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Criminalizing cheating in a game is insanity and I am shocked and appalled that this idea has so many supportive comments here. Here in the civilized world we s

Criminalizing cheating in a game is insanity and I am shocked and appalled that this idea has so many supportive comments here. Here in the civilized world we should only be criminalizing conduct that causes actual harm. Not conduct that causes occasional frustration. What’s next? Shall we send the slippery fingered Monopoly Banker to actual jail, too? We’re talking about a game FFS.

fnord77 5y ago
I'm not advocating criminalizing it, but it is essentially fraud in some contexts, especially where there's direct or indirect compensation for the players.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Would that then not be covered by extant laws?
  - _delirium 5y ago
    Yeah, and it is sometimes prosecuted under existing laws in that case. For example several people were successfully prosecuted in 2013 for a match-fixing scandal in English football: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_English_football_match-fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_English_football_match-fi...
skinkestek 5y ago
Criminalizing (i.e. permanent record, can't ever take certain jobs) is probably to far i 99.99% of the cases. Fining people who keeps on annoying others in a public context for no good reason (e.g. only for their own amusement) should be fine either they cheat in games, keep people awake at night by playing loud music in streets where this isn't common, harass kids playing on the playground etc etc. Edits: yes. Mostly clarification.
krapht 5y ago
Define actual harm. You don't seem to hold the time of people who play games very highly.
- celeritascelery 5y ago
  If wasting time is a crime, we should also make long checkout lines and traffic jams illegal while we’re at it.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    But imagine if someone built purpose-built software for causing traffic jams, and a large community of regular users make traffic jams 5 times more common than they used to be. I don't say this out of any personal animus, I don't drive very often myself, but I think it would be reasonable to start talking about criminal penalties. At some point you have to be able to defend the commons, no?
    - gruez 5y ago
      >But imagine if someone built purpose-built software for causing traffic jams, and a large community of regular users make traffic jams 5 times more common than they used to be. What's the difference between that and someone who simply drives bad/slow? Do they get a pass because it doesn't have "purpose-built software"? Or is it because they're not acting as a group? If cheaters are not acting in a coordinated way, do they get a free pass as well?
      - krapht 5y ago
        The difference is intent, and this is a core consideration of our justice system.
        gruez 5y ago
        So people using excessive amounts of coupons and/or change at checkouts should be sanctioned as well?
TulliusCicero 5y ago
Cheating in professional sports sometimes gets addressed by Congress, and that, too, is cheating in a game. While I don’t think we should be putting cheaters in jail, I wish bans could stick harder, even across games. VAC does this to a certain extent, but only for some games. A shared database of cheaters that companies could use would be nice, but of course the sticking point is identity. The current setup is a bit like if getting DUI’s only suspended your driver’s license in the particular town or stretch of highway where you got the DUI, and you were free to continue driving anywhere else.
- jbnorth 5y ago
  I may be wrong, but I believe South Korea has a centralized identity system that game companies use so this kind of thing can be tracked and enforced. I wouldn't be against a similar system being used in the USA.
  - ev1 5y ago
    Yes - all players in SK essentially require identity verification. Using other's is a crime. Cheating is generally not directly prosecuted, but in other part of fraud/gang activity such as illegal match fixing, betting, fraudulent gains (tournaments), etc. At least in the US I cannot think of any cheats that don't violate the CFAA/DMCA.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I wouldn’t be either, except that IIRC in South Korea you use your social security number, and I don’t imagine Americans (or other Westerners) will be comfortable with handing that over to gaming companies.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  PBBans does this.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  People get actually killed due to DUI. And are there going to be any limits to this? If you cheat on a game when you're 13 by downloading some aimbot and get caught should you still be banned from all gaming when you turn 50? And will there be any kind of halfway transparent appeals process or is this going to work like all the other corporate run Kafkaesque bans we see every other day on HN?
seanp2k2 5y ago
With gaming NFTs going they way they are, cheating in games may become actual financial crimes in the near future.
hellotomyrars 5y ago
At the highest level of play, players who cheat to gain and advantage could be causing actual financial harm to others. The professional scenes of these games involve non-trivial amounts of money. The sad thing is that in the professional scene you have a lot of players who are legitimately very good, but who still use the cheats to gain an edge. The solutions to these problems are mercurial and at some point unless you get the players in one physical space with controlled/organizer supplied hardware it’s impossible to keep things clean but it is a real problem and it has real consequences for players who compete at that level.
TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
It certainly causes actual harm. Thousands of hours people spend in games to have it completely stolen away. I imagine the victims pay level x the hours required to achieve what was stolen should be at least the severity level of the cheating and punishment.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seanhunter 5y ago
People cheating (and especially people making and selling cheats) cause actual harm to the publisher of the game for starters, by making the game worse for all legitimate players.
- mantaraygun 5y ago
  Only for very particular kinds of games. And the meaning of "cheat" isn't even clear, different communities have different standards for what is permitted. Codifying any particular communities standard for video game cheating as the law and forcing all others to abide by it under threat of state violence is abhorrent. I'll give an example: I play minecraft on a server with a group of a few dozen friends. On this server, some forms of client mods are permitted while others are frowned on. One mod I use, ItemScroller, has the ability to mass craft lots of items at once. This is great for avoiding RSI, try crafting a chest of dispensers without it and you'll have to click thousands of times, instead of holding down a single button for a minute or so. Other minecraft communities might think this is cheating, and they are free to think that and play without it. But why should they have any right to impose their viewpoint on me?
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
  That's a very narrow interpretation. World of warcraft at some point reached a required level of farming where it was assumed that you needed a bot to just participate in endgame content (lot of material to gather and side quests), or devote your entire life (16 hours) to repetitive actions. How you manage that? What about cheating in single player in games that do have also a multiplayer components? How about monster hunter, many people cheated in that game because the end game farming is unsustainable, however once the equipment is cheated, it's possible to play and really enjoy the endgame content. It would be so detrimental to ban cheating. There are games that are made with cheating presumed (e. g. Ultima online)
Bancakes 5y ago
You only cheat because you suck and that's the only way you enjoy the game. It takes time to get into the gaming flow, and enjoy the pastime, and cheating ruins this investment. When I pay $100 for a game, and cheaters make me stop playing, I have been harmed with a wasted $100 plus hours of frustration. If you're too shallow and emotionally unintelligent to pick this arithmetic up, it's on you I guess.
Volundr 5y ago
I don't know. I think disturbing the peace laws are generally reasonable, which essentially boils down to the same thing. You don't have a right to annoy others for your own entertainment.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Cheating in a video game does cause actual harm. And there are plenty of analogous actions that would be criminal in real life. For example if some dude came and interfered with your tennis game every week, that would be harassment and probably trespassing, even if the only thing that person did was to interfere with your tennis game.

