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).