Hack the Hackers: The Potential Power of Narrative to Stop Cheating in Video Games

I find nothing fun or fair about using hacks in multiplayer games. I don't condone it. Still, I view hackers showing off on livestreams with the same fascination as women who binge-watch murdershows. It's a passing interest that I've studied for a while, and I wonder if we're missing something in the effort to stop them. 

I found this neat quote by Johan Huizinga, who studied the importance of play in human culture. In calling cheating "anti-play," he said "as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play world collapses." 

That seems to be true. Cheating in multiplayer games runs rampant in everything from World of Warcraft to World of Warships to New World. It causes unending rage across player communities, requires companies to spend millions of dollars annually to find, fix, and destroy hacker accounts, gives development teams migraines, and leads to lawsuits whenever players argue the ban-hammer was erroneously dropped on them. 

But all of this treats cheating like it's an arms race. The cheaters get a better hack, so now we need a more advanced system to detect it and thwart it. We are locked in a constant cycle of threat creation and threat response. I think there's a broader approach to this conflict; an opportunity to win hearts and minds.

Dan Ariely at Duke University has studied the mindset of cheating for years. If you have time, his TED talk on why we cheat is riveting. If you don't, here's his quick 13-point breakdown. 

Either way, here's what I find most interesting when we think about people who hack to gain an advantage over others in multiplayer. From the article:

"Increasing the reward gained by cheating or the penalty of being caught cheating did little to change the amount of cheating in the group."

"The more abstracted we are about the cheating, the more willing we are to cheat."

"If we feel like someone has cheated us, then we are more likely to cheat to get even."

"We cheat when we see others we associate with cheating."

"A nudge to remember our moral compass has a profound impact to reduce cheating if it comes before the opportunity to cheat presents itself."

In light of Ariely's findings, it seems like nuking player accounts is a doomed strategy. The Call of Duty community's response to the banning of 10,000 accounts at a time appears to back that up. It's all drop-in-the-bucket and we-haven't-seen-the-last-of-them stuff. The damage to the play world is compromised. If people experience loss at the hands of a cheater or watch a cheater using hacks on stream, the damage is done and the cancer is already spreading. This is a problem that demands a more proactive approach. But what? 

I focus on points 2 and 5 above. Can we reduce the "abstractness" of the game environment to the player? Can we shine a laser pointer at the player's own ethical code before they engage in the game?

I think we can.

The principle of "abstractness" relative to the game is a subject of study unto itself. You play for "credits" or "tokens" instead of actual money. Even if you pay money for the credits, Ariely finds that there's still a diminished sense of value and that you'll cheat to accumulate them. You could arguably say your K/D ratio in a multiplayer game becomes a kind of currency. If you can't track it, then you can't be driven by it. 

The biggest sense of abstractness lies in the game world itself. "That is not actually me cheating, and I am not actually harming other people, and the owners of these avatars who I shoot are nowhere near me and will never know my true identity or where I live." 

A player therefore has no sense of connection to their fellow players or the game world. It's the same problem as trying to get older generations to believe in climate change. "I'm not going to be here in fifty years, what do I care where the sea level is then?"

I believe narrative structures can be developed in games to make players care about the overall game environment. I mean, the whole purpose of narrative is to make the player feel immersed in the world, right? 

America's Army did something that felt a little experimental with the concept back in the day. They set up an honor system that unlocked "special forces character capabilities" if you played by the rules long enough. Notably, the fastest and roughest way to lose honor points was to kill a teammate. Even if that RPG hit them by accident, you lost 10 points (it took countless hours of play just to earn 5) and got locked out of the game for a few hours. It definitely made you think twice about pulling the trigger. 

I think the biggest thing that can be done is to repeat a practice Ariely tried in an experiment. In the experiment, Ariely told students in two separate classrooms to make it very obvious they cheated on an exercise. The difference was that one classroom cohort signed an honor code before the exercise, and the other didn't. The groups that signed the honor code consistently exhibited lower levels of cheating. 

Could a main character from a game's campaign ask a player to take 30 seconds to sign an honor code before jumping into multiplayer? Would that be such an inconvenience to the community that it kills the log-on rate? I can't imagine it being worse than what we are already experiencing. 

It sounds silly and corny and antithetical to the player experience, I know. Having the Master Chief telling you to raise your right hand and repeat the UNSC Academy Honor Code might be a stupid idea. Then again, if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid. 

