Cheating Spreads Like Infections In Online Mulitplayer Games

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Published by MIT

Cheating Spreads Like Infections In Online 

Mulitplayer Games

If you have friends who cheat, you are more likely to become a cheater, according to computer scientists who say this can be used to label you as a potential cheater kfc 12/23/2011

Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that serves millions of gamers around the world. But it suffers from a problem: cheating. Some players give themselves an unfair advantage by using 'cheat software' to see through walls or to automatically shoot moving characters

Cheat software is banned but in the sophisticated economies that have evolved in these worlds, cheaters can generate a significant income by using it. The developers of multiplayer game APB Reloaded, estimate that cheatmakers can make up to $50,000 per month.



The trouble, of course, is that cheats poison the experience for legitimate players. The temptation is then for all players to cheat which leads to an uncontrolled escalation of illegal activities and the eventually destruction of the gaming environment.

So gaming communities invest significant resources into finding and stopping cheaters. In the Steam Community, for instance, which has some 30 million users, cheats are clearly labelled so that other users can see them and so that servers can prevent them playing games from which they are banned (although they can play other games).

Cheaters cannot easily start new accounts because the games they buy are linked to their old accounts and access is non-transferable.

So an interesting question is how cheaters behave in this social network.

Today, Jeremy Blackburn at the University of South Florida in Tampa and a few buddies study a social network of about 12 million gamers on the Steam Community of which some 700,000 are cheaters.

What they find is interesting. First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters.

Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community.

Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings

Blackburn and co say they've even seen newly labelled cheaters commit 'social suicide' by cutting themselves off from all their friends.

While this work gives a unique insight into the social behaviour of cheats, Blackburn and co say it also points to a new angle of attack for gaming communities hoping to stamp out cheating.

Their idea is to use the structure of the network to predict the likelihood that a given player will become a cheat in future. In other words, the number of friends who are cheats determine how likely this player is to becoming infected with the 'cheating virus' in future, so to speak. They say they expect to do more work on this in future.

Nobody knows exactly how the Steam Community developers detect and label cheats now. The details are strictly guarded, as would be expected in this kind of cat and mouse game.

But however it is done, the new method is a kind of pre-crime detection rather like the movie Minority Report. That's a dangerous avenue to tread. The labelling of individuals as potential cheats itself has significant moral, philosophical and legal implications that will need to be teased apart and examined before it can be employed in the real or virtual worlds.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1112.4915: Cheaters in the Steam Community Gaming Social Network

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A Christmas wake-up call

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeTweet

PUTIK LADA By RAPHAEL KOK

Christmas is the time for us to redeem and reconcile our relationships with people that we care about. It’s a time for us to remember and rekindle the passions in life that we dream about.

IT all began in a little town called Bethlehem, where a baby was born in a manger. Over centuries, it has captured the joys of wintertime like listening to sleigh bells ringing, building snowmen in the meadow and roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

With or without snowfall, Santa Claus always comes to town whenever the season is upon us, in the malls and on the streets.

Today, Christmas is no longer just a religious or cultural festival celebrated in the West, but a global event transcending race, religions and cultures.



Much of its universal appeal lies in the values embodied in the spirit of Christmas. The highlight at any Christmas party, whether hosted by Christian families, schools, offices or friends, is the exchange of gifts.
Christmas is about goodwill to all and sharing between loved ones.

Of course, cynics would say that Christmas also epitomises the sin of greed, considering how much people spend on Christmas decorations, shopping and parties.

However, that says more about human nature, rather than Christmas itself. After all, how we celebrate Christmas is very much like how we celebrate life.

In life, just like during Christmas, we expect to be rewarded for the good things we have done. Life, just like Christmas, is about dreams and desires.

True, more often than not, they are materialistic in nature. True, we always want to have more than what we already have, and that there is no end to dreams and desires.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Instead, where we go wrong is not knowing what we truly want out of life. We instead want things that bring little value to our lives.

We crave for more clothes, cars, properties and sources of physical affection. We crave for the same things we already have in abundance, except in different designs, colours and sizes.