fnord77 5y ago

I'm not advocating criminalizing it, but it is essentially fraud in some contexts, especially where there's direct or indirect compensation for the players.

arcticbull 5y ago
Would that then not be covered by extant laws?
- _delirium 5y ago
  Yeah, and it is sometimes prosecuted under existing laws in that case. For example several people were successfully prosecuted in 2013 for a match-fixing scandal in English football: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_English_football_match-fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_English_football_match-fi...

skinkestek 5y ago

Criminalizing (i.e. permanent record, can't ever take certain jobs) is probably to far i 99.99% of the cases. Fining people who keeps on annoying others in a public context for no good reason (e.g. only for their own amusement) should be fine either they cheat in games, keep people awake at night by playing loud music in streets where this isn't common, harass kids playing on the playground etc etc. Edits: yes. Mostly clarification.

krapht 5y ago

Define actual harm. You don't seem to hold the time of people who play games very highly.

celeritascelery 5y ago
If wasting time is a crime, we should also make long checkout lines and traffic jams illegal while we’re at it.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  But imagine if someone built purpose-built software for causing traffic jams, and a large community of regular users make traffic jams 5 times more common than they used to be. I don't say this out of any personal animus, I don't drive very often myself, but I think it would be reasonable to start talking about criminal penalties. At some point you have to be able to defend the commons, no?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >But imagine if someone built purpose-built software for causing traffic jams, and a large community of regular users make traffic jams 5 times more common than they used to be. What's the difference between that and someone who simply drives bad/slow? Do they get a pass because it doesn't have "purpose-built software"? Or is it because they're not acting as a group? If cheaters are not acting in a coordinated way, do they get a free pass as well?
    - krapht 5y ago
      The difference is intent, and this is a core consideration of our justice system.
      - gruez 5y ago
        So people using excessive amounts of coupons and/or change at checkouts should be sanctioned as well?

