Medal of dishonour: why do so many people cheat in online video games?
Fall Guys had only been online for two days when it started. This bright, silly multiplayer game, in which rotund Day-Glo bean people race toward a finishing line avoiding giant tumbling fruit pieces – a sort of digital equivalent of a school sports day, albeit a slightly hallucinogenic one – had tens of thousands of players, but it didn’t seem like it would attract cheaters. Surely it was too frivolous, too much about the shared joy of slapstick comedy? Yet in they came: players using speed hacks (a type of cheat that increases the speed your avatar can run at) to win races against other Day-Glo bean people. A totally meaningless, seemingly rewardfree victory. Why?
For many, cheating utterly ruins the experience of a multiplayer video game. Even if you are not directly affected, it breaks the social contract. “When people play a competitive game together, they conjure the world of that game into existence through mutual agreement: this is the aim, these are the restrictions on how we can achieve that aim,” says game designer Holly Gramazio. “When you realise that someone is cheating, it can disrupt that mutual agreement and call the whole experience into question.”
Unfortunately, there is a chronic cheating problem in online multiplayer games. The servers of first-person shooters such as Call of Duty, PUBG and Counter-Strike are utterly rife with cheaters, most of whom download special software that alters the game in their favour. That might be aimbots, which make it easy for them to shoot other players; wall hacks, which render walls invisible so players can easily spot their opponents; or speed hacks, which allow them to move much faster. Such hacks are largely confined to PC games, where players are able to alter the code in client software, but console games are also vulnerable to exploits (using errors in a game design to get an advantage) and “lag switching” (disrupting the network communication to other players). Now that many multiplayer titles allow cross-platform play, PlayStation and Xbox owners are coming up against PC players who are using hacks to get an advantage.
And this isn’t only in professional and competitive leagues and ranked matches, where there are prizes at stake. This is on public servers against complete strangers with nothing tangible at stake apart from a few stats. Publishers are doing what they can to address the issue, utilising thirdparty anti-cheat systems such as BattlEye, while working on patches to block cheat programs and remove players who use them. Last week, Activision banned 60,000 players from its battle royale game Call of Duty: Warzone for using cheat software – over 300,000 permanent bans have now been administered. And that’s just one game. The problem is, when one cheat app is blocked another is developed and distributed. Demand is high. Why? Why are people cheating this much?
In her fascinating 2007 book Cheating, Mia Consalvo develops the concept of “gaming capital”, a variation on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “cultural capital”, which defines the standing of a gamer within their peer group. Gaming is a subculture, with its own rules, hierarchy and status objects, and achieving success or a higher position within a subculture, is for many, reason enough to cheat.
In multiplayer games such as Call of Duty, Fortnite and Apex Legends, there are cosmetic items, such as outfits and gun decorations, that are only available to players who have reached certain rankings and therefore act as visual signifiers of status within the game world. Attaining these intrinsic status symbols might be enough of a motivation for some players; like stealing fashionable trainers, or buying knock-off branded clothes. The motivation to carry out conscious or unconscious activities in order to gain peer respect, a process known as “impression management”, is a powerful one, especially in an insular, competitive environment.
The psychologist Corey Butler, who has written about cheating in board games, sees this component as a major motivator for cheats – the sheer pressure to maintain self-esteem and social status can be overwhelming. “The motivation is related to self-enhancement and impression management,” he writes. “We all like to feel good about ourselves and look good in front of others. Indeed, self-esteem is a powerful motivation in social psychology, right up there with other core human motives like food and safety.”
For some gamers, there is perhaps also an underlying sense of entitlement. “I wonder whether there’s something around cheating that can come from a sense of deserving the win, of having enough gaming capital that cheating to get the win is alright for you,” says Gramazio. “Maybe you feel that the work you’ve put into figuring out how to cheat makes the action valid. Maybe you just feel like you’re so dedicated and involved in the game that you deserve the win, even if you can’t get it legitimately.”
Cyber-psychologist Berni Good argues that the very nature of video games give tacit permission to cheat. “Players can cheat and not have face to face contact – social norms differ in a virtual world,” she says. “Gamers have always used cheats, tips, previews and walkthroughs, it’s always been part of the culture, it’s just that more people are playing multiplayer than, say, 20 years ago. In fact, if you think about it, the game ‘cheats’ too when for example a player’s character gets defeated and then rejuvenated.” If death does not mean death in a game, then is cheating really cheating?
