 | This article has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on thetalk page.(Learn how and when to remove these messages) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
Cheating in video games involves avideo game player using various methods to create an advantage beyond normalgameplay, usually in order to make the game easier. Cheats may be activated from within the game itself (a cheat code implemented by the original game developers), or created by third-party software (a game trainer or debugger) or hardware (acheat cartridge). They can also be realized by exploitingsoftware bugs; this may or may not be considered cheating based on whether the bug is considered common knowledge.
The first cheat codes were put in place forplay testing purposes. Playtesters had to rigorously test the mechanics of a game and introduced cheat codes to make this process easier. An early cheat code can be found inManic Miner, where typing "6031769" (based onMatthew Smith's driving license) enables the cheat mode.[1] Within months ofWizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord's 1981 release, at least two commercial trainers appeared.[2] 1983 advertisements for "The Great Escape Utility" forCastle Wolfenstein (1981) promised that the $15 product "remodels every feature of the game. Stop startup delays, crashes and chest waiting. Get any item, in any quantity. Start in any room, at any rank. Handicap your aim. Even add items".[3]
In a computer game, all numerical values are stored "as is" in memory. Gamers could reprogram a small part of the game before launching it. In the context of games for many 8-bit computers, it was a usual practice to load games into memory and, before launching them, modify specific memory addresses in order to cheat, getting an unlimited number of lives, currency, immunity, invisibility, etc. Such modifications were performed throughPOKE statements. TheCommodore 64, Amstrad CPC range and ZX Spectrum also allowed players with the proper cartridges orMultiface add-on to freeze the running program, enter POKEs, and resume. Some games tried to detect the Multiface and refused to load if it was present. The earliest models had no ability to "hide". Later revisions either included a switch, hid if the menu had been opened and closed before loading the game, or automatically hid.
For instance, withPOKE 47196,201 inKnight Lore for the ZX Spectrum, immunity is achieved. Magazines such asCrash regularly featured lists of suchPOKE instructions for games. In order to find them ahacker had to interpret themachine code and locate the critical point where the number of lives is decreased, impacts detected, etc. Sometimes the term POKE was used with this specific meaning.
Cheating was exploited by technology-oriented players due to the difficulty of early cheats. However, a cheat industry emerged as gaming systems evolved, through the packaging and selling of cheating as a product.[4] Cheat-enablers such as cheat books, game guides, cheat cartridges helped form a cheat industry and cemented cheating as part of gaming culture.[5] However, cheating was not universally accepted in early gaming; gaming magazineAmiga Power condemned cheaters, taking the stance that cheating was not part of their philosophy of fairness. They also applied this in reverse; games should also not be allowed to cheat the player. Guides, walkthroughs, and tutorials are sometimes used to complete games but whether this is cheating is debated.
Later, cheating grew more popular with magazines, websites, and even a television show,Cheat!, dedicated to listing cheats and walkthroughs for consoles and computer systems. POKE cheats were replaced by trainers and cheat codes. Generally, the majority of cheat codes on modern day systems are implemented not by gamers, but bygame developers. Some say that as many people do not have the time to complete a video game on their own, cheats are needed to make a game more accessible and appealing to a casual gamer.[6] In many cases, developers created cheats to facilitate testing, then left them in the game as they expanded the number of ways people could play it.[7] With the rise in popularity of gaming, cheating using external software and hardware raised a number of copyright legal issues related to modifying game code.
Many modern games have removed cheat codes entirely, except when used to unlock certain secret bonuses. The usage of real-time achievement tracking made it unfair for any one player to cheat. In online multiplayer games, cheating is frowned upon and disallowed, often leading to aban. However, certain games may unlock single-player cheats if the player fulfills a certain condition. Yet other games, such as those using theSource engine, allow developer consoles to be used to activate a wide variety of cheats in single-player or by server administrators.[citation needed]
Many games which use in-game purchases consider cheating to be not only wrong but also illegal, seeing as cheats in such games would allow players to access content (like power-ups and extra coins) that would otherwise require payment to obtain. However, cheating in such games is nonetheless a legal grey area because there are no laws against modifying software which is already owned, as detailed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[8]
The most basic type of cheat code is one created by the game designers and hidden within thevideo game itself, that will cause any type of uncommon effect that is not part of the usual game mechanics.[9]
Cheat codes are usually activated by typing secret passwords or pressing controller buttons in a certain sequence.[10] Less common activation methods include entering certain high score names, holding keys or buttons while dying, picking up items in a particular order and otherwise performing unintuitive actions. Some games may also offer adebug console that can be used to edit game parameters. Effects might include unlocking a character or improving a character's performance: for example providing a car with greater acceleration,[10] or just visual gags such as "big-head mode" inGoldenEye 007.[11] Some games humorously penalise the player for using another game's cheat codes. For example, using cheat codes fromDoom inHeretic gives the opposite of the desired effect, such as instant death instead of invulnerability or stripping weapons instead of providing them.[12]
Unlike other cheating methods, cheat codes are implemented by the game developers themselves,[9] often as a tool to playtest certain aspects of the game without difficulty. One of the earliest known examples of this type of cheat is theKonami Code, created in 1986 by Konami developerKazuhisa Hashimoto as he worked onporting the 1985 arcade gameGradius for use on theNintendo Entertainment System. Hashimoto is quoted as saying "The arcade version ofGradius is really difficult, right? I never played it that much, and there was no way I could finish the game, so I inserted the so-called Konami Code."[13]
A bot is a type of artificial intelligence (AI)–based expert system software that plays a video game in the place of a human, to perform actions (repetitive or not) that enable advantages to be achieved.