TulliusCicero 5y ago

Cheating in professional sports sometimes gets addressed by Congress, and that, too, is cheating in a game. While I don’t think we should be putting cheaters in jail, I wish bans could stick harder, even across games. VAC does this to a certain extent, but only for some games. A shared database of cheaters that companies could use would be nice, but of course the sticking point is identity. The current setup is a bit like if getting DUI’s only suspended your driver’s license in the particular town or stretch of highway where you got the DUI, and you were free to continue driving anywhere else.

jbnorth 5y ago
I may be wrong, but I believe South Korea has a centralized identity system that game companies use so this kind of thing can be tracked and enforced. I wouldn't be against a similar system being used in the USA.
- ev1 5y ago
  Yes - all players in SK essentially require identity verification. Using other's is a crime. Cheating is generally not directly prosecuted, but in other part of fraud/gang activity such as illegal match fixing, betting, fraudulent gains (tournaments), etc. At least in the US I cannot think of any cheats that don't violate the CFAA/DMCA.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I wouldn’t be either, except that IIRC in South Korea you use your social security number, and I don’t imagine Americans (or other Westerners) will be comfortable with handing that over to gaming companies.
Bancakes 5y ago
PBBans does this.
lamontcg 5y ago
People get actually killed due to DUI. And are there going to be any limits to this? If you cheat on a game when you're 13 by downloading some aimbot and get caught should you still be banned from all gaming when you turn 50? And will there be any kind of halfway transparent appeals process or is this going to work like all the other corporate run Kafkaesque bans we see every other day on HN?

seanp2k2 5y ago

With gaming NFTs going they way they are, cheating in games may become actual financial crimes in the near future.

hellotomyrars 5y ago

At the highest level of play, players who cheat to gain and advantage could be causing actual financial harm to others. The professional scenes of these games involve non-trivial amounts of money. The sad thing is that in the professional scene you have a lot of players who are legitimately very good, but who still use the cheats to gain an edge. The solutions to these problems are mercurial and at some point unless you get the players in one physical space with controlled/organizer supplied hardware it’s impossible to keep things clean but it is a real problem and it has real consequences for players who compete at that level.

TechnoTimeStop 5y ago

It certainly causes actual harm. Thousands of hours people spend in games to have it completely stolen away. I imagine the victims pay level x the hours required to achieve what was stolen should be at least the severity level of the cheating and punishment.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

seanhunter 5y ago

People cheating (and especially people making and selling cheats) cause actual harm to the publisher of the game for starters, by making the game worse for all legitimate players.

mantaraygun 5y ago
Only for very particular kinds of games. And the meaning of "cheat" isn't even clear, different communities have different standards for what is permitted. Codifying any particular communities standard for video game cheating as the law and forcing all others to abide by it under threat of state violence is abhorrent. I'll give an example: I play minecraft on a server with a group of a few dozen friends. On this server, some forms of client mods are permitted while others are frowned on. One mod I use, ItemScroller, has the ability to mass craft lots of items at once. This is great for avoiding RSI, try crafting a chest of dispensers without it and you'll have to click thousands of times, instead of holding down a single button for a minute or so. Other minecraft communities might think this is cheating, and they are free to think that and play without it. But why should they have any right to impose their viewpoint on me?
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
That's a very narrow interpretation. World of warcraft at some point reached a required level of farming where it was assumed that you needed a bot to just participate in endgame content (lot of material to gather and side quests), or devote your entire life (16 hours) to repetitive actions. How you manage that? What about cheating in single player in games that do have also a multiplayer components? How about monster hunter, many people cheated in that game because the end game farming is unsustainable, however once the equipment is cheated, it's possible to play and really enjoy the endgame content. It would be so detrimental to ban cheating. There are games that are made with cheating presumed (e. g. Ultima online)

Bancakes 5y ago

You only cheat because you suck and that's the only way you enjoy the game. It takes time to get into the gaming flow, and enjoy the pastime, and cheating ruins this investment. When I pay $100 for a game, and cheaters make me stop playing, I have been harmed with a wasted $100 plus hours of frustration. If you're too shallow and emotionally unintelligent to pick this arithmetic up, it's on you I guess.

Volundr 5y ago

I don't know. I think disturbing the peace laws are generally reasonable, which essentially boils down to the same thing. You don't have a right to annoy others for your own entertainment.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

Cheating in a video game does cause actual harm. And there are plenty of analogous actions that would be criminal in real life. For example if some dude came and interfered with your tennis game every week, that would be harassment and probably trespassing, even if the only thing that person did was to interfere with your tennis game.