709 - 1784)

A game inherently depends on the players to play by the rules, a virtual community whose existence depends on trust. No one wants to play a game when their opponent had an unfair advantage. In the online world, however, cheating becomes as simple as a download. In a soccer game or chess game, cheating can only get you so far, but in an online game, such as Starcraft, invincible units can put you above the level of any professional, and worse, if the cheater is subtle, they may never be caught. Social pressure and open denouncement of hacking, then, is the only effective way to deter cheating.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that cheating isn’t often seen. Often, rules against hacking or cheating are included on the server, or on the game website, but spend any significant amount of time playing an online game, especially an older, popular game, and you’re bound to see someone hacking anyway. It may take a while to realize or it may be blatantly obvious, but once noticed (or suspected), everyone soon hears about it. The cheater in question is often asked to stop, then ridiculed, and finally, hunted down or harassed by the rest of the players. Also, people often leave or avoid games and servers that have cheaters. This excludes the offender from the gaming community, an ostracizing of those who break the rules. This is serves as punishment and as warning to newbies that hacking is not accepted by their fellow gamers.

Of courses, there are more drastic means to enforce the power of the Leviathan. Often, pressure from their peers may not be enough. Administrators of a game server, like the moderators of forums, can monitor and remove cheaters, either by kicking or IP banning them. A player with administrator privileges goes a long way in discouraging hacking. Also, Valve, the maker of Half Life, Counterstrike, and Team Fortress Classic, uses anti-cheat software (although its effectiveness is questionable), and Maple Story and other games installs something called GameGuard, which has the power akin to a rootkit. A rootkit is a piece of software that that is designed subvert the operating system, and while they are extremely untrustworthy, it is a good way to stop and remove cheaters.

In competitive gaming, where cheating reaps the greatest rewards, cheating must be carefully screened. Because it is difficult to have officials watching each match online, it is common for players to make “demos” of their matches, to submit after the game. Once, in a CAL-I (Cyberathlete Amateur League- Invite level), a new Counterstrike team did suspiciously well during a match. The community, and later the CAL officials, checked the demos of one of the players and saw evidence of a “wall hack,” a cheat for seeing through walls. Not only was the team and players banned from CAL, the Counterstrike community publicly denounced the players for their underhanded actions. This episode illustrates the power of social pressure to conform to a norm, in this case, for the greater good of the society.