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Xbox Live Labels Autistic Boy "Cheater"
Jellis55 writes "Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old boy who lives with autism, is outraged at Microsoft Xbox Live for labeling her son a 'cheater' and taking away everything he's earned online. She says her son, Julias Jackson, is so good at playing X-Box games, Xbox LIVE thought he cheated. She says her son got online last week to play Xbox LIVE and saw that he was labeled a cheater and had zero achievements. Microsoft continues to ignore her requests to take 'cheater' off of his account."
Maybe he actually cheated... LOL. Naturally, the mother is biased in favor of her son.
Since about 2008 MS has had measures in place to establish whether an achievement unlock happened during gameplay, and they consequently delete the relevant achievements and apply the "Cheater" flag. I don't think anyone, autistic, dyslexic, or neurotic, is good enough at Xbox to unlock achievements without actually playing.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So we're just supposed to believe the person who banned him without any details. Is twitter now a reliable source?
Yeah, so if the kid's moral compass is stuck at "cheating in videogames is a-ok in my book" then there's no hope for him in the rest of his gaming life ey?
I know Microsoft is evil, the devil, the anti-christ, etcetera etcetera, but in this case, I'm willing to believe that they are right. The kid's a cheater. End of story.
While we may debate if he really cheated or not,, really has true autism or not and so on, I think there's something else that is worth discussing.
Online games are played by millions nowadays and want it or not, this shapes the society a little bit in it's own ways.
In my experience, anyone losing to the superior minded in any game involving strategy (they almost all do, including FPS and "dumb" RPGs) will eventually call it cheating. I think everyone has experienced that. Eventually, if enough people get pissed and do not understand how it is possible to lose so bad to a legitimate player, they will label him cheater.
Admins and game masters are no different - usually they also play the game. They will find any so-called proof to dismiss the person and have it banned for breaking the rules, even if no rule was broken.
Examples:
- it's statistically impossible to have 60% accuracy, it's a proof of cheating
- it's statistically impossible to win 1v10, it's obvious cheating
- he's going too much damage
- he can't click that fast
and so on - mostly based on lose "stats" and no real reference
Sadly (well - this is human), people also tend to play such games so many hours a day that such reactions are seen also in their day to day offline life.
So we're just supposed to believe the person who banned him without any details. Is twitter now a reliable source?
He sent the details to the parents. Those are the only people he has to convince. Whiny mouth breathers on /. demanding that MS provide proof are not on his list of people he has to convince or impress.
Your logic doesn't hold water. The kid has an obvious motivation to lie -- he doesn't want to admit to mom he cheated but still wants his achievements back. Mom on the other hand wouldn't want to admit that his child could be a bad apple -- everyone has heard a parent say "my son would _never_ do something like that"...
How are you supposed to distinguish a bug from an in-game trick? Many games are loaded with shortcuts and secrets.
No you're not an "aspie" if you're going to call yourself anything its an Autistic Psychopath. Yes thats its proper name. And being an antisocial narcissist who can pay attention to detail doesn't make you special. And its completely "fixable." giving it a special label and saying LOL MENTAL DEFECT IT MAKES ME SPECIAL just pisses off the people who work with people who have real autism and see you cocks diluting the term and drawing negative attention with your narcissism.
http://phelannguyen.blogspot.com/
Whiny mouth breathers on /. demanding that MS provide proof are not on his list of people he has to convince or impress.
Then he is a fool and should be fired immediately. Whiny mouth breathers on /. that are paying XBox live customers such as myself damn sure better be on his list of people that he has to convince or impress!
I'm not sure you can consider Xbox Live "open to the public". After all, it's not available to non-Xbox owners, and if I'm not mistaken, you pay to play (subscription). How is this public again? Sounds pretty private to me. Just because it uses the interwebs to deliver the private content, does not make the content public.
I don't know, it sounds like he cheated. Whether or not the kid has a disability is really irrelevant. The ADA provides protection for the disabled so that they have EQUAL access to public services and businesses open to the public. It does not mean you give them special treatment... you give them EQUAL treatment. The point is to *not* discriminate against anyone with a disability. That also means that just because you have a disability, you are not entitled to special treatment above a person who may not have a disability, which is exactly what some posters are calling for here. If the kid cheated, then he violated the TOS and got what he deserved.
Naturally, this will get spun the wrong way by the media as the media is so good at doing, MS will have a PR nightmare on their hands, and the kid will get the cheater label dropped and his points restored.
