Cheating in games and sport

I was thinking about cheating in sport and in games not long ago, after reading an article about intersex athletes. This is an interesting topic and how it is handled is related to current issues in societies, especially the ‘woke’ ideas of the ‘politically correct’ thinking crowd,  but that is for another time.

In sports there has always been a tendency by people to cheat, which is mostly ‘bending the rules’, for example for doing what they think others do (such as take certain stimulants, growth hormones, etc.). Some people just don’t care about morality but most people justify it to themselves in some way such as ‘everyone at the top uses steroids’, and ‘to win you need steroids’.

I read or heard about one such case in athletics long ago in my youth, of a shot putter getting banned for life, and I said to a friend “What an idiot, he trained for years, and threw it all away’. In reality it could be that such people don’t really enjoy the sport but see it as mostly a way to make money, especially from advertising contracts. In that case it makes sense to try to attain the top to get well paying sponsor contracts, as they prefer the best, not an ‘also ran’ unless there is some other angle the sponsor can exploit such as ‘our local boy’ for some company that is located in the same area where the athlete grew up and has connections. There can be many such cases, but results count most of all.

Many people also just don’t think of the consequences, they think they are smarter than others and won’t get caught. It seems that not getting caught because testers are behind the methods and means of doping is more of a reason why dopers don’t get caught. From an anonymous list of questions given before a meeting some years ago the IAAF (=World athletics) found that about half the athletes admitted to using some form of doping, but almost none are caught…

In games there is usually not a lot of money involved and so the reasons to cheat are mostly to do with prestige and I think a boost of self-esteem even though it is based on a lie. There are some ‘e-sports’ players who make a lot of money, but you can’t cheat by using the computer to your advantage in tournaments where you play with a given setup. Perhaps it’s back to real doping there?

In computer games where you play on your own computer, or console, there is a lot of cheating possible, such as replaying sections until you get it right, slowing down the game then playing it back from the game data to make a video, at normal speed. There are also cases where what others may consider cheating is simply using your brain to interpret the rules and do what is allowed within them. On some arcade games where alternate finger movement is needed to determine the speed of running, people have been using various techniques for fast button pressing such as rocking a pencil on those 2 buttons, or finger rolling. Is that cheating or just using your brain and doing what is allowed? Surely it was not intended that way, but this argument of what is intended or not is in my view not a real argument. You can for example look at playing ‘Defender’ in “you have to save the people” whereas a tactic that I use is to just keep a few people alive, I will even kill many of them on the higher levels, to be able to deal with the insanity that goes on at higher speeds at higher levels. This is not what the designers’ idea was, but it is what is needed to get really high scores. You may consider the score being the ultimate goal and thus doing whatever is needed to get a high score, is then perfectly fine.

In casino games card-counting is illegal, and presumably the techniques used there to detect such things are also used in the computer/web versions, such as Bet22. To show or prove cheating is, same as with detecting doping, usually hard, and in some way it’s like a strategy game with boy sides trying and using various ways to cheat and to detect the cheating…

Herbert Wise

“Award-winning food geek. Unapologetic gamer. Wannabe web junkie. Amateur coffee maven. Zombie fanatic. Writer.”