Cheaters

In my previous blog posts, I discussed the early theories on the ‘magic circle‘ by Johan Huizinga, this theory will be quite important in this post to understand things that are mentioned later on. The magic circle is meant to set up the whole atmosphere of a game, it is the environment, the space and the whole rules of a particular game. However, what if the magic circle comes to be broken or tampered with?

Can someone dismantle the magic circle in a game? When rules are broken, does it consequently break the magic circle? An Hungarian psychology professor called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who, for the sake of my sanity, will be called Mr C in this blog) created a chart (named ‘flow channel‘) which showed the relationship between boredom and skill, and challenge and anxiety, and a perfect flow of these elements down the middle. If any of these have too much of an influence, does the magic circle apply to that player (or even the game)? If you were playing a game, it is quite unlikely to carry on with the game/task if you happened to get too anxious because of your low-skill level, and if you got too bored in the game it’s likely that you’d switch off, which in itself would damage the magic circle.

Mr C's flow chart!

What about if a person spoils a game, rather than the game itself? Johan Huizinga called people who spoil the magic circle intentionally ‘spoil-sports‘, as if it’s a group game it spoils the atmosphere for the other players. It’s likely that you’ve heard the term ‘spoil-sport’, it’s a term that is usually applied to young children playing games, especially when one of them happens to cheat…

“The spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion-a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusion, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.”

– Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pg. 11

Salen and Zimmerman give their own definition of a spoil-sport, saying that they act as “a player that refuses to acknowledge the authority of a game in any way. These nihilistic players do not hesitate to destroy the magic circle of the game”. How do people be spoil-sports, aka cheaters, in modern-day games? There are many things and different kinds of people that can be called cheaters or spoil-sports now, and a lot of them do a lot more damage than just ruining the magic circle.

For example, there are hackers (which include things like aimbots, which is a hack which enables the player to continuously have perfect aim and wallhacks which lets the player see through objects and walls etc.), team-killers (who kill members of their own team for fun, and maybe for other reasons which I can’t seem to think of), griefers (these are very similar to the team-killers, their main aim however is to destroy the magic circle of a game by any means, i.e. being abusive, giving away ‘harmful’ information’ etc.) and many more.

 

An example of a Wallhack in action

However, besides the genuine attempts to disturb the games magic circles, there are actually accidental hacks within the games left over by the designers, which are usually known as ‘glitches‘. Glitches can sometimes be good (sometimes they are short-cuts) and sometimes they are bad (it’s never a good thing when you find yourself randomly trapped inside a wall), there are even people known as ‘glitch hunters’ who scour games looking for glitches. However, if people who use hacks are cheaters and ruin the magic circle, aren’t glitch hunters and people who exploit glitches ruining it as well? In some ways yes, as they are playing the game by their own rules rather than the rules that they are supposed to play by, but then again no because they didn’t put the glitches there and as I mentioned before they’re not always on the side of the player! Either way, both hacks and glitches damage the magic circle somewhat.

“A glitch, or a ‘bug’ as it is sometimes known, is a generic term for the result of a programming error. Glitches vary significantly in their scale and severity and range from graphical artefacts or anomalies that do not dramatically affect or alter gameplay to those that can crash the game, and even the system on which it is running, or corrupt save data, thereby eliminating a gamer’s recorded progress. Although not all are so predictable, many glitches are repeatable and, as such, may be deliberately replicated by gamers”

– James Newman, Playing With Videogames, pg. 114

What is an algorithm? An algorithm, applied to the gaming world at least, is the process the gamer goes through learning the rules and the mechanics of a game. As they advance through the game, the more it enables them to tamper with the rules to their own advantage. For example, the user will come to discover positive glitches and short-cuts that enable them to play the game with much more ease, but referring to Mr C’s chart earlier on in the post, will the easiness of the game lead to it being totally boring?

“If you don’t think about the underlying mechanics of the simulation – even if that thinking happens in a semiconscious way – you won’t last very long in the game. You have to probe to progress”.

– Steven Johnson, Everything Good is Bad for You, pg. 46

If glitches can affect a players, and even a multitude of players, magic circle, than why do they tend to be less frowned upon than cheaters? Contrary to popular belief, most people who are gamers are perfectly normal, and the odd glitch or two doesn’t bother them in the slightest, the rules of the real world don’t apply to the digital world! On the other hand, there can be some people that think that all glitches, whether they be handy or downright inconvenient, are absolutely terrible and a disgrace to mankind and digital kind, they spit on them! Anyway, they’re probably less frowned upon due to them being a genuine mistake left over from the creation of the game, rather than any malicious attempt by an outside source.

Steven Poole outlined three different incoherences that can be found in the modern gaming world:

1. Incoherence of Causality: When someone/something recieves some kind of damage and survives, whereas in the real world they’d be in pieces
2. Incoherence of Function: For example, if you come across a flimsy little bush in a game and can’t walk through it, but somehow you can climb trees?!
3. Incoherence of Space: In them games which, for some reason, allow you to jump off ledges and cliffs but for some reason isn’t daring enough to let you hop a little over small obstacles that would make your/your characters ‘life’ so much more easier.

With all this new technology why hasn’t anyone fixed all of this and made the games more similar to how things would be in real life? It wouldn’t be possible to create a good game if a character died after taking just one shot, and if you had a gun which could break practically anything it would ruin a large part of the challenging element of the game too. These incoherences are important to recognise in games due to them enabling/causing the player to realise that the game isn’t the real world, but at the same time they cause many gamers to get annoyed at the game.

