Online Gaming and Personality: Explaining Gamers’ Cheating Intention

Cheating in online games poses a risk to game publishers, as it deters other gamers and reduces revenues. These facts make it essential for game publishers to understand ‘who’ in the sense of gamers with what personalities have cheating intentions. Building on psychology research, we draw on (a) the big five personality traits and (b) the dark triad personality traits to explain how these reflect gamers’ personalities and together lead to cheating intentions. Following a configurational approach (N=192), we reveal two configurations explaining high cheating intention and one explaining low cheating intention. We contribute to online gaming research by revealing that gamers with cheating intentions have specific personalities. We advance information systems (IS) personality research by combining broad and dark triad traits to explain divergent behavior like cheating

Cheating in Online Courses for Financial Aid Fraud in the U.S.

This manuscript reviews issues that differentiate traditional academic cheating from course misconduct that is motivated by a desire to defraud financial aid services in the U.S. Past research on college student cheating has assumed that cheaters are driven by an incentive to obtain undeserved grades in college in order to ultimately obtain a degree. However, researchers on academic dishonesty, professors, and college administrators might not realize that online class members can include virtual straw students who are puppets of a financial aid fraud ring leader. Cheating behaviors of straw students differ from cheating behaviors of actual, legitimate students. This has implications for those who attempt academic dishonesty research in online environments, and it has implications for course-level professors and university administrators who are in a should have known position with regard to discovery of a financial aid fraud ring

Born to Run: A Grounded Theory Study of Cheating in the Online Speedrunning Community

Video games represent a growing genre of media quickly becoming one of the leading forms of entertainment (Jordan, 2014). This popularity has allowed new playstyles to emerge across the video game genre, such as e-Sports and speedrunning. In particular, the speedrunning community has somewhat redefined what it means to “cheat” in a video game by accepting the use certain software and hardware violations that could be seen as “cheating” to the general gaming community. This paper examined the social construction of cheating in this digital community through the use of grounded theory methods

온라인 게임에서 유저의 행태에 관한 연구

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 경영대학 경영학과, 2018. 2. 유병준.This dissertation consists of two essays on user behavior in online games. In the first essay, I identified multi-botting cheaters and measured their impacts using basic information in database such as user ID, playtime and item purchase record. I addressed the data availability issue and proposed a method for companies with limited data and resources. I also avoided large-scale transaction processing or complex development, which are fairly common in existing cheating detection methods. With respect to identifying cheaters, we used algorithms named DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) and JWD (Jaro–Winkler distance). I also measured the effects of using hacking tool by employing DID (Difference in Differences). My analysis results show some counter-intuitive results. Overall, cheaters constitute a minute part of users in terms of numbers – only about 0.25%. However, they hold approximately 12% of revenue. Furthermore, the usage of hacking tools causes a 102% and 79% increase in playtime and purchase respectively right after users start to use hacking tools. According to additional analysis, it could be shown that the positive effects of hacking tools are not just short-term. My granger causality test also reveals that cheating users activity does not affect other users' purchases or playtime trend. In the second essay, I propose a methodology to deal with churn prediction that meets two major purposes in the mobile casual game context. First, reducing the cost of data preparation, which is growing its importance in the big-data environment. Second, coming up with an algorithm that shows favorable performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art. As a result, we succeed in greatly lowering the cost of the data preparation process by employing the sequence structure of the log data as it is. In addition, our sequence classification model based on CNN-LSTM shows superior results compared to the models of previous studies.Essay 1. Is Cheating Always Bad? A study of cheating identification and measurement of the effect 1 1. Introduction 2 2. Literature Review 8 3. Data 16 4. Hypotheses 17 5. Methodology 20 5.1 Cheating Identification 20 5.2 Measurement of Cheating Tool Usage Effect 28 6. Result 33 6.1 Cheating Identification 33 6.2 Measurement of Cheating Tool Usage Effect 33 7. Additional Analysis 35 7.1 Lifespan of Cheating Users 35 7.2 Granger Causality Test 36 8. Discussion and Conclusion 37 9. References 48 Essay 2. Churn Prediction in Mobile Casual Game: A Deep Sequence Classification Approach 61 1. Introduction 62 2. Definition of Churn 64 3. Related Works 65 4. Data 66 5. Methodology 66 5.1 Data Preparation 66 5.2 Prediction Model 71 6. Result and Discussion 74 7. References 77Docto

