Aug 2, 02:42 AM

Doping in Sports, Cheating in Games

Floyd Landis Doping in sports has taken center stage again after Floyd Landis, this year’s winner of the Tour de France, tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone in one of his urine samples during a key stage in the tour. While those results are not final yet, it has renewed the ongoing debate about cheating in sports.

One of the major arguments against doping regulation is that “hey, they’ll always find a way to dope no matter what we do, so why not just allow everyone to do it?” We allow sick people to take drugs to make them better, so why don’t we see the peak of human achievement and let athletes use whatever they want?

There are plenty of reasons for and against this argument, but I’d like to use an example from gaming. Cheating in online gaming has always been a problem. No matter what measures we take, it always seems like someone finds a way around it. In MMOs you have gold farm bots. In FPSs you have wallhacks and aimbots. So if this is the case, shouldn’t we just be real about it and let everyone cheat?

HELL NO. Can you imagine a world where you log in to WoW and everyone is glitching around and has unlimited gold? Or when you start a game of Counter-Strike where you can see all of the opposing team through the map and they can see you? Where everyone has 100% accuracy and every shot is a headshot?

Pervasive cheating may elevate the level of play in one sense, but it also changes the culture of a game. Instead of a place where gamers come to have fun and test their skills, the game becomes a cheating arms race where everyone is dependent on the next version of aimbot v. 1.35b, where no one cares about learning or improving their skills, but just how better their bot is than the next guy. It violates the spirit of the game, and ruins the very reasons why we enjoy playing them in the first place.

Yes, cheating is an ongoing battle. There will always be cheaters. That doesn’t mean we should just take this defeatist attitude and give up. To an outsider it might seem harmless, making the game more competitive, but we forget about the many negative consequences it would have. Cheating should always be an exception, not the rule.

-Jon
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