Sajid Ahmed
Group C
CS 312
The
article in the book is about ever popular area of the online gaming and
cheating that goes on in these communities. Many people are taking advantages
of the bugs in the game itself or many programmers are reprogramming the games
to cheat. There are ethical issues involved in doing this as to some people are
working really hard to build up their score and profile and if someone is
cheating they can just build up their profile in seconds. There is the issue if
balance in the online gaming community, cheating can ruin the balance. Blizzard
Entertainment’s Warcraft 3 is a popular online game. Recently some gamers were
taking advantage of a hack that enables them to see the opponent’s territory,
which gives then enormous advantage in internet games. “The company reacted by banning the cheaters from
online tournament play for two weeks and resetting their accounts, wiping out
win-loss records that can take months to assemble”[1].
People like Kurt Squire editor of a gaming site Joystick 101 thinks that
cheating of this magnitude can take the meaning out of the game and it is
threat to the gaming networks. A poll by Blizzard Entertainment revealed
sixty-three percent of gamers in their network thinks that the chaters should
have been banned completely from the network. The company banned 14,000 from
the Warcraft netwok and 8,500 from the Diablo 2 network. This is one of the
most drastic efforts to prevent cheating in online games.
Resources:
‘Blizzard’ of Cheaters Banned. Noah Shachtman
12 Sep. 2002. 4 March 2004
< http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,55092,00.html>