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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."
he just cheated?
Maybe he actually cheated... LOL. Naturally, the mother is biased in favor of her son.
Statistical Model, you failed my Outlier.
What do you have to say for yourself?
IANAL, (and IANAUSC) but the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 may offer some sort of legal redress, if the mother (or son) are convinced that it is his disability which is affecting his game play.
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...to take cheater off his account simply because there is evidence of cheating. From @Stepto 's Twitter feed:
We confirmed there were cheated achievements and gave the parent the details. This wasnt a "he played too good" situation at all. https://twitter.com/stepto/status/30451173655838720
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
Can someone explain to me how it's even possible to "cheat" in Microsoft's little walled playground? I thought that was the whole point of a closed console network.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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?
Given the relatively closed state of the Xbox360(some known exploits for rather old firmwares; but not much available for the newest ones and aggressive banning of detected modified units from XBL by Microsoft) and the Xbox Live service, what are the avenues of cheating that would motivate them to use what are presumably statistical outlier detection models?
Are there individual game glitches that are considered to be "cheating" if used? Are there third-party controllers that have some equivalent of the good old "turbo" button(and some game that fails to control max fire rates, now that actual computing power is available)? Is there, in fact, a reasonable population of hacked xboxes running modified binaries that allow any of the classic PC gaming cheaters' tricks(see-through walls, etc.)? Do the requirements of low latency over domestic connections mean that some or most games leave themselves open to packet modification tricks?
Has somebody gone to the trouble of building a machine vision +input emulation system capable of delivering mathematically optimal play for certain games?
I know Microsoft bans modded hardware, and I know unmodded hardware won't execute unblessed binaries or talk to unblessed peripherals(unless, possibly, the correctly emulate the behavior of blessed ones), so why is "cheater" a distinct category from "banned"?
I once played an online game where you could set the robotic factories to building robotic factories, and then after a while switch them over to building ships. In one turn you could produce a huge fleet out of nowhere. When I did this, the game designers were convinced I had cheated because "there's no other way you could get that many ships." They didn't understand their own game, or how exponential growth works. Explaining this didn't help, I was banned.
P.S. So in the next round I helped my friends actually cheat by hacking the game's database and producing written spy reports of enemy movements. Ha.
It's a score. You earn points and your score goes up. You can compare your score to your friends. Or you can ignore it. Pretty much the same way games worked in the 1980s, but applied at a platform level rather than a game one.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
Only if the cheater label was made public by Microsoft - was it? If it's a private label applied to just the views the account holder can see, then there is no case to be made. I'm not sure how MS applies the label.
1) The importance of this game in the kid's life has gotten totally out of control. "This is all he does." Creepy. 2) Kid thinks game achievements actually mean something; they don't. 3) Mother probably does not understand mechanisms for cheating. 4) Response from XBL was poor though.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I doubt Microsoft was really aware they were banning an autistic child from their service at the time. Quite honestly, I'd imagine if you take that factor out of the equation this sort of thing happens all the time.
Unless, of course, the kid had "AUTISTIC" marked on his account.
Reminds me how a Warner Bros exec once visited the Netherlands, noticed cartoons were subtitled and demanded they be dubbed instead. Dutch kids can't possibly be that proficient at reading! They are dubbed every since.
Dumbass. Before dutch channels started to broadcast cartoons we depended on the British Sky Channel. No subtitles, no dubbing. Not a kid complained. Ever. And we all enjoyed it just as much.
I hope they sue and crush that crook! The feds couldn't fix him but be sure some angry mothers of disabled children will decimate him!
I can't WAITTTT to see that!
I say that as an antisocial mensa member with Asperger's that went undiagnosed into his late 20s.
After that rant, I can't imagine why it took over 20 years.
Well, apart from the smart thing; who should crush who and why?
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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/
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.
"antisocial Mensa member"
Yup, that's why I never joined. Every single person at the Mensa meeting I went to were weird as hell. and being a Mensa member does not do anything at all for your career so why should I pay dues to a club that has zero value?