There are also important moral distinctions to be made between different forms of cheating. Gramazio is the editor of Bernard de Koven’s wonderful book The Infinite Playground about the shared imaginative spaces
The screenwriter William Goldman cautioned against making predictions in the movie business with the line: “Nobody knows anything.” That said, there is one thing we do know: global events leave their mark on cinema – and things don’t get much bigger than a worldwide pandemic. And not always in the ways you’d expect. So, if we’re looking for clues about films that will be released in the years to come, is cinema history any help?
The pandemic is the biggest global crisis since the second world war, and, if we look back to the cinema of that era, one trend in particular stands out: the arrival of film noir. Classics of the genre, such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and The Killers, were dark, cynical tales about murder plots, manipulative women and morally compromised men. Might postCovid cinema take an equally dark turn?
Possibly – though film-makers and audiences may need a bit of a break first. Ed Guiney, producer of the Oscarwinning films Room and The Favourite, told me: “I don’t feel the desire to watch something that speaks directly to the pandemic.” Instead, he’s craving films that are “enjoyable” and “exuberant”. So expect a deluge of musicals, romances or comedies.
However, with sufficient distance, it’s inevitable that Covid will show up in cinema in one shape or another – but that shape may well be an alien, monster or zombie. When America has come under threat in the past, it has often used genre as a way of telling the story. During the cold war years, the fear of nuclear annihilation sparked a sci-fi boom, with films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Blob. And, after 9/11, horror of all stripes became popular, from big-budget disaster films such as Spielberg’s War of the Worlds to that B-movie favourite: zombies.
Kevin J Wetmore, author of Post 9/11 Horror in American Cinema, has a theory about zombies: “They’re angry, they’re fast; they want to convert you to their way of life. Zombies are, he says, “a stand-in for Islamist terrorism”. Zombies also seem like an obvious metaphor for a contagious disease. But Andy Willis, professor of film studies at the University of Salford, says this time around we’re unlikely to turn to the walking undead. Perhaps because zombies have been done to death over the past couple of decades.
Instead, Willis says genre film may see stories similar to those of the 50s, in which there is an unseen monster that appears from nowhere or where people are struggling to find an explanation for the threat. That makes sense. Covid, at least in the panicky first few weeks of the pandemic, had much in common with nuclear anxiety. It was invisible and not fully understood and yet seemed as if it had the potential to destroy the world.
We’re still very much in the middle of the crisis. And perhaps the mood and direction of cinema will depend on how well we can get a handle on the virus. Sci-fi in the 50s was, for the most part, hopeful about the world’s resilience – or at least America’s. The government or scientists usually managed to defeat the extraterrestrials and order was restored. Today, we may have lost faith in government, but, so far at least, scientists seem to be doing a good job of saving the day.
On the other hand, Covid-19, though deadly, doesn’t provoke the same visceral terror as a plane flying into a building or nuclear annihilation. Instead, for many of us, this past year has been (to borrow a phrase from an article in Wired magazine) “‘perilously boring”. It has poured fire on everyday issues: burnout, relationship tensions, money worries, loneliness. And it’s in this domestic pressure cooker that Wetmore believes film-makers will find inspiration. “I think we’ll see films that deal with isolation or being trapped,” he says. And paranoid stories in which “the person with whom I share my life must now be a stranger until we can find out if it’s safe”.
Films may also reflect the societal shifts, both profound and small, that Covid has ushered in – and in some cases, they are already doing so. In the creepy horror Host, released in 2020, all the action plays out over Zoom. Just as, in the post-9/11 years, there was an explosion in found-footage films that mirrored the way the world watched the attack on the twin towers – in real time, on a shaky videocam.
As the months roll on and vaccines neuter the virus, our attention might turn away from danger to the things we’ve missed. Such as human connection. As film industry data researcher Stephen Follows suggests: “The first person who releases a film that is nothing but 90 minutes of people hugging and just hanging out in social environments – that’s going to be a blockbuster.”