ETHICS IN ONLINE GAMING

Ethics in Online Gaming

Table of Content

INTRODUCTION3

BACKGROUND3

ANALYSIS4

Example Description5

CONCLUSION8

Ethics in Online Gaming

Introduction

Online Gaming is a dramatically expanding dimension of contemporary exploitations of computing and computer network technologies one that, thus far, has evoked much more heat (often, in the form of "moral panics") among parents and politicians than light in the form of serious scholarly and philosophical analysis. We argue that e-games deserve such analysis in part because of their intrinsic philosophical interest as they raise primary philosophical questions of ontology, epistemology, human nature, the character of gameplay," and most especially, of ethics. We further suggest that such analyses exemplified by the articles collected here may also contribute to resolving the larger social and political debates evoked by e-games.

This essay will focus on ethics issues related to online gaming specifically to cheating in online games.

Background

The question of where to draw the line on cheating in online games is a very difficult decision to make, and as competition has gotten fiercer and massively multiplayer online games have spread in popularity (Crogan 2004, pp 72-77), it only gets more

blurred, mimicking ethical dilemmas in real life.

Cheating has been a part of video games from the days of the first personal computers, when a game was loaded into memory and then run, commands could be run to change values in the memory. At first, this was done mostly by programmers or others who had the technical knowledge (Crogan 2004, pp 72-77), but eventually there became an industry of publishing codes for invulnerability or infinite ammo, cheats that didn't really affect anyone else as the Internet and the multiplayer competitive gaming that came with it wasn't around yet. This can be seen as fairly harmless, it is the player's own decision to affect his game, and the real ethical questions come in to play when interaction with other players is allowed.

Analysis

When played in a local setting, with the players all on one screen or at least one local network, cheating could still be caught fairly easily, and was shunned, but the internet gave a shield of anonymity, it became very hard to tell whether someone in Quake was a really good shot, or they had a computer program helping them aim. One perspective on this is that it is still a game, but players take games very seriously sometimes, online FPS games like Quake or Counterstrike have been developing technological methods to combat cheating almost since the start, as widespread cheating could ruin the experience of the game for everyone who wasn't cheating (Bittanti 2005 , pp 117-206). FPS games usually last for about five minutes, and while it can be infuriating if someone in the game is cheating, at least it is over soon. In MMOs (massively multiplayer online) games, the world is persistent, a cheater will keep whatever advantages they have and affect the game world with what they do, possibly destroying the balance or giving themselves an unfair ...