“Is It Legit, To You?”. An Exploration of Players’ Perceptions of Cheating in a Multiplayer Video Game: Making Sense of Uncertainty

Abstract

Cheating is a major concern for any gaming environment, but effective solutions are still far from being found. Previous research has overlooked the social complexity of current video games and the role that technology may have in determining the cheating practices. In this article, we explore how cheating unfolds within Call of Duty: Warzone through a digital ethnography, analyzing the perspectives of both amateur players and video game streamers and how technology shapes the cheating phenomenon. We highlight that players’ perception of cheating depends on the “social role” of the cheater. Moreover, the technological sophistication of cheats makes them uncertain in the players’ eyes, contributing to the spreading of mutual suspicion and surveillance practices. Based on these findings, we offer a novel understanding of cheating as a sort of black box that only a few individuals are able to decipher, and several design considerations addressing the cheating practices in contemporary games.

Keywords:

• Cheating
• video games
• first-person shooters
• FPS
• multiplayer
• surveillance
• sense-making
• organizations
• psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• HCI

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term lobby also identifies all the players that participate in a single game session (i.e., the player’s team and all the enemy teams).

2 These and other data were retrieved through the website https://cod.tracker.gg/warzone, which registers log data and provides statistics about the player and her friends.

3 Doping may be defined as the enhancement of skills via the assumption of substances that are prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency and by the law.

4 Live streams are realized by capturing the screen displaying the perspective of the player’s avatar: then, as the streamer controls the functioning of cheats during different moments of the game, the hacking application is visible to spectators.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arianna Boldi

Arianna Boldi is a Ph.D. student in the Psychology Department at the University of Torino. Her research interests revolve around video games, self-tracking and intelligent agents, as well as the use of technology in the context of work.

Amon Rapp

Amon Rapp is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Torino. His research interests revolve around self-tracking and wearable devices, video games, intelligent agents, and behavior change technologies.