Cheating can, of course, be a good thing. We've all entered cheat codes into games to unlock special modes, to obtain weapons, to give ourselves infinite ammo, or extra lives.
The reason those cheat codes exist is that the developers knew their prospective players would want the option to play the game in those ways: to skip levels and open up options.
This kind of cheating isn't really cheating at all, it's more like an admission by the game designers that the rules they've made might as well be bent, and even formalised with specific keys to unlock them as the player sees fit. They're an extension to the original game.
But cheating, in the strictest sense, means not playing by the rules of a game, and benefiting from your actions as a result. There are several cases where cheating isn't simply a cheeky secret hidden inside the game, but an outright violation of the way we expect games to be played.
The most famous of these cheats are probably 'hacks' and 'bots', in which games are either rewritten by players for their own ends, or are played out by computer programs to the benefit of the player who uses them.
In the course of this article we'll look at both of these phenomena, and see how the people who run games and their communities have attempted to deal the problem cheating presents.
However, there are a couple of other aspects to cheating which aren't usually mentioned, and I'd like to touch on those here too.
The first is the situation which arises when a single player game allows the computer side to 'cheat', because it can't rely on AI to challenge a human player.
The other is when developers themselves manipulate their own games, to give themselves an unfair advantage in play. When multiplayer games are a social phenomenon, and a kind of pact between developer and player, who really gets to make the rules? We'll be finding out.
The necessary cheat
The lead designer of Civilization 4, Soren Johnson, blogged about the very specific problems that designers face when making single-player games a fair challenge for players.
"Under symmetrical conditions," he wrote, "artificial intelligence often needs to cheat just to be able to compete with the player. Accordingly, designers must learn what cheats feel fair to a player and what cheats do not. As the Puzzle Quest team knows, games need to avoid situations in which players even suspect that the game is cheating on them."
Puzzle Quest, as Johnson points out, is easily accused of cheating, because the computer could easily 'know' what the next line of puzzle jewels was going to be, just as it might know that the next shape would be in competitive Tetris. This made cheating by the computer a possibility – even a distinct probability – in the minds of many players, to the detriment of the player experience.
Another example might be the recently released Red Faction Guerilla – a third-person action game with a wide-open Martian world – in which the game spawns enemies just out of sight,, which then run in to attack the player. This means an empty building, cleared of enemies seconds ago, can contain opponents again just moments later.
Until you notice this happening – which everyone eventually does – you think you're just up against waves of reinforcements. But the illusion does not and cannot last, because these enemies appear even when it's 'unfair' or illogical for them to do so. A brilliant game, one of the best of the year, but it still feels like it's cheating.
Johnson points out how frustrating this can be for players, but it's not something that game designers can necessarily avoid. If games are going to be suitably balanced for players to face a challenge, while still being allowed to win, then such artificial system must be in place.
Johnson's example is that of racing games, where computer controlled cars slow down or speed up their pace relative to the player to create a fun experience. If the computer cars drove realistically then one mistake would pretty much put the player out of the race, every time. This would not be entertaining, and most people would not enjoy racing games.
It's notable that the racing games which do not include such concessions to the player are seen as extremely hardcore, and appeal only to limited audiences. Cheating, here, is a good thing.
Of course, what matters is how the player perceives that artificiality. If done subtly, then it's not a problem – such as waves of enemies in FPS games arriving from places where it makes sense for them to appear, or races in which you're constantly struggling to overtake, and don't see the cars slowing down to let you cross the line.
Necessary cheating in a single player game comes about where the competition is asymmetrical between player and PC, and the final judgement is always made on whether the player is able to win, and enjoy doing so.
Punks Online
Games played against other human beings, however, must be fair. Even when teams are not exactly symmetrical, such as in Left 4 Dead's survivors vs infected, every effort is paid to balancing the experience for players on both sides of the game. The best players must win by virtue of skill alone.
Of course, that's not always the case, because when cheats appear, it's not by design, but by malign intention.
In online gaming there are two major modes of cheating. The first of these are loosely termed 'hacks', because they're often a manipulation of the game code, or some kind of software tweak that gives the player who uses them an unfair advantage.
The most widely known in online shooters is the wallhack, which allows players to see where their enemies are throughout a level (interestingly, rather like the infected's ability to see each other and players through walls in Left 4 Dead), as if the walls were translucent.
Such hacks are relatively easy to develop, and can be easily downloaded and installed by players. Sometimes they're modifications to the game itself, other times they can be additional programs that alter how graphics are rendered.
Other hacks can be more sophisticated still, giving players powers and abilities in the game that they should not otherwise have – something that comes about when the cheaters, or the people who implement cheats, get their hands on the client code of the game installed on their computer.
And you can't always tell who is cheating, either, because such exploits may simply allow the player to seem like he is playing really well, when in truth he has an unfair advantage of some kind.