For the reporter to ask: "What's your autistic 11 year old doing spending all his time playing Mature rated games that revolve around killing people?"
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Who says autistic children can't cheat? Where is the evidence that supports that assumption?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
1. Ideally you wouldn't do it like that at all, but have enough data transmitted and processed by the server to actually know WTH happened there.
E.g., if you have an MMO and do any money or item transfers in an atomic transaction on the server, then you just eliminated duping. And if you keep a log of who bought or transferred what, and suddenly an item appears that doesn't have such records, then you know some cheat was involved.
2. If someone did go with such statistical methods, they have the added disadvantage that
A) they don't account for flukes. As you probably know, having, say, 55% accuracy only means 55% in the very long run. Getting even 10 or 20 hits in a row is improbable but not impossible. When you have a million players shooting millions of rounds each, and more deaths per minute than at Kursk, one in a million odds will actually happen very often. You'll have several deaths a day which are the 20'th hit without a miss in a row.
B) being "that good" is actually a relative thing.
Someone who thinks they're that good against random newbies in random matches, may be completely pwned when they stumble on a major clan's server. I had exactly that nasty surprise myself in UT. You'd think I'd manage at least one frag there, but it was like skeet shooting with me being the clay pigeon ;)
Conversely, someone who isn't even playing that good may stumble upon a bunch of complete noobs, and rake up a ridiculous score by simple virtue that accuracy against stationary targets is really that much better. I've had that kind of experience too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He sent the details to the parents. Those are the only people he has to convince. Whiny mouth breathers on /. demanding that MS provide proof are not on his list of people he has to convince or impress.
And arrogant asses like yourself who don't understand than an action like this impacts confidence in Microsoft's service but get modded up anyway by moderators with sand in their vagina over "whiny mouth breathers" (I have allergies, you insensible clod!) are not on the list of people who have anything useful to say.
Butthurt much? Let me try this one more time, I'll even go slow for you to understand. They. sent. the. details. to. the. parents. These. are. the. only. people. that. matter. Was that slow enough for you? This has nothing to do with *any* of us. You can claim you have an imaginary right to know, because of some half baked claim that it hurts confidence in the service but 40million+ people seem to disagree and go right on using it because they expect cheaters to be dealt with. The parents went screaming and crying to the media because they're douchebags who think the world owes their kid something because he has a problem and the media latch onto shit like this because it gets ratings and outrages people who can't sit for two seconds and think for themselves. If this were a normal Live member who claimed MS did this to him cause he's good at games, people would tell them to stfu and not cheat next time. tl;dr version: It's none of our business what evidence MS has and supplied the parents with.
Yes, his undeniable skill at video gaming and the sheer force of his savantism reached out to his Xbox's hard drive and altered checksums in such a way that his account would be flagged as having cheated. You think Microsoft's anti-cheat enforcement is entirely qualitative? They were able to ban one of my consoles for having modified firmware even though I never took it on Live, downloaded DLC, &c. You think they can't spot someone artificially inflating their Gamerscore?
Take a second, breathe deeply, be intellectually honest with yourself, and apply Occam's Razor. What's more likely: that Microsoft is engaging in an unfair and oppressive campaign against gaming savants (never mind that that's not how autism actually works) at the highest levels of their company, or that an 11 year old cheated at a video game? I find it actually more offensive that everyone's first reaction to this story is that the kid is being oppressed for having autism, which must clearly make him an unstoppable video game ninja, and that we should all be so lucky as to be autistic too.
--Obyron
Whiny mouth breathers on /. that are paying XBox live customers such as myself damn sure better be on his list of people that he has to convince or impress!
As a paying Xbox Live customer myself, I sure as hell don't want my private information publicly distributed if I'm the subject of an investigation. If I did want it public, I'll be the one distributing the info, not MS. I'm actually really surprised to see people here up in arms that MS isn't distributing the details. If they did, everyone would be up in arms about the "obvious privacy violation."
Here's the timeline as I see it
At this point, one of three things are happening right now:
I figure, if it's the first, we'll hear about it again in a few days. Otherwise, they're going to quietly hide and hope the media attention goes away.
* I'm still trying to find a scenario where it actually matters that the kid is autistic (other than a means to get the media attention, or as some sort of "you have to let my son cheat - he's disabled" BS. But maybe I'm just extra-cynical this morning.