Ultimately, I find Ariely's argument compelling that keeping multiplayer spaces safe is more about giving a little TLC to our buggy moral code than it is about defeating malicious computer code. That means flipping the script on the player's internal monologue. The best way to hack that is with a new narrative that compels them to take care of their game environment. 

Mazes Instead of Wheels - A Modest Proposal For a New Model of Battle Royale

The teaser videos for changes to the Fortnite and Warzone maps over the last week haven't really excited me, and I haven't been able to convince my gaming friends to try Battlefield out with me. I'm not really excited to leave Verdansk, but at the same time I'm feeling like it's gotten stale.

I got to thinking about why I feel caught between this boredom and apprehension. It's not because I like modern warfare more than retro 80s warfare more than WWII warfare more than treehouses that defy Newtonian physics warfare. It's really that, at the end of the day, it's same-stuff-different-map. 

Change the map all you want. The story is still the same, isn't it? Here comes the ever-shrinking circular border of gas/fire/wind/tachyons. Time to run toward the center where sixty-five people are waiting to snipe you. If you're lucky enough to make it into a good hiding spot, your reward is to run for the next winnowing of the real estate. 

So, while much ink has been spilled over cheating in shooters, the unspoken goblin frustrating battle royale players of every stripe is the degree to which luck plays into winning. It's better to have the favor of the circle gods than the meta loadout. 

That's a more important principle than I think a lot of people realize. In the player's view of a battle royale "story," there are only a few potential endings:

1. We won! My team and I prevailed! Did you see that? I can't believe that just happened! 

2. Stupid aim-botting $&#@!

3. Dude, we landed in the worst spot possible. We were screwed from the get-go.

4. Just wasn't our day. 

Experience #1 likely makes up less than 10% of average player experiences. And even then, it's notable that the phrase "I can't believe that just happened" is uttered on a LOT of streamers' win vids. They are expressing disbelief in their triumph because their volume of experience tells them it's not a reasonable conclusion to the game story. In other words, it's exciting but not satisfying. Not the outcome we want for the player. 

I get that there are all kinds of explanations rooted in psychology that explain why players continue to say "just one more round" time and time again after having experiences 2-4. And while that's good for a game's popularity and earnings, it boils down to establishing a relationship between the game and the player like a rat on a wheel. Keep running and eventually some cheese will drop. Meanwhile, to keep the player motivated between wins, here are some mini-missions, new weapons, and little accomplishments to pick up along the way. All of this is introduced through some cinematics to hype new guns, skins, map areas, and the like. 

This is how narrative is abused in battle royale games. Everyone knows that narrative is there to create an emotional conduit between the game-player and the gameplay. In battle royale that emotional conduit is narrowed to "excitement to collect new stuff." No further emotional connection is sought, let alone pursued. 

And while that's a successful model now, battle royale games should be looking to the future now. Because nothing stays popular forever just by putting fresh paint on well-worn concepts (looking at you, MMORPGs of the early 2000s). 

So the problems I see with the current state of battle royale are:

1. The story of the player experience is wearisome and frequently discouraging.

2. There's nothing to make players feel invested in the game world. 

And just for good measure...

3. Cheating is all over the place.

And this got me thinking about how narrative could solve a LOT of problems in the battle royale genre. Here's my pitch. 

Turn the wheel into a maze. Instead of telling everyone to get closer, tell them to escape. 

Now the dynamic changes from "be the last one standing" to "don't be the last one left inside." 

I think this creates a ton of dynamics to heighten the player experience. 

1. Player choice now has a lot more influence on player outcomes than random circle changes.

2. The story is more complex. The player isn't killing to kill. They're killing to achieve an ultimate objective.

3. By making the win condition slightly more complex than "kill all the things," you put a huge dent in cheating. 

4. The idea of escape is a fountain of story narratives that can take you beyond "stop the apocalypse," "stop the communist terrorists," or "win World War II." 

I've seen some games already play with this idea. Closest to it is Hood: Thieves and Legends. The idea is that a team of four players select their class and then try to steal a treasure from a castle guarded by NPCs. Meanwhile, an opposing team is trying to do the same thing. You go in, grab the loot, and then hold an escape area until you get out. All the while you can be pursued by NPCs and the other team. The mechanics and class-leveling (or lack thereof) keep it from working, but the idea is there.