From my experience of being sucked into it by a friend for 1 year, Mensa has zero value for members other than nerd bragging rights. And a weak one at that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I thought all video game addicts were mildly to severely autistic anyway? Isn't that what most of the American population is breeding to be these days, "functioning autistic"? All the autistic people I've ever met catch huge fat checks for being alive with autism. They're even allowed to have kids with other autistics. Those kids are born into the grand estate of autism, autism awareness, and quotes around the word "functioning". They get to play videos games and eat ice cream balls all god damn day long. The American Dreams, so, what else could their parents possibly in a million years want for them?
If the kid is screaming and breaking shit too much to handle since he lost his high falootin' shooter's awards and trophies for cutting peoples' balls off, she should sit the kid down and put it to him like this: they kicked Dustin Hoffman's "Raymond" character out of the casino in "Rain Man", they can kick you out of XBOX. Not everybody loves Raymond, and not everybody loves you. See the dichotomy? See the similar pattern? Good pattern, good pattern-solving little kid. Just hit the reset button and try again, it'll be like going back in time.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I suggest you go away and read up on what autism actually is. Posts like yours do no more to help understanding of the condition, than the very people you rail against for self-diagnosing as autistic.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The modern way that cheating is detected is basically simple and yes it is accurate.
Microsoft has access to the internals of the game code while you play. Here are a few examples of how MS knows if someone cheated.
All the below are a few examples are checked while the person is playing online.
1) Look for the actual cheat code in the game memory.
2) Look for the specific altered values of game code that represent what the cheats modify.
3) Look for the jump point in the game memory, that the cheat code uses to hide the cheat outside of game memory.
4) Look to see if a specific file has been altered from what is expected and/or is impossible to have that value(s)
5) look at the supporting system files the game uses for specific alterations from standard.
The methods used are accurate in detecting cheaters. I've simplified the full explanation of some and left others out. I've just listed common methods that a lot of people are aware of already. My point here is if these or similar are the methods MS used, then the kid is a cheat.
It's been my experience that parents just don't want to believe their little Johnnie or Mary is a cheat. Some will once you explain how they were caught but almost as often the parent stays in denial. Denial won't change MS's view or decision however.
This woman's threat that she will cancel her child's account is a good thing. The first and obvious is that it will remove one more cheater from the on-line game community. It will teach her child a lesson. By the parent canceling the child learns a lesson that cheating has ramifications beyond what MS did to the account. Now the child will learn that just losing achievements was a more just punishment after all and by lying to his mom jut made things worse. Now he can't play online.
In my opinion MS should have permanently banned this kid from whatever game he got caught cheating in. MS should offer one redemption and that is to buy the game a second time and he can play again unless he is caught once again cheating. If the person does it again then make the ban permanent with no further second chances.
It's been my experience that showing the cheater that there are significant consequences to their actions, does work. Some are just a little slower on the uptake than others but after a couple of bans they get the message. My experience is based on what I do and it's represented by my /. alias.
I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes at Microsoft and how they detect and handle cases of cheating. However, for quite a few years during my postgrad days and early years of employment, I was involved on the admin-side of the (PC) online gaming scene, and spent a lot of time dealing with cheaters. I have a few thoughts based on that:
A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable, assuming that MS have even mildly competent people working on this. Back when I was running a (major, UK-based) Counter-Strike league, the kindest description of my own level of play would have been "slightly better than average". There were players in the league who could have beaten me with their eyes closed. My admin team contained people who had a range of ability levels, but none of them were top-tier players.
Adminning top-division games was therefore something that had to be taken very seriously. Accusations of cheating were always rife in CS, though in my experience the actual level of cheating, outside of a relatively small proportion of badly adminned public servers, was never as high as it was commonly perceived to be. Making sure that average players were able to tell whether a top level player was cheating or was just plain good was, therefore, one of the main challenges for an admin team and one that was taken very seriously indeed.
We had a number of principles in place regarding accusations of cheating (or independent admin suspicions when no accusation had been made). These were:
1) Any flags raised by the Valve Anti-Cheat were treated as reliable. If VAC says a player is cheating, they are kicked from the match and the league immediately. They can appeal, but would need to show very convincing evidence that there had been a false-positive (nobody ever managed this, all we ever got was "OMG my brother installed cheats").
2) Knowing that Valve Anti-Cheat was, at the time, fairly easily defeated, admins were expected to know the signs of cheating and to watch for these. We had a library of video clips that all new admins were expected to study, some of which showed players who were using wallhacks or aimbots, others which showed clips that were just of very good players pulling off shots that looked suspicious, but which were recorded at LANs and verified as legitimate.
3) If an admin suspected that a player in a game he was refereeing was cheating, he did not stop the match or kick players. No bans were given at this stage.
4) Admins recorded all matches as a matter of policy (both for anti-cheating and because players liked to download the replays later). The admin of the "dodgy" match flagged a concern in private to the senior admins.
5) 3 other admins, including at least 1 of the senior admins (usually me) scrutinised the demo from the alleged cheater's point of view. There were reliable signs of cheating (as opposed to good or lucky play) that could consistently be spotted. One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
6) If 2 of the 3 other admins (with one of the two being the senior admin) agreed that there was cheating, then the player was banned from the league and the results of games they had played in were overturned (subject to appeal). If there was no consensus, then the original admin who raised the concern was thanked for their diligence (there was no harm in privately flagging suspicious activity - I always encouraged it) and no further action was taken.
In around 75% of cases, all 3 reviewers would agree that there had been no cheating. In around 95% of cases, 2 of the 3 agreed that there had been no cheating. We averaged around 3 player bans per season, of which 2 were usually as a result of "technical" (ie. VAC) detections. I am confident that none of the "admin" detections that were confirmed were false-positives.
My point is that this is the degree of scrutiny we applied to what was, for most of its
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.
One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
Are you aware that most good bots, at least these days, can be tuned to whatever sensitivity you desire in order to evade detection?
I play tremulous occasionally, and one of the difficulties of an OS game with no built in anti-cheat is that you never know whos cheating. Is that guy cheating, or is he really able to take people out at close range with a sniper rifle (mass driver)? Is he cheating, or is he consistently taking out top level aliens with the weakest gun due to never missing a bullet?
You can spectate the guy (view game from his PoV), but you never know if he is turning the aimbot on and off, or tweaking its settings, or if he is really that good. You can accuse him of cheating, but the problem is its not wrong to be so good that you can flick your mouse onto someones head; its only cheating if you have a bot do it for you, and there is no rock solid way to detect that by observation.
The Xbox 360 allows you to copy a game to the HDD, significantly reducing loading times. In addition, the Xbox 360 has been hacked for a while using a JTAG to run unsigned code. Once someone hacks the game, a player can download the hack by using the xbox Media Center, a USB drive to transfer the files, or just by joining a game with someone that has the mod. (Modern Warfare, I'm looking at you!)
You can also do a combination of bridging host and running unsigned code to give you all kinds of control. (Bridging host = forcing XBL to give you host). For example, one hack was able to return all players in a game lobby to level 1. (Modern Warfare 2, players would lose all of the weapons and perks that they unlocked.) There were also "10th Prestige" lobbies that would automatically boost you to the max level, unlocking all of the weapons and perks in the game.
All of your typical Counter-Strike style cheats can be applied to XBL. Some studios have done a significantly better job at banning cheaters than others. For example, Bungie has done a great job filtering out the cheaters, but Infinity Ward was absolutely horrible at it. (A lot of cheating) Microsoft has done a decent job, but certainly not enough.
Yes, there are also "bugs", but exploiting a bug in the game won't result in a ban.
In the end, there are a LOT of ways to cheat. XBL is not pristine, but it does have some controls to ban Cheaters.
Adding to the GP and P posts: I also play online FPS games, I am an admin with reasonable experience, and, most importantly, [b]I've had the chance to see autistic kids gameplay[/b].
