Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
limits on players' ingenuity or the lengths to which some will go. Even if your
game doesn't offer a chat feature, players can play from two machines in the same
room, call each other on mobile phones, or use any online chat facility to collude.
You can't prevent players from colluding, but you can design the game to minimize
the effects of cheating. You should consider in what ways the following types of
collusion might affect your game:
Sharing secret knowledge.
Does the player ever have secret knowledge that she
can share to someone else's benefit? In the trivia game described previously, some
players receive the correct answer before the time runs out. Withholding this infor-
mation prevents collusion.
Passing cards (or anything else) under the table.
Does the game include
mechanisms to transfer assets from one player to another? Is there any way to
abuse these mechanisms?
Taking a dive.
What are the consequences if one player deliberately plays to
lose? If you allow gambling on matches (even if only with play money or points),
you should look out for this.
If you're designing a game in which the competition mode is supposed to be every
player for herself, try imagining what would happen if you made it a team game in
which you encouraged players to collaborate. If it's already a team game, try to
imagine what would happen if one player on the team spied for the other team.
Technical Security
People feel a strong impulse to test the limits of computer software—to see what it
will do with nonsensical inputs (such as firing upon their own troops in a war
game). Similarly, players often think of ways to do things that the designers never
intended or expected. Sometimes these unanticipated maneuvers, such as using the
rocket launcher to propel the player upward in
Quake
, even become standard tactics.
Making unexpected but legal moves is not cheating; one can argue that designers
should anticipate these tactics or that testers should discover them. But other forms
of cheating, such as hacking the game's software or data files, are clearly unfair. In
a single-player game, it doesn't really matter, but cheating in multiplayer games
presents a more serious problem. People who wouldn't dream of cheating their
close friends in person—say, playing poker around the living room table—happily
cheat strangers when protected by the distance and anonymity that an online
game offers.
Players have a moral right to expect a fair game when they're playing against other
people, and they have a legal right to a fair game as well if they're paying money
for the privilege. This becomes even more crucial if they're playing for prizes.
Although all game software comes with a disclaimer that the publisher sells the
software as is and without any warranty, the moment you start to give out prizes