Cheating can easily be achieved by modifying the game's data while it is running. These methods of cheating are often less reliable than cheat codes included in a game by its creators. This is due to the fact that certain programming styles or quirks of internal game logic, different release versions of a game, or even using the same game at different times or on different hardware, may result in different memory usage and hence the trainer program might have no effect, or stop the game from running altogether.[14] Modifying game data usually constitutes a violation of a software license agreement that prohibits modifying the program at all.
Cheating via memory editing involves modifying the memory values where the game keeps its status information. The way to achieve this will vary depending on the environment in which the game is running.
A cheat cartridge is attached to an interface port on a home computer or console. It allows a user to modify the game code either before or during its execution. An early example is theMultiface for the ZX Spectrum, and almost every format since has had a cheat cartridge created for it; such asDatel's range ofAction Replay devices. Another popular example of this isGame Genie forGenesis,NES,Super NES,Game Boy, andGame Gear game consoles. Modern disc-based cheat hardware includesGameShark and Code Breaker which modify the game code from a large database of cheats. In later generation consoles, cheat cartridges have come to be replaced by cheat discs, containing a simple loader program which loads a game disc and modifies the main executable before starting it.
The legality of this type of devices has been questioned, such as in the case ofLewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., in whichNintendo unsuccessfully suedLewis Galoob Toys stating that its cheating device, theGame Genie, createdderivative works of games and thus violatedcopyright law.
The most basic way of achieving this is by means of memory editor software, which allows the player to directly edit the numeric values in a certain memory address. This kind of software usually includes a feature that allows the player to perform memory searches to aid the user to locate the memory areas where known values (such as the number of lives, score or health level) are located. Provided a memory address, a memory editor may also be able to "freeze" it, preventing the game from altering the information stored at that memory address.
Game trainers are a special type of memory editor, in which the program comes with predefined functions to modify therun time memory of a specificcomputer game.[15] When distributed, trainers often have a single + and a number appended to their title, representing the number of modifications the trainer has available.[15]
In the 1980s and 1990s, trainers were generally integrated straight into the actual game bycracking groups. When the game was first started, the trainer would typically show a splash screen of its own, sometimes allowing modifications of options related to the trainer, and then proceed to the actual game. In the cracker group release lists and intros, trained games were marked with one or more plus signs after them, one for each option in the trainer, for example: "the Mega Krew presents:Ms. Astro Chicken++".
Many emulators have built-in functionality that allows players to modify data as the game is running, sometimes even emulating cheating hardware such asGame Genie. Some emulators take this method a step further and allow the player to export and import data edits. Edit templates of many games for a console are collected and redistributed as cheat packs.
Emulators also frequently offer the additional advantage of being able to save the state of the entire emulated machine at any point, effectively allowing saving at any point in a game even when save functionality is not provided by the game itself. Cheating hardware such as "Instant Replay" also allows such behavior for some consoles.
Somewhat more unusual than memory editing, code injection consists of the modification of the game's executable code while it is running, for example with the use ofPOKE commands. In the case ofJet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum computer, a popular cheat involved replacing aZ80 instructionDEC (HL) in the program (which was responsible for decrementing the number of lives by one) with aNOP, effectively granting the player infinite lives.[16] OnMicrosoft Windows, a common type of video game hacking is through the use ofDLLs. Users use a third party program to inject the DLL into their game of choice.[17]
Editing a saved game offers an indirect way to modify game data. By modifying a file in persistent storage, it is possible to effectively modify the runtime game data that will be restored when the game attempts to load the save game.
Hex editors were the most basic means of editing saved game files (e.g. to give the player a large sum of money in strategy games such asDune II). However, as happened with game editors, dedicated game-editing utilities soon became available, including functions to effortlessly edit saved data for specific games, rendering hex editing largely obsolete for this purpose.
