Normative Transgressions of Cheaters in Online Competitive Games

Cheating is a widespread phenomenon within gaming that has lacked attention in academia. Despite the prevalence of cheating and its recognised negative impacts, there is a lack of understanding in how the cheat resources are shared and facilitated at a communal level. The following research examines the governance mechanism of cheating communities in online multiplayer games. It is an exploratory research that sets out to identify and analyse the elements that support cheating in an online game. The main research question is: How do cheating communities govern themselves? We design our studies based on the framework that we draw from the existing concepts of self-governance from social and political science spheres. Our methods encompass both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods as a way to access relevant users and resources present in the community.

This research embarks the first academic investigation to apply the angle of community on the game cheating phenomenon. It focuses on how cheating evolves as a product of a systematic, communal work rather than as an individual act. The findings will suggest wider social implications of cheating, and inform private companies and law enforcements who are looking for innovative ways to tackle the issues arising from cheating. They will also guide future studies in human-computer interaction that analyse online communities that are covert by nature.

It is part of the nature of Cyber Security - and a key reason for the urgency in developing new research approaches - that it now is a concern of every section of society, and so the successful CDT will have a very broad impact indeed. We will ensure impact for:

* The IT industry; vendors of hardware and software, and within this the IT Security industry;

* High value/high assurance sectors such as banking, bio-medical domains, and critical infrastructure, and more generally the CISO community across many industries;

* The mobile systems community, mobile service providers, handset and platform manufacturers, those developing the technologies of the internet of things, and smart cities;

* Defence sector, MoD/DSTL in particular, defence contractors, and the intelligence community;

* The public sector more generally, in its own activities and in increasingly important electronic engagement with the citizen;

* The not-for-profit sector, education, charities, and NGOs - many of whom work in highly contended contexts, but do not always have access to high-grade cyber defensive skills.

Impact in each of these will be achieved in fresh elaborations of threat and risk models; by developing new fundamental design approaches; through new methods of evaluation, incorporating usability criteria, privacy, and other societal concerns; and by developing prototype and proof-of-concept solutions exhibiting these characteristics. These impacts will retain focus through the way that the educational and research programme is structured - so that the academic and theoretical components are directed towards practical and anticipated problems motivated by the sectors listed here.