And here's the thing: before I found out a player was autistic, their manner of play raised all kinds of warning flags for me. There were spurts of uncanny abilities, they wouldn't talk to anybody, they were focusing obsessively on a limited sets of actions (run this exact route, attack at these exact points), they displayed anti-social behavior (attacking their own team) for no apparent reason. My first reaction? What a cheater/asshole combo!
Has anybody considered how their repetitive/compulsive nature alone may cause autists to deviate from the player norm? Not to mention that about 1 in 10 autists show outstanding abilities ("idiot savant" kind) and about 9 in 10 exhibit enhanced sensory perceptions.
So I find it strange that most highly-moderated comments so far have completely ignored the fact the kid is autistic and how it may have affected his gameplay. My own experience tells me that unless Microsoft knows for sure he used an actual bug or exploit, I'd take that "cheater" verdict with a BIG grain of salt. I'm fairly confident that an autistic person can trip both automated and human cheater detection. They were designed for regular people.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
You're making a number of assumptions here that I don't think can be supported. First, we know nothing about the reason for the ban. Nobody's said. There's a tweet from MS saying that the kid's mother has been informed of the reasons for the decision. In fact, there's evidence that MS do have a review/appeal process; there have been cases of false-positives in the past, which have been over-turned. However, where such false positives occur, they tend to affect a large number of people and become news in their own right.
Second, you are assuming that MS is using some kind of stats tracking for its anti-cheat. I do have experience with anti-cheat and I can tell you now that for skill-based games, relying on stats tracking for any kind of anti-cheat, let alone one that is allowed to institute bans, is absolutely ludicrous. Nobody with any brains is doing this. MS are not doing this. What happens if you end up with a top-end gamer who jumps online for a quick match and gets put into a game with a bunch of newbies?
There are a few instances where you can use stats-based automatic tracking. In strategy games, it is possible to calculate the maximum possible level of resource acquisition. If somebody is exceeding this, they're cheating. But that is absolutely not the same as looking at the kills/deaths ratio in an fps. Clever games these days have a matchmaking system which looks at a spectacular kills/deaths ratio and doesn't say "this person is cheating" but rather "I will match this person against people with similar ratios in future".
I'm also surprised that you are willing to grant this kid elite powers of gaming supremacy, but not the ability to hack around with his console.
As you say, public server adminning does tend to throw up a higher number of issues than tournament adminning. However, it is still generally 100% possible to have a review and appeals mechanism, particularly for admin-detected cheating. If your customers are paying £40/year to play on your servers, you are going to have a review mechanism at the very least. Of course, my experience is that the majority of the time, the people who get hit by anti-cheat measures are indeed cheating (not true in every instance, but it does generally hold up). As most people who get a ban will appeal, this means that most appeals get rejected. Which in turn gives the impression that there isn't an appeals mechanism.
According to stepto (XBox director of enforcement) he did provide proof to the mother. He has no obligation to provide that proof to anyone else.
If everybody was at risk of being banned for mad skill useage, I would be the last person to receive a ban as I am utterly hopeless.
On Modern Warfare 2 I absolutely have to unload a whole clip at my opponent's feet before trying to inflict any significant damage.
When a knife is called for I am more likely to offer my opponent a packet of sweets that try to stick a knife through their stinking custom painted war face.
If mad skill useage was banned, it would only be a matter of time before I was King of the World. Shortly before killing myself with a cooked pineapple.
Sweet. I should have replied to you instead. Yes, this.
My own son is becoming a gamer, and those patterns you're seeing are exactly, precisely why he plays games at all. He gets in the zone running the same loops over, and over, and over, and over again until he has them nailed down. That precision was honed by countless hours of repetition. (Variety is NOT his thing.) So in that specific skillset, he's going to eventually demonstrate a level of absolute mastery. Popping in another game would put him back to square one, but in his own element, he could really be described as superhuman in his ability.
Why do you think that an autistic child cannot be savvy enough to cheat? There is a large range of autism, some people with autism are capable of functioning independently in society. We do not know what level of autism this child has. It is even possible that this child would not technically be considered autistic but is merely suffering Asperger's syndorme and the article simplified it to "autistic".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I give you one of my experience.