If a saved game is stored in multiple files, it may also be possible to cheat simply by mixing and matching these files. For example, if one file represents the items in a treasure chest, while another represents the player's inventory, then the player can save the game before and after picking up an item from the chest, and continue play using the treasure chest file before the item was picked up, and the inventory file from afterward -- allowing the player to pick up the item repeatedly, gaining multiple instances of the item, if the program's logic does not prevent them from having more than one of the item.
An alternative method for cheating in online games involves modification of inbound or outbound network traffic between the client and server.
One early implementation of this concept was seen with lag switches. A lag switch refers to any hardware or software mechanism that temporarily limits network traffic. They grew popular as, unlike most cheats, they could be used on theXbox One andPS4 consoles. Infirst-person shooters, a common use for lagswitches was the ability to understand enemy positions without any risk to the player.[18]
For example, if a player was unsure whether an enemy was present in a room, they could activate the lag switch to block network traffic momentarily. This would allow the player to enter the room and scout for enemies without their movements being transmitted to the game server. As a result, the player’s character technically remained in the safe position from the server’s (and enemy's) perspective. Once the player had gathered the necessary information about enemy locations, they could deactivate the lag switch and resume normal play. Many games have since implemented "anti-desync" measures to limit the effectiveness of lagswitches. This may include the client game preventing player movement if connection is lost.
More modern methods typically involve lower level packet editing or forgery in a "Man-in-the-middle attack" style. For example, symmetric encryption keys could be read from the game's memory, granting access to inbound packets. These packets could be edited to provide the client game with information that does not reflect the server's reality. I.e. if an enemy player uses an ability that should slow your movement, the packet detailing the slow factor could be modified to a lower value, manipulating the client game into applying the lower value. Techniques like this are not as common as simple memory manipulation and are typically only used in specific scenarios.[19]
In games having attainable achievements orhigh score records, or both, cheats by nature allow the player to attain achievements too easily or score point totals not attainable or extremely difficult to attain through legitimate means by a non-cheating player.[citation needed] Notable examples include the following:
Cheating exists in manymultiplayer video games. While there have always been cheat codes and other ways to make single-player games easier, developers often attempt to prevent it in multiplayer games. With the release of the first popular internet multiplayer games, cheating took on new dimensions. Previously it was rather easy to see if the other players cheated, as most games were played on local networks or consoles. TheInternet changed that by increasing the popularity of multiplayer games, giving the players relative anonymity, and giving people an avenue to communicate cheats.
Examples of cheats in first-person shooter games include theaimbot, which assists the player in aiming at the target, giving the user an unfair advantage, thewallhack, which allows a player to see through solid or opaque objects or manipulate or remove textures,meshing, which is the action of pushing an item/npc/player into the graphic boundary of another object/player/location in a manner not intended by the game developer, andESP, with which the information of other players is displayed. There are also cheats that increase the size of the target'shitbox, allowing shots striking close to the target to register as hits.
In online trading card games, creating multiple accounts by jailbreaking a device to get more rewards can be considered as cheating because it is unfair to players who have only one account.
Inonline multiplayer games, a player may usemacro scripts, which automatically find items or defeat enemies. The prevalence ofmassively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) such asWorld of Warcraft,Anarchy Online,EverQuest,Guild Wars, andRuneScape has resulted in the trading of in-game currency for real-world currency.[24] This can lead tovirtual economies. The rise of virtual economies has led to cheating where a gamer uses macros to gain large amounts of in-game money which the player will then trade for real cash.[25] The Terms of Service of most modern online games now specifically prohibit the transfer of accounts or the sale of in-game items for 'real-world' money. The enforcement of these terms varies however from one company to another, many turning a blind-eye to such trading as detection and prevention requires resources and banning players also results in losses of revenue.
Cheating in online games is common on publicgame servers. Some online games, such asBattlefield 1942, include specific features to countercheating exploits, by incorporating tools such asPunkBuster,nProtect GameGuard, orValve Anti-Cheat. However, much like anti-virus companies, some anti-cheat tools are constantly and consistently bypassed until further updates force cheat creators to find new methods to bypass the protection.
In single-player games, there are a number of plug-ins available to developers to use to stop cheaters. An obfuscator will scramble code so it is unreadable by decompilers, rename events/properties/methods and even add fake code. An obscurer will encrypt variables in memory and mask out strings. Anti-cheat toolkits have a variety of tools such as: detecting speed hacks, encrypting player prefs, detecting time cheats, detecting wall hacks and more. These can be used in most multi-player games as well.
{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help){{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help)