Cheating in online games

Cheating in online games is an activity that modifies the game experience to give one player an advantage over others. Depending on the game, different activities constitute cheating and it is either a matter of game policy or consensus opinion as to whether a particular activity is considered to be cheating. Johan Huizinga defines cheating as the action of pretending to obey the rules of the game, while secretly subverting them to gain advantage over an opponent.

Cheating reportedly exists in most multiplayer online games, but it is difficult to measure. The Internet and darknets can provide players with the methodology necessary to cheat in online games, sometimes in return for a price.

Mods

Mods are modifications to games that are intended to change the gameplay experience. Sometimes, mods are intended to give players an advantage over other players who are not using mods.

Bots and software assistance

Aimbots and triggerbots

An aimbot (sometimes called "auto-aim") is a type of computer game bot used in multiplayer first-person shooter games to provide varying levels of automated target acquisition to the player. While most common in first person shooter games, they exist in other game types and are sometimes used colloquially with a TriggerBot, which shoots automatically when an opponent appears within the field-of-view or aiming reticule of the player.

Chatterbot

A chatterbot (also known as a talkbot, chatbot, Bot, chatterbox, Artificial Conversational Entity) is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to engage in small talk with the aim of passing the Turing test by fooling the conversational partner into thinking that the program is a human. However, chatterbots are also used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatterbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simply scan for keywords within the input and pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a textual database.

The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot, Julia) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs.

Background

In 1950, Alan Turing's famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published, which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. This criterion depends on the ability of a computer program to impersonate a human in a real-time written conversation with a human judge, sufficiently well that the judge is unable to distinguish reliably—on the basis of the conversational content alone—between the program and a real human. The notoriety of Turing's proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, published in 1966, which seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human. However Weizenbaum himself did not claim that ELIZA was genuinely intelligent, and the Introduction to his paper presented it more as a debunking exercise: