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Valve's Battle Against Cheaters
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"
Ayn Rand was an insufferable bitch with opinions that... wait why the fuck would you even TALK about playing games if you're a Rand fan? Don't you have work to do with all your waking hours?
For a given value of 'best'. In theory, as you say, being the 'best' will likely entail hard work and genetics, but they should also be ethical; examples to us all as to what we can achieve. The reality is closer to what you say, though - although I doubt it's only steroids that they use to enhance performance. Then again, we might just be comparing apples to oranges here since it's probably a lot harder to cheat (and not get caught) in a gaming tournament, where actual money is on the line, than it is in an athletics competition.
What Vavle is really trying to do with crying about cheaters is create another excuse (along with piracy) to completely abandon the PC platform altogether and just make console games, like everyone else is slowly doing.
Oh that must be it! It makes perfect sense to abandon the largest online games distribution platform on the planet that's literally making them billions!
Alan Greenspan, a long time Randist, had the same opinion about fraud in financial markets. He essentially argued that there was no such thing as "fraud", and that anything done within the bounds of the "free market" was a valid expression of the mechanics of that system, whatever those mechanics may be. It does work out well if you happen to be the one committing the fraud, and for an Objectivist the line between "I have the right to keep what's mine" and "I have the right to take what's yours" seems like it would be an easy one to cross.