A (very) brief history of cheatingHumble beginningsEureka!Paradise LostDéjà vu?Hard lessonsDesign factorsTechnologicalCulturalBusinessThe future awaits…Additional Works CitedAndy Kuo STS 145 Final paper 3/22/01 A (very) brief history of cheating In the history of mankind, for as long as there have been social structures, there have been cheaters – people who attempt to circumvent the rules and find illicit or even illegal shortcuts toward their goals. In today’s so-called modern society, as advanced as we would like to think we are, this fundamental aspect of human nature has not changed one iota. Oh, methods of cheating certainly have become more advanced, but the motivations behind those methods remain as base as ever. The November 1999 cover story for U.S. News & World Report was on academic cheating; it had the disturbing tagline: “‘Everyone’s doing it’, from grade school to graduate school”.1 According to the article, anywhere from 75%-98% of all students admitted to having cheated at least once. It seems that the passage of time has not tempered the human instinct to cheat, merely refined it, as cheaters have become more and more inventive. In addition to traditional academic cheating, however, another arena has recently risen for cheaters: online multiplayer gaming. The introduction of network play was probably the single most revolutionary event in gaming since the personal computer. Most new games now have some sort of online component, and some games are played entirely online. For the most part, this shift towards online gaming has been a great advance, bringing with it completely new paradigms of gameplay. However, it has also spawned a new breed of high-tech cheater, one who has the potential to cause the “world’s gaming community…to die a slow and painful death”.2 Some might regard this statement with skepticism, thinking, “He must be exaggerating; it’s only a game.” If cheating were confined to single-player games, this disbelief would be warranted. In the world of online gaming, however, the threat cheaters pose is a very real and very serious one, with grave ramifications, should it be left unchecked. Consider the following scenario: millions of gamers avidly participate in an online game involving a persistent world in which the players’ characters are slowly built up over time. One day, a malicious cheater decides to hack into the servers containing the game information, and deletes a multitude of characters. The company restores an old backup, but by then it is too late; many players are outraged at their wasted effort, and stop playing the game. This scenario is not fiction; it occurred only within the last few months, to one of the most popular online games ever made. In the short run, only the company is hurt. Now imagine this sort of incident occurring on a more frequent basis. As more and more gamers become frustrated and disillusioned, they may decide to turn away from gaming completely, eventually leading to the realization of the grim prediction earlier. With gaming would die one of the most innovative facets of the computing industry. In short, cheating in online multiplayer games is not an issue to be taken lightly. 1 Carolyn Kleiner and Mary Lord, “The Cheating Game,” U.S. News & World Report Nov. 1999 2 Rupert Loman, “Opinion Article: ‘Online Cheats’”, http://www.theoga.com/news.asp?nid=137This paper will explore one game company’s experiences with and efforts to combat online cheating. In fact, this is the very company that fell victim to the hacker described previously – Blizzard Entertainment. I will chronicle the development of two of Blizzard’s most popular games – Diablo and Diablo II – within the context of cheating. It will be followed by an analysis of the implications of the events Blizzard experienced for computer game decision. Finally, I end by drawing some conclusions about how various factors – technology, business, and culture – affected Blizzard’s game designs, and, by extension, game designs in general. Humble beginnings Brothers Erich and Max Schaefer loved to play games, especially fantasy role-playing (FRP) ones. FRP’s take place, for the most part, in the players’ imaginations. One player, the dungeon master, acts as narrator and adjudicator, tying the players’ actions to the fantasy world. FRP’s reached their height during the 70’s and the 80’s, the most popular one probably being Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Erich was two years older, but both he and Max had been playing these kinds of games together for as long as they could remember. A typical session consisted of their usual friends, Kenny Williams, Grant Wilson, Chris Root, Karl Greenfield, and several others. Gathered in Erich’s darkened bedroom, listening to a Rush album booming in the background, the friends sat hunched over the rules, maps, and other implements of a D&D game. Players would tell the dungeon master what they wanted to do. The dungeon master would roll some dice to determine the consequences of their actions, and the players would groan or cheer. This obsession with games was not limited to just D&D. In fact, the Schaefer brothers played dozens of other FRP games at the time, including Traveler, Squad Leader, and Top Secret. When the first computer games came out for the Apple II, that became their next interest. This attraction of computers would eclipse their passion for gaming, at least temporarily. They spent nearly ten years “wandering the techie wilderness, dabbling in desktop publishing”.3 Then, in September 1993, they returned to their original passion, with the formation of a company called Condor Games. Their first few contracts were relatively small, consisting of porting Acclaim’s Quarterback Club football games to handheld systems, as well as a Sega Genesis version of Justice League Task Force. Despite these humble beginnings, the Schaefer brothers would make history in a few years with a game called Diablo. They wanted to make a game that incorporated all of the elements [they] really liked about “classic” RPGs [role-playing games], but with modern enhancements, like outstanding graphics, sound, and, of course, multiplayer support.4 Excited by their idea, Erich and Max pitched it to a company called Blizzard Entertainment, whom they knew because they had worked on a Super Nintendo version 3 Karl Taro Greenfeld,
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