A Community-based Investigation of Competitive Cheating

Game cheating is the act of gaining an unfair advantage over one’s opponents. It is prevalent across many competitive games to the detriment of many players and developers, and has remained a significant problem despite efforts to eradicate it. Previous work has broadened our understanding of why players cheat but the social practices surrounding cheating have yet to be documented. This knowledge gap hinders researchers from comprehending the full extent of cheating necessary to scope relevant research in a meaningful way. The following dissertation serves to address this gap through exploratory studies that adopt a community perspective on cheating. The work so far involved mapping the governance mechanisms and examining the artefacts facilitating cheating. Building on these findings, I plan to explore the resource development process, and ultimately provide a framework tying the results together into an integrated structure. By documenting the social forces that shape and support cheating, scholars will be better informed when surveying the phenomenon in the future.