Cheating in Multiplayer Video Games

Cheating in video games has been prevalent ever since the days of Pong. Games have evolved much since then and the ways in which people play together have changed as well. Older systems required people to play together in the same room, but with the advent of the internet, gaming consoles allow us to play games together with people located all over the globe. Cheating has evolved as well, since gamers no longer have the luxury of monitoring the person sitting next to them; anti-cheating mechanisms are built into most online systems and suspicious behavior is monitored by gaming companies.

Most of the current research has surrounded ways in which players cheat and their reasoning for doing so. This is only half of the equation however, what happens after a gamer is caught cheating? What are the repercussions for being caught cheating and how does being caught influence future decisions to cheat? By putting gamers in a situation where they are caught cheating, three different responses were revealed: those who are determined to cheat no matter what, those who scale back their cheating in the hopes of remaining undetected, and those who stopped cheating altogether.