Games Cheats
From god-like immortality to infinite ammo, games cheats make it possible to play video games in ways the game designers never intended. While most gamers would consider such changes to be a violation of the game’s design principles, some cheaters see creative innovation in the ways they alter games to suit their own needs.
Video game hacks have been around for decades. In the 1980s, players with some computer knowledge were able to use 8-bit computing systems to manipulate games and change memory values. Statistic variables like lives, health, and ammo are really just numbers stored in a block of memory; changing those values allows you to alter the game’s behavior.
The advent of the Internet in the 1990s facilitated online game communities and the creation of a global professional gaming industry, commonly known as esports. While many of these tournaments are purely skill-based, there are also some that offer large sums of cash to the winners. This shift has caused a huge change in the way that both games developers and players perceive cheats. In esports, skill-based competition is paramount, so it’s no longer acceptable to use cheats to win. But in other types of gaming, companies have jumped on the opportunity to monetize cheats. This has fueled a growing controversy over “pay-to-win” experiences.
Cheats come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, forms, and styles. They can range from simple code alterations to sophisticated third-party software. Some even involve physical hardware devices that alter a game’s internals to allow for cheating.
Regardless of their complexity, all game cheats share common elements: they break the rules of a video game by modifying its internal data structures, allowing players to gain an unfair advantage over other gamers. For example, a speed hack gives cheaters the ability to move at velocities far beyond the game’s designed limits. This can facilitate quick traversal of maps and rapid engagements that opponents cannot react to in time. Aimbots are similarly destructive, granting cheaters precision aim beyond the reach of human capabilities.
A few steps in the process of developing a game cheat include: choosing the programming language, creating memory modules, locating and scanning the game for vulnerability, reading memory and writing to memory, and using hooks. A hook is a programming technique that allows a hacker to extend the functionality of a program at runtime and is used in internal game cheats. Once a hacker has the basic elements in place they can start testing the cheat.
Once a hacker successfully develops a game cheat they are usually ready to sell it to other hackers. The sale of game cheats is a highly competitive industry and the more popular a cheat becomes the more lucrative it will become for its creator. For this reason it is critical for cheat developers to ensure that their code is as secure as possible. A single flaw in the design of a game cheat can lead to its discovery by an untrustworthy hacker and cause them to ruin their reputation along with possibly killing off their revenue stream.