We are like kids crying out for toys, ice-cream and a playmate, with no time to think of the consequences.
However, there’s got to be more to life than chasing every temporary high.

Just like Lord Buddha centuries ago, Mark Zuckerberg exhorts us to eliminate desires. Not just any desire, but desires that don’t really matter to us to begin with, or any more.

Having desires is not greedy. Having false desires is.

Our fragile minds, wrecked by insecurities, are always vulnerable to being incepted by foreign ideas. We constantly worry about what others think of us, and what they tell us we should be like.



Not only are we weighed down by excess material and emotional baggage, but we are also forced to abandon our own innermost dreams and desires.

Only when you have eliminated your false desires, will you discover what you want, what you really want.

Basically, start doing the things you have always dreamt of doing but never did because you kept telling yourself “Not this weekend, there’s a sale”, “Not this month, peak period” and “Not this year, saving for a bigger car”.

And it doesn’t just stop there. If you fail to recognise the things that truly give you joy, chances are that you will fail to recognise the things that truly give joy to the rest of the world.

Getting a gift for someone is never easy. We can’t read minds.

Sure, you may ask them what they want, but that’s rather spoiling the whole idea of a gift or they may be too embarrassed to reveal their innermost dreams and desires to you anyway.

The true value of a gift is not how much it’s worth to the giver or anyone else, but to the recipient.

How much the person appreciates the gift is a measure of how much you actually know and care for the person.

As noble as our intentions may be, the act of giving itself is simply not enough. Yes, it’s the thought that counts. But with more thought put into a gift, the more value the gift has.

So make your gifts count, be it to your family, friends or lover.

Don’t just go for the safe gifts like chocolates, Hallmark greeting cards, mugs or even expensive jewellery.

Make an effort to think hard about what the person truly wants. It may be something the person never even thought about having.

Don’t just buy something off the shelf. Forget about the price tag.

Be original. Go the distance. Fly to the moon and back. Like writing a song for your girlfriend that she can tell everybody this is her song. Don’t just say “I Love You”, say “I Love Us”.

Sometimes, the greatest gift is simply changing the way we treat others. Like being more obedient to your Mum and Dad. Or stop yelling and giving unreasonable deadlines to your employees.

And instead of just giving away monetary handouts such as bonuses, subsidies or salary increases every year, governments should also give its people greater freedom to express themselves.

As a wise prophet once said, man does not live by bread alone.

People should also be entitled to ask questions like “Who is producing and selling this bread, was there an open tender exercise?” and “Why do I only get one loaf, and my neighbour gets two?” without fear of persecution.

Whoever we are, rich or poor, Christmas ultimately serves as a wake-up call for us to change our lives for the better.

It’s the time for us to redeem and reconcile our relationships with people that we care about. It’s a time for us to remember and rekindle the passions in life that we dream about.

There’s something magical about Christmas. It’s the magic that makes us believe in miracles, and make miracles happen. It’s the magic that makes us rediscover our freedom and power to dream.

So, although it’s been said many times, many ways – have yourself a merry little Christmas, for now and always.

The writer is a young lawyer. Putik Lada, or pepper buds in Malay, captures the spirit and intention of this column – a platform for young lawyers to articulate their views and aspirations about the law, justice and a civil society. For more information about the young lawyers, visit www.malaysianbar.org.my.

Learning From The Masters of Management

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Dan Schawbel, Contributor

Adrian Wooldridge

I recently spoke with Adrian Wooldridge, who is the author of Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World – for Better and for Worse. Wooldridge is the management editor and “Schumpeter” columnist of The Economist. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and All Souls College, Oxford, where he held a Prize Fellowship. He was formerly The Economist’s Washington bureau chief and “Lexington” columnist. In this interview, he talks about how the field of management has changed over the past decade, the difference between management and leadership, and more.

How has the field of management changed in the past decade?

Management has been revolutionised by two great changes over the past decade. The first is the rise of the internet. A decade ago the internet was still a fancy reference tool and Google was still a start up. Today the internet is reorganising the world. The internet is not only spawning an entire ecosystem of new businesses. It is reshaping the way that even the most conservative companies organise their business.