There is this game called Power Soccer ( www.PowerChallenge.com) where I used to play. At one point I was having a 100+ win streak and consistently defeating opponents that are 40 levels above ( max level 99) and some clan has decided my existence has endangered their clan domination so they made up some fake screenshot, fake proof and so on trying to get me banned.
The "straw that broke the camels back" moment comes when someone mis-represented as me posted game hacks on myg0t. The admin used that as a proof and banned my account, tons of people protest and left the game as a protest, many of them stopped their subscription to the game.
New Economic Perspectives
and it is very possible he is indeed "too good". Autistic kids can be blinding geniuses at complex tasks that require conceptual thinking. First off, I doubt seriously the kid could manage the procedure to "cheat" since it involved downloading and installing. Their minds race all the time, and they would find this very frustrating to do.. But, they are all stellar at seeing concepts and patterns, and they can focus 100% on what they are doing, for hours at a time, and block out everything else. For example, I played a gig at a "Home for mentally "disabled" kids". A boy there, about 10 or so, was fascinated by the Hammond B3 we had. He sat on the edge of the stage, swaying back and forth for an hour while we played, lost in his own little world. We took a break, and the boy could barely manage a conversation, but he got across to me that he loved the last song we played, and wanted to play the organ.. With the OK of the B3 player, I let the kid get up and play. And he played back EXACTLY what our keys played played in that song, INCLUDING his solo. No mistakes, just as if somebody had recorded it. Perfect. Jaw dropping. And in an "aww" moment, the kid hugged our keys player, then he retreated into his own little world on the edge of the stage. The point is this: an autistic child can catch onto a game much faster then we normals can - they see patterns we don't, and they can exactly duplicate patterns they just did. like walking from their room to outside, in exactly the same footsteps. I will guess about they boy's success at gaming- the boy made mistakes at first, but saw some of the patterns in the game. He duped the patterns up to the point of the mistake, then figured out how the "enemy" behaved, since the "enemy" has a behavior pattern that the kid saw, and figured out how the game operated well enough to exploit anomalies we do not see. MS owes this kid an apology, and of they were smart, they'd watch him play the game. they might just learn something from an autistic kid. I did.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Years ago when I played RoN a lot I was a above average player. Good enough to be in some of the better clans and thus had recognition in the community but I still was not in the top tier of players. I had a few specific strengths that even allowed me at times to compensate in team games on a higher level than I would have been 1v1 but that is an aside.
In a RTS like RoN a part of the game was matching up 1v1 with people in rated games. And I did so often and as such played a pretty full spectrum of players in such a way. RoN while having its flaws was kept pretty balanced and most of the games that were played rated 1v1 were random civs and random land maps to boot keeping all the players on their toes. (I always would fight to play full random maps and thus force people to fight on the sea as well but anywhoo.)
In playing those games I would every now and then allow myself to be fodder for one of the high end players. One game in particular comes to mind. I had drawn a, this is in the context of 1v1, random strong civ and he had drawn one of the weaker ones. The map was pretty for both of us so overall I had the advantage.
He came at me early and strong. Microing his units well and forced me on the defensive while my early raids suffered because I had to spend my attention to his raiding. He leveled faster and boomed better than me. In short he outplayed me rather well and while I put up a good fight he won.
When playing such games I remember thinking at times, how the hell are they doing that!? And had I not known a lot about the game and the state of what type of cheating was possiable in RoN (very little to none) I think it might have been human nature to assume that my opponent was cheating. When in reality I was just getting outplayed by orders of magnitude.
And here is the kicker. RoN like many RTS games allowed you to record every game you played so you could go back and watch your opponent to see exactly what they did. When I would watch the records of the games I played vs the higher level players I could understand what they were doing but was simply unable to replicate it myself. They were better players than me and that was ok. But even I will admit that at times when I would be playing and see myself getting out played to a degree beyond what I even expected I would wonder if there was some sort of cheating involved.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!