Referee-based architectures for massively multiplayer online games

Network computer games are played amongst players on different hosts across the Internet. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) are network games in which thousands of players participate simultaneously in each instance of the virtual world. Current commercial MMOG use a Client/Server (C/S) architecture in which the server simulates and validates the game, and notifies players about the current game state. While C/S is very popular, it has several limitations: (i) C/S has poor scalability as the server is a bandwidth and processing bottleneck; (ii) all updates must be routed through the server, reducing responsiveness; (iii) players with lower client-to-server delay than their opponents have an unfair advantage as they can respond to game events faster; and (iv) the server is a single point of failure.The Mirrored Server (MS) architecture uses multiple mirrored servers connected via a private network. MS achieves better scalability, responsiveness, fairness, and reliability than C/S; however, as updates are still routed through the mirrored servers the problems are not eliminated. P2P network game architectures allow players to exchange updates directly, maximising scalability, responsiveness, and fairness, while removing the single point of failure. However, P2P games are vulnerable to cheating. Several P2P architectures have been proposed to detect and/or prevent game cheating. Nevertheless, they only address a subset of cheating methods. Further, these solutions require costly distributed validation algorithms that increase game delay and bandwidth, and prevent players with high latency from participating.In this thesis we propose a new cheat classification that reflects the levels in which the cheats occur: game, application, protocol, or infrastructure. We also propose three network game architectures: the Referee Anti-Cheat Scheme (RACS), the Mirrored Referee Anti-Cheat Scheme (MRACS), and the Distributed Referee Anti-Cheat Scheme (DRACS); which maximise game scalability, responsiveness, and fairness, while maintaining cheat detection/prevention equal to that in C/S. Each proposed architecture utilises one or more trusted referees to validate the game simulation - similar to the server in C/S - while allowing players to exchange updates directly - similar to peers in P2P.RACS is a hybrid C/S and P2P architecture that improves C/S by using a referee in the server. RACS allows honest players to exchange updates directly between each other, with a copy sent to the referee for validation. By allowing P2P communication RACS has better responsiveness and fairness than C/S. Further, as the referee is not required to forward updates it has better bandwidth and processing scalability. The RACS protocol could be applied to any existing C/S game. Compared to P2P protocols RACS has lower delay, and allows players with high delay to participate. Like in many P2P architectures, RACS divides time into rounds. We have proposed two efficient solutions to find the optimal round length such that the total system delay is minimised.MRACS combines the RACS and MS architectures. A referee is used at each mirror to validate player updates, while allowing players to exchange updates directly. By using multiple mirrored referees the bandwidth required by each referee, and the player-to mirror delays, are reduced; improving the scalability, responsiveness and fairness of RACS, while removing its single point of failure. Direct communication MRACS improves MS in terms of its responsiveness, fairness, and scalability. To maximise responsiveness, we have defined and solved the Client-to-Mirror Assignment (CMA) problem to assign clients to mirrors such that the total delay is minimised, and no mirror is overloaded. We have proposed two sets of efficient solutions: the optimal J-SA/L-SA and the faster heuristic J-Greedy/L-Greedy to solve CMA.DRACS uses referees distributed to player hosts to minimise the publisher / developer infrastructure, and maximise responsiveness and/or fairness. To prevent colluding players cheating DRACS requires every update to be validated by multiple unaffiliated referees, providing cheat detection / prevention equal to that in C/S. We have formally defined the Referee Selection Problem (RSP) to select a set of referees from the untrusted peers such that responsiveness and/or fairness are maximised, while ensuring the probability of the majority of referees colluding is below a pre-defined threshold. We have proposed two efficient algorithms, SRS-1 and SRS-2, to solve the problem.We have evaluated the performances of RACS, MRACS, and DRACS analytically and using simulations. We have shown analytically that RACS, MRACS and DRACS have cheat detection/prevention equivalent to that in C/S. Our analysis shows that RACS has better scalability and responsiveness than C/S; and that MRACS has better scalability and responsiveness than C/S, RACS, and MS. As there is currently no publicly available traces from MMOG we have constructed artificial and realistic inputs. We have used these inputs on all simulations in this thesis to show the benefits of our proposed architectures and algorithms

An investigation of cheating in online games

Cheating is rampant in current gameplay on the Internet. However, it isn't as well understood as we might expect. The authors summarize the various known methods of cheating and define a taxonomy of online game cheating with respect to the underlying vulnerability, consequence, and cheating principal. This taxonomy provides a systematic introduction to the characteristics of cheats in online games and how they can arise. Although cheating in online games is largely due to various security failures, the four traditional aspects of securityconfidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticityare insufficient to explain it. Instead, fairness becomes a vital additional aspect, and its enforcement provides a convincing perspective for understanding security techniques' role in developing and operating online games