Apart from the obvious things, is there really much difference between the gaming world and the real world? There probably isn’t, as we seem to have cheaters, spoil-sports and sticky moments in both.

What’s the Game?

What is a game to you? Is it something you used to play on the fields at school? Is it a disc that you put into a computer or console? Is it played on a board? Is it something involving a ball of any kind? The real answer is that all of those are games, although some of them would differ completely. However, since the Johan Huizinga book ‘Homo Ludens‘ (or Playing Man) from 1938, gaming theory has expanded and developed.

Johan Huizinga - Author of Homo Ludens

How can a book published over 70 years ago reveal anything about the fast-paced gaming world of today? In his book, Huizinga mainly talked about the concept of gaming, which when studied, makes it easy to categories even modern games into the different types of gaming categories that he outlined. He also mentioned a theory that during a game the players get a sense of being in a ‘special time and place’.

“All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”

– Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pg. 10

One of the most well-known theories from Huizinga’s book is the theory of the ‘magic circle‘. What on earth is a magic circle, and what does it have to do with a game?! Basically, the magic circle can be applied to many things, not just games. It’s the thing that makes a space that it used to fit a particular activity (i.e an opera house, is usually built to look like it is exactly that), however, if you stripped all the interior away and left just an empty room, with no evidence of its previous use, then the room would be totally inconspicuous. In the gaming world, the easiest thing to think of as a magic circle would be a football pitch, without the lines creating the boundaries and without the goal posts, the football pitch would ultimately become just another field.

 

The Football Pitch - The Magic Circle for Many

But what about the magic circles in digital games? Digital games, as far as I know, are always played in front of a screen (unless there’s some kind of projection device available, but I’ll leave that out to avoid almost certain confusion). There are many objects and environments that could contribute to the digital gamers magic circle. It could be within the screen, the room/area where the game is being played, in a MMOG it’s perfectly viable to say that the magic circle could exist between the players in the game.

A French intellectual called Roger Caillois outlined his classifications of gaming in his book ‘Man, Play and Games‘ (1961).  In this book, Caillois theorised 2 main types of play, Paidea (‘wild, free-form improvisational play’ pg. 36) and Ludus (‘complementary to and a refinement of Paidea’ pg. 29). He also defines 4 different types of basic play within the categories :

1. Agon – Competitive gaming, for example, a race, where someone or a team must ‘win’.
2. Alea – Games that revolve around chance much more than skill
3. Mimicry – Free-form play, play that is make-believe, for example, wearing a mask or a disguise to alter the players identity. The player is pretending to be something else, but should still abide by the rules.
4. Ilinx – This type of play can be compared to the experience of being on a ‘rollercoaster’, for example, if someone was spinning around for a sufficient amount of time, when they stopped the way that they see the world would change significantly for a short amount of time.

However, do any of these apply to modern-day digital gaming? Obviously, in some ways they all can, it depends on how strictly you apply them. When playing a racing computer game, there is either competition between you and online competitors or you and the computer, which covers the Agon aspect. Although slightly harder to apply to the most popular computer games, factors of Alea can still be found, for example, in a game of computer Solitaire there is always an element of chance in what deck you end up with. Not to mention the popular game of ‘Pacman‘, which contains chance due to the direction of which the, erm, ghosty things, decide to go. The Mimicry aspect can roughly be applied to role-playing games, where they gamer/player takes on a different identity for the game, which can be compared to wearing a disguise in real life. And finally, Ilinx is possibly the most difficult one to apply to digital games, but in a way when people get ‘immersed’ (refer back to previous blog, on immersion!) in games it can sometime change their state of mind, offering a similar ‘rollercoaster’ experience.

Pacman - a game resting on chance?

Although I’ve already spoken a lot about digital video games in this blog already, what are they?! According to Jesper Juul, game should not include such things/elements such as hypertext fiction, storytelling, traffic, noble war etc. but they do include fixed rules, variable outcomes, player effort, player attachment  to outcome, negotiable consequences etc. However, is what Jesper Juul outlined always definite? Sometimes it won’t be, as when someone plays a video game the experience, like most other things on Earth, is very individual. For example, is it true that any games that have a storytelling element aren’t games at all?

 

Jesper Juul’s gaming chart

Why are games so popular nowadays? A guy called Geoff Howland detailed certain ‘hooks‘ within games that urge people on to buy them, these hooks are:

1. Gameplay hooks – ‘any activity performed by the player for the purpose of furthering their playing’
2. Action hooks – ‘action hooks require the player to move their controls, characters or pieces around, or to interact with the game explicitly’
3. Resource hooks – ‘resource hooks are elements that the player does not directly control… Ammunition or health are basic examples of resource hooks’
4. Tactical and Strategic hooks –  ‘not present in every game… tactical hooks change the way the game works’ i.e. weapons available, skill levels etc.
5. Marketing hooks: ‘designed to attract the player to by the game, or from the style or gimmick hooks that may entice initial play’ ground-breaking graphics in the game, etc.
6. Supporting hooks: ‘differentiate games within the same genre’ i.e. providing something new and appealing to the player to choose that particular game rather than a game which is seen as similar.

What is the main element that makes games fun to play? There are many elements to a game that appeal to every different person, people like to play games for the interactivity, some like to play them to escape the ‘real world’ and be someone/something else. Ultimately, games are getting more popular year by year, with new advancements in the way that they are played, and with new consoles offering new things, they’re only going to keep getting more popular.