Bots are a similarly hi-tech unfair advantage. In shooters these are programs called 'aimbots' which detect opponents are then fire very accurately. They're really rather sophisticated, and can be used to devastating effect by cheaters.
Just one player using an aimbot can massive alter the outcome of a game, especially where pin-point accuracy is required, such as when using sniper rifles and railguns.
Bots are also used in MMOs, where the player sets up a bot to perform game tasks such as killing spawns or running simple quests. It's possible to set these up to 'farm' certain resources, which can be extremely infuriating for gamers trying to play the game proper.
Many MMO players will have encountered them, often with characters killing the same targets over and over. Most famously, one Ultima Online player claimed to have purchased a house by trading the gold he earned from running a dozen bots on six PCs over a couple of years.
While there will always be coders who enjoy exploiting games and finding ways to gain an advantage through technological prowess rather than gaming skill, there's also much being done by developers and publishers of games to provide us with counter measures against cheating.
Identifying and banning cheaters from games often comes about through months of painstaking research, especially in MMOs where bots can be difficult to detect without human intervention. It also requires teams of programmers to be constantly monitoring the cheater community, to come up with defences against it in the same way that other coders come up with ways to block and eradicate viruses.
In first person shooters the depth of the challenge often provokes players to use cheat programs, and it has therefore become widespread. Cheaters aren't always able to get away with it, however, because systems for identifying and banning cheats automatically now fight a never-ending war against the hackers and bot designers.
One such battle is being fought by PunkBuster, an anti-cheating system developed Tony Ray and his company, Even Balance. We talked to Ray about why he'd been inspired to devote his life to fighting the cheats and he explained that his experiences as a Team Fortress Classic clan leader had led him to explore the ugly side of cheating in that game.
As, at the time, the developers had said it was up to the community to deal with such problems, he took matters into his own hands.
"I have been to several high profile LAN tournaments," explains Ray, "and have seen the best players in the world compete in person. Many of those get called cheaters online because the average player can't comprehend how a real person can be that good.
So at some point, it occurred to me that if a referee was watching over the shoulders of players, it would be very hard to cheat and get away with it, plus the good players would get the credit they deserved for their skill instead of constant suspicion."
This idea of a virtual referee was the genesis for PunkBuster. "I imagined a program that would run in the background and 'watch' what was going on during gameplay, " says Ray. "That's how the seeds for PunkBuster were planted."
Ray got to work on the idea of a program that would report on individual gamers to a central server. PunkBuster, which was initially nothing more than another free tool for gamers, was to spot cheats as they were loaded into memory and stop the players from connecting to PB protected servers.
PunkBuster wasn't to remain a pure community effort, however, as the system soon proved its worth in countering cheats in these games. "I had no support from game developers at the time, so PunkBuster was originally developed as a standalone application that ran in the background during gameplay … In 2002, id Software gave us a shot at supporting Return to Castle Wolfenstein and it was fully integrated with the game and things just took off from there."
As online games become more popular, so the cheating problems became worse. And the more popular a specific game, the more cheats are developed for it, as Ray explained: "We have found a direct correspondence between the number of players and how bad the cheating problem is for a given title. Games with few players rarely have much of a cheating problem. The popular titles are heavily targeted by cheaters and hack writers."
For Ray this is nothing more than the bad side of human nature showing itself in our game worlds. "I've always said that online gaming will be cheat-free the same day society is crime-free," says Ray. "There will always be people trying to cheat and some will succeed. Just like in real life there will always be people trying to break the law for their own gain. We have to keep after the cheating problem just like the police do in society to try to provide a deterrent against getting caught cheating."
Cheaters by right
There's one situation in which programs like PunkBuster won't come in handy, however, and that's when you're playing a game against the developers who made the game in the first place.
Famously, Valve Software revealed their in-built cheats for Half-Life 2 in a game against a bunch of Capture The Flag modders. As the game unfolded the community modders were suddenly rendered helpless as they watched the Valve team transform into their super-powered alter-egos, with automatic missile launchers and other crazy weapons.
Although meant as a joke, the event did seem to upset some gamers, who didn't seem to quite understand that – in this instance – the cheating was just a little fun on the part of the developers.
Of course it can go seriously wrong for developers, too, as in the case of the Eve Online developer who provided help for his in-game faction.
By acting with a bias, he tainted the neutrality of the developers, and damaged relationships between team and game community forever. Events like these, where real world and virtual world mingle, make it impossible to come up with a game design solution.
This was, arguably, the first time game cheating changed life in the real world, as Eve Online's developers, CCP, set up an independent ombudsman council to police the game against such events in the future.
Cheating and cheaters, it seems, will always find a way, no matter how extreme or new the game might be. Whether it's hard-coded by devs or brought in after, we'll have to be ready to go to ever more extreme measures to identify, understand and defeat it.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited
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