Abstract

This talk surveys the ways in which people currently cheat in online first-person “twitch-based” computer games. It then discusses how the tactics used by hardcore players (as satirised in the famous “Boom! Headshot!” youtube video) are often mistaken for cheating, and argues that preventing the perception of cheating is an equally interesting security-related challenge to preventing actual cheating.

The talk focuses specifically on the evolution of a special sort of winning tactic – the neo-tactic – the use of which often appear cheating-like. This sort of tactic exploits the underlying low-level physics properties of the virtual environment, for example network latency effects.

The talk is a much more colourful, diagrammatic, screenshot-rich (and hopefully more accessible) presentation of my paper with the same name.