Five of the Most Common Games Cheats
Game cheats are an ongoing problem that threatens fair competition and the enjoyment of honest gamers. This article takes a closer look at five of the most common games cheats, from aimbots to wallhacks, scripting, ghosting, and speed hacks, exploring their mechanics, impacts, and ongoing fight against them.
While some game developers intentionally include cheat codes during development, these alterations can be discovered by gamers by using third-party software after a game has been released. Cheats are often used to save in-game progress, or to help players get ahead on a difficult level, but they can also be a means of adding a personal touch or even lore into a game’s story.
Cheat codes are a product of the evolution of gaming and its technology. When gaming first appeared in the 1980s, it was possible to manipulate 8-bit computing systems and change memory values associated with a game’s statistics (lives, ammo, health, etc). These self-made cheats allowed gamers to teleport across large areas of a game world or even skip entire levels without ever having to play through them.
As games have grown in size and scope, a number of other cheating methods have emerged to make the experience more challenging for the player. Some of these methods include boosting, farming, stat-padding, currency manipulation, and scripting.
These forms of cheating are often in direct conflict with a game’s integrity, which is why the first step in any anti-cheat strategy should be to implement data encryption and security tools to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and offline tampering of critical game files. Achieving this goal requires a holistic approach, from design to deployment, that ensures all gameplay elements are protected from offline tampering and that player data is always validated against the server.
Creating and developing game cheats is an incredibly complex process that involves deep understanding of coding, game mechanics, and memory manipulation. Some of these cheats are created by gamers for their own enjoyment, while others are developed for use in professional video game competitions such as esports. For the most part, cheats are considered hacking because they involve modifying the core code of a game to alter its functions in an unauthorized way. In order to create a game cheat, hackers must identify a vulnerability in the game’s core files and then exploit that weakness to access and modify critical game data. This process can be time-consuming and tedious, especially when a programmer must find a vulnerable point in the game’s coding and then figure out how to exploit that hole. This is an example of the “hacker mindset” that makes many people think of game cheats as a form of hacking.