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An Interview with a Cheater
Dan writes to mention a post at the Aeropause site. Author Richard was recently given the rare opportunity to interview a cheater, shining a light into the dark recesses of a conflicted mind. The article explores why the cheater cheats, and the great excuses they use to be able to look themselves in the mirror. From the article: "Aeropause: What made you decide to mod your Xbox to gain an unfair advantage in games like Halo 2? Schmuck5000: Modding is not an unfair advantage. There is just as much chance that there will be a modder on the other team. I am there to even things out. Halo 2 is beginning to get old, us modders are just making it more funner."
Athletes often use the same excuse, that since there will be "other" players on drugs, they need to use the same drugs to stay competitive. However, this should only be the case if the drugs are allowed, because any given cheater could be exposed and stripped of their titles, video game or otherwise. That's the ultimate slap-down, because anyone after that will assume you're cheating even if you're not.
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The summary calls this a "rare opportunity to interview a cheater". Cheaters are hardly rare and it isn't difficult to talk to them. Granted, you're likely to get "OMGSTFUONTEHBBQ!!!11!1!one!eleven" than a real conversation, but...
Regardless, the amount of cheating that exists online now is the reason I only play online with people I know, on locked servers. The rest of the time it is single player stuff. When I play a game I play to have fun, and cheaters make games very UN-fun.
Catching them can be a problem. I'm happy the some companies are taking steps towards anti-cheating measures, but ultimately the cheaters are going to win. They control the software running on their hardware and they can modify it as they see fit.
PunkBuster was a good example of this. A server with PunkBuster running required all client connecting to be running a PunkBuster client, which reported to the server various bits of information such as video drivers, what processes are running, if something might be modifying the game's memory, etc. But, after a while, it was useless because the client software was hacked to make the cheater player seem legitimate.
Anti-cheat software is like a lock on a door: It only keeps the honest people out.
Love sees no species.
So you can get an interesting look into my mindset if you want. I expect heavy critisism but I'll continue anyway: Halo 2 is a fun game. I'm not gamer, and Halo 2 is one of the only games I actually play, besides the ones on my old Megadrive! I played online for quite some time until I experienced a cheater on a matchmade game. I became interested. I'd been using linux for 6 months and the idea of putting it on my xbox - to cheat - appealed to me. It took me a lot of getting to grips with the text talk used by all the "modders" as they prefer to be known on Halo 2. Eventually I managed it, and got banned in 6 hours on my subscription account! I guess that taught me a lesson. For a few months I cheated offline with friends. Some of the less destructive hacks (such as the new-ish 0 gravity hack) can make some interesting playing, and I agree with said cheater that it can bring a different edge on a game which can become repetitive! I decided to mod online one day. Not for glory, just to see if I could. It actually takes 2 people to mod online, and 4 hours of fussing around with that meant I totally screwed it up, and didn't have a single sucessful game! Heres my excuse: I'm a bit of a documenter/tutorial maker myself. Hacking Halo 2 isn't that simple. A lot of newbies get stuck, I was one. A lot of cheaters are fools and pre-teens (including mental age here), but not all of us! Much like the OSS community have their shared ideas, "modders" do too. I'm not demonising OSS here either. I actually wrote a rather lengthy and detailed tutorial, the only of its kind, on this topic (Halo 2 Softmodding, google it). Thats my excuse. I haven't played halo 2 in 6 months now, but cheaters don't always cheat to win. A lot do, but try and bare this point in mind! And please comment on this =) I just wrote a blog post on my second slashdot comment. Ah, such a newbie.
That's some ironclad logic there, if I've ever seen it.
You're missing the point of the interview.
Yes, it would be very interesting to ask technical as well as moral questions to the people who enable cheaters to cheat, but this interview gave us insight into why a person would cheat in the first place.
I would also like to add that there is a strong difference between cheating at a single player game, and having fun figuring out the save system, and cheating at multiplayer. When you're cheating by yourself, whether it be because you enjoy reverse-engineering the save file or because you simply want to advance faster, it has no impact on anybody else.
Cheating at multiplayer is an annoyance for everybody. The interviewee clearly demonstrates that there is no technical challenge to what he is doing. He's not doing it because he wants to understand how the game works. He's doing it because he's not very good at the games he likes to play and he wants to win, to the frustration of everybody else.
It's impossible for a cheater to win. People who face cheaters get irritated because they completely ruin the game, not because they're such potent adversaries.
Even when you aren't getting shot by magic bullets from adversaries who can track you and shoot you through walls, once cheaters have permeated a domain you can no longer enjoy the game: Instead of ceding that your opponnet played better, once there's cheaters in the mix you can never savour a loss (to put it in a funny but truthful way). Suspicion and bitterness overtake the game (on both sides. I was pretty good at Urban Terror, and my abilities were endlessly chalked up to "cheats" by my victims. I could never enjoy my wins, and they couldn't enjoy their loss or learn from it, because the game was saturated by cheaters).
I think what motivates the creator of the cheats is clear to us all. Hell, I would never spam, but creating spam-track avoidance software has always intrigued me because it's a challenge. I'm sure the cheat developers are just playing their own game, and they are legitimately winning.
The people destroying online games, however, are just the scriptkiddy wankers, and really I doubt the actual developers behind the cheat (who do legitimate, real work for their achievements) ever really even bother using their cheats online.
Your argument has so many flaws it isn't even funny. First, nobody ever cheated in the wild. You can't. There are no rules.
Games, and rules are an artificial, social contstruct, created by humans. Cheating is just as artificial. One major difference between a video game and real life is that a video game has rules posted.
In life, using all of the resources available to you is fair game. In video games, using all of the available resources to you is called "playing." It isn't the same thing as "cheating."
Your argument holds water for one type of person, the type who can not mentally differentiate between real life and video games.