Study Finds Online Cheating Is Infectious

Freddybear writes "A study of online gamers in the Steam community finds that those who are friends with cheaters are more likely to begin cheating themselves. From the article: 'First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters. Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters, you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community. Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings.'"

Comments

cheating is a bit more complex

[Trepidity]

There are some black-and-white cases of what constitutes "cheating" in online games, but a lot of gray-area ones as well, especially when it comes to when players will accuse other players of cheating (this book is an interesting study). Sometimes it's violating technical mechanisms, like installing a modified video driver or aimbot, but there are a lot of social rules of what constitutes cheating as well, and some mixed cases like using technical features in the "wrong" way. Some tournaments even have to very precisely specify what constitutes "cheating" with legalistic rules, like some of the Starcraft 1 tournaments' rules about which edge cases of unit behavior (mutalisk stacking, etc.) were cheating (banned) versus just edge-case behavior (ok to use).

Re:Makes sense

[bky1701]

I buy very good mouses. My latest one is very vast, and has a polynomial speed curve, so I can aim quickly and accurately. This gives me an edge over others - but is it dishonest? I do not even buy good mouses for that purpose, I do for graphical design; should I have to downgrade to the level of others?

Situations aren't as black and white as people want to make them. MMOs are designed to suck up time, either to cost the players more money directly (subscription games) or encourage them to spend more ("hey, look at my hat, it only cost 20$!" while grinding). I don't play these games because of that, but if I did, I certainly wouldn't feel it in any way wrong to use a bot.

Cheating on fluff classes I am inclined to not care about, either. The education system is screwed up and needs fixed badly enough that people stuck in it now should be using whatever means they can to get through and get the piece of paper entitling them to be some kind of magically upstanding citizens (regardless of actual skill or knowledge). Again, I never cheated on tests, but I wouldn't necessarily vilify those who do. If cheating on a meaningless test makes the difference for someone between flipping burgers and having a fairly good job, I can't possibly fault them for it, and I think you'd be hard pressed to do so, even. Maybe if the system weren't broken it would be different, but I just see bigger ethical and moral issues in the world than that.

You basically have to draw the line somewhere, and a lot of people, you seemingly included, take whatever some authority figure has defined it as for you as gospel. That's bad; bad for you, and bad for society, because it leads to a false sense of ethics and ultimately double standards. Somewhere between buying a better computer mouse and using steroids in the Olympics you need to define a line, a line which probably isn't where the group mentality placed it for you.