The question of what could be done about FPS cheating has been on my mind a bit lately. Yesterday while on a walk I had this thought that it's really because th

The question of what could be done about FPS cheating has been on my mind a bit lately. Yesterday while on a walk I had this thought that it's really because the shooting mechanic is in an awkward metaphorical compromise between the genuine mechanics of aiming and firing, and a symbolic representation of such. If you actually had to play these games by holding a gun level with controlled muscle motions, it would be hard to cheat because even if you could insert a computer in there to automatically control your muscles, it's a fairly complex AI problem to make them move correctly. In comparison a purely symbolic form would be like how most role-playing systems do it: you declare that you shoot at a target, and then perhaps there is some dice rolling done to determine if you do. All an aimbot does is distill the vocabulary of mouse aim into the more symbolic form and automatically trigger certain symbolic responses. Someone who has played online FPS long enough develops a sense of when they are playing with these "symbolic adversaries" because even if they've dialed down the bot so they are merely "skilled", they start playing aggressively, with the assumption of fluent shooting to back them, while real players will hedge and look for a wider set of advantages, making more use of the game's vocabulary even if they can shoot through clutch scenarios. Cheater-vs-cheater matchups tend to suck the air out of the room as both sides flail about, eliminating the non-cheaters while never getting clear advantage over each other. But then you look at a game like Rocket League, and it gets away with having more a discrete mechanism for moving and hitting, because not only is it all indirect through physics interactions, it's not clear what the right move is symbolically either. You can't win just by chasing the ball or by hitting the other players. And there's a path for making shooting in FPS complex in that way, too - make all the targets large, trivial to aim at - and then ramp up factors that make it both indirect - slow projectiles, bounce - and symbolically complex, with various target prioritization and vulnerability mechanisms that deny simply spamming the headshot verb.