Fall Guys has done an outstanding job of putting the idea to work. Sure, there's randomness to a lot of the play spaces, but it doesn't rob me of feeling like I own my decisions. 

I think that forcing people to find a way out is an exciting dynamic. Instead of a military backdrop, you can have scientists in a facility, or astronauts on a space station, or (my personal favorite) elite criminals pulling off a heist. Get in, get a required item for escape (key, money, air supply), and get out.

I'd offer that this narrative framework also might put a dent in cheating. Your standard lock-ons, aim-bots, and wall hacks would probably be great at helping you kill other players, but what's the relative value of that when reducing the in-game player count only brings you closer to being the last one left inside? 

Best of all, you have a natural out for map overhauls. Instead of nuking the world, you have already opened an escape hatch to somewhere new. Do the scientists get out of the underground facility, only to find themselves on a sprawling sealed-in military compound? Do the thieves find a new city? Do the astronauts fly to a new space station? These all feel like natural lead-ins that enable you to shift environments, change out weapons, and permit new skins without turning your thinly-veiled Crimean conflict into a gang war between the Judge Dredd and a guy in a clown suit.

Let's face it, the success of Westworld is based on the two questions it constantly asks you - "how will they get out?" and "what will they do after they get out?" If it works for HBO, it could absolutely work in a game. 

Dialogue Sample: A Mission Briefing for a Special Ops Team

This is a scene from an early draft of a screenplay I'm working. I'm laying it down here as an example of how I'd attack a similar situation to outline a mission or intro a scenario for something like a Call of Duty or Battlefield game. 

The Abduction: A Sci-Fi /Thriller Short Film Script

"The Abduction" is my 2020 sci-fi short format submission to several contests. It hit #3 on Coverfly's Red List in May. Below is an excerpt and the full script can be found here.

The Caregiver Excerpt

This is an excerpt of a short story I wrote last year. It was selected as a finalist in ScreenCraft's Cinematic Short Story Competition. I'm currently re-working several ideas to turn it into a novella or full novel, with plans to make it a trilogy. One of the things that appeals to me most about this is that, while it certainly involves tragedy, it's a story with an overall optimistic look at the future. I'm sure those who've seen 'I Am Mother' on Netflix will see some similarities, but I'm weary of the dystopian settings in most modern sci-fi. I like to think that there's hope for all of us and the future will be brighter. 

Father dies first. Mother is too weak to bury him. The drugs don’t suppress the allergen anymore. Her lungs are calcifying. Every day her breath gets a little shorter. If she takes the gulp of air her body screams for, her chest cavity will crack like burnt paper. She would welcome the release from the slow panic of asphyxia. But she has to hold on for the baby’s sake. So that’s what she does.

They were the first couple to get pregnant. The others were months behind and the allergen finished the women before they came to full term. Mother and father assumed the baby wouldn’t last. They braced for the cruelty of just barely outliving their child. But two months went by, then three. Then they faced a worse cruelty. This atmosphere is not alien to the child. Instead of suffocating, she will starve. 

Unless, father had said. There’s a chance. The colony’s artificial intelligence. All but the most essential med lab equipment. Everything was committed to the effort. Father validated motor functions and logic pathways the day before he died. Only mother remains to teach a robot how to be a parent. She hasn’t nearly enough time. How do you upload instinct? What is the command prompt for motherhood? 

Just love her. Her voice is barely more than sand racing across the outer habitat wall in the windy season.

The robot cannot feel love. Please specify directives.

Mother closes her eyes. Her lung will break open if she sobs. Emulate human behaviors and acts associated with love. 

Define parameters.

Keep her safe from physical harm. Don’t let her out of your sight unless it’s essential. Promote her emotional well-being. Don’t lie to her. 

There is so much more to say, but she is exhausted. She needs rest before she can continue. 

She dies in her sleep, the baby in her arms. Cambria would have been the fourth colony beyond Earth. It collapses in just 27 months. People across the universe watch the tragedy unfold from the isolation of their worlds. Adrift on their little lifeboat orbs, all they can send now are thoughts and prayers. Anything of substance is constrained by physics and economics. Tian has yet to reach industrial maturity. Columbia is closer by a few lightyears. Earth has the most robust fleet. No matter how or where from, it will be 12 years before the child feels another human’s touch.