The second is the rise of emerging markets. A decade ago we still referred (often pityingly) to the underdeveloped world. Today we regard the emerging world as a hotbed of growth and innovation. Investment houses are pouring money into the BRICs even as they despair about stagnating Europe. Multinationals are ‘offshoring’ research and development as well as manufacturing to India and Brazil.

Are all managers leaders? What’s the difference between management and leadership?

No: not all managers are leaders (and not all leaders are managers: some great leaders such as Winston Churchill have been hopeless everyday managers).

The great distinction between the two lies in the choice of direction: leadership is about choosing where to go while management is about choosing how to get there. Jack Welch was a great business leader because he changed General Electric’s strategic direction with his emphasis on being number one or number two in a business or getting out. A secondary distinction lies in inspiration: the best leaders not only set a direction but inspire their followers to strain every sinew in reaching their new destination. There is nothing second-rate about management: great leaders mean nothing without the nuts-and-bolts men and women who put their visions into practice and make sure that the trains run on time. Incremental changes can sometimes add up to big changes. But given the uncertainty of the current business world—the sudden gusts of change that blow from unexpected directions—leadership is more important now than it was say fifty years ago when ‘organisation man’ ruled the roost.



Can you name a few management gurus that you’ve been observing and explain how they have helped make change?

These astonishing changes of the past decade—the world remade by the internet and turned upside down by emerging markets—have changed the pecking order among business thinkers. You are probably more likely to find a mind-changing article in Wired than in the Harvard Business Review or from an Indian than from an American-first mid-westerner.

The business gurus that I pay most attention to come in two guises: geeks or third-world firstists. Christopher Anderson made waves with his book on The Long Tale (which argued that the world of niches is replacing the world of mass markets). The book has had a huge influence not only with high-tech companies but with other organisations (retailers for example) that are seeing their markets redefined by the internet.

I suspect that his work-in-progress on 3-D printing will also have a big influence (though there is a lot of work in this area). V.G. Govindirajan of Tuck Business Shool has produced exemplary work on ‘frugal innovation’ (the idea that the most interesting form of innovation in the emerging world is about radically reducing costs rather than adding more bells and whistles. This has had a huge impact on General Electric which is producing a new generation of ‘frugal’ medical products. John Hagel and John Seely Brown have produced equally fasinating work on how these ‘frugal products’ will send a wave of disruption through rich countries, as traditional producers are forced to cut costs dramatically or see their markets eaten up by emerging-market giants.

What will the new management gurus of the future look like?

The management gurus of the future will look more like the class of 2010 at CEIBS or the Indian Business School than the class of 2010 at Harvard Business School or Wharton. They will also look more like the class of 2010 at the Stanford School of Engineering than the class of 2010 at the Stanford Business School: white faces will give way to ‘faces of colour’ and classic business school types will give way to engineers and other sorts of geeks.

Masters of Management

For the past century business thinking has been dominated by the United States. The bulk of the business cases have been about American companies. The bulk of the tools and techniques have been dreampt up by American managers. The driving assumption has been that if you don’t measure up to American standards—about how you organise your company or measure your performance—you are doing something wrong. That model was shaken by the rise of Japan but reasserted itself in the 1990s. It is now being shaken up even more thoroughly by the rise of a huge variety of emerging world companies. The business gurus of the future will come from emerging world—not just from India (which has cornered the market for the moment) but also from China, Indonesia, Turkey and Nigeria.

For the past century technology gurus have played second fiddle to strategy gurus (or even marketing gurus). Peter Drucker was less interested in technology than in the sociology of organisations. Tom Peters made little use of his training as an engineer in his voluminous writing. Technology is now at the heart of business thinking rather than an optional add on. Technology gurus are rewiring our thinking about organisations. And gurus from other disciplines face a stark choice: think deeply about what is happening in the world of the internet or face irrelevance.

Dan Schawbel, recognized as a “personal branding guru” by The New York Times, is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, LLC, a full-service personal branding agency. Dan is the author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, the founder of the Personal Branding Blog, and publisher of Personal Branding Magazine. He has worked with companies such as Google, Time Warner, Symantec, IBM, EMC, and CitiGroup.

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