Cheating

Abstract

A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry. The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games, and what happens when they can't always play the way they'd like. She explores a broad range of player behavior, including cheating (alone and in groups), examines the varying ways that players and industry define cheating, describes how the game industry itself has helped systematize cheating, and studies online cheating in context in an online ethnography of Final Fantasy XI. She develops the concept of "gaming capital" as a key way to understand individuals' interaction with games, information about games, the game industry, and other players. Consalvo provides a cultural history of cheating in videogames, looking at how the packaging and selling of such cheat-enablers as cheat books, GameSharks, and mod chips created a cheat industry. She investigates how players themselves define cheating and how their playing choices can be understood, with particular attention to online cheating. Finally, she examines the growth of the peripheral game industries that produce information about games rather than actual games. Digital games are spaces for play and experimentation; the way we use and think about digital games, Consalvo argues, is crucially important and reflects ethical choices in gameplay and elsewhere.

A Taxonomy of Coping Strategies and Discriminatory Stressors in Digital Gaming

“…For a small proportion from our sample, these challenges increase performance, self-assertion, "grit, " compelling direct confrontation (seen in revenge strategies Consalvo, 2008;Cicchirillo, 2015;Leonard, 2020). In highly specific conditions, exposure to discrimination can benefit sympathy (as seen in literature on proteus effects Yee and Bailenson, 2007;Gutierrez et al, 2014;Ash, 2015) and provoke conflict against discriminatory sources.…”

“…The results here, as in Gibbons (2015), Fox and Tang (2017), Vella et al (2020) and Gray (2012aGray ( ,b, 2018, reflect a potential for coping strategies unique to digital games: like-minded players can connect over global networks; avatar customization, use of social features like chat, private server creation, and the ability to go offline promote greater control over one's digital environments; identity play for personal exploration and norm-bending (Martey et al, 2014) permits creativity and control over self-disclosure; players are given opportunities for cathartic revenge [also seen in Consalvo (2008) and Leonard (2020)]. When low-demand coping strategies fail, players engage in space-making and refuge-taking.…”

Existential Transformational Game Design: Harnessing the “Psychomagic” of Symbolic Enactment

“…A key difficulty is that their impact on players is highly dependent on a player’s receptiveness and the context of play (something the LARP and RPG community is very mindful of). While both games and ritual are capable of meaningful, transformative, symbolic enactment, one of the main differences between the two forms is what we expect of them and what meaning we ascribe to the actions we perform within them, as players may disregard the meaning of actions in games given the form of the media itself ( Consalvo, 2007 , p. 188).…”

ARQUEOLOGÍA CULTURAL DE LOS VIDEOJUEGOS. Entre discursos nostálgicos, experiencia del gamer e innovación tecnológica

“…En las revistas se podría aprender cómo superar el nivel, cuáles eran los trucos y muchas más cosas. También existían las guías (no confundir con las instrucciones del juego), una especie de manuales para acompañar paso a paso los gamers (Consalvo, 2007).…”