Steam, the massively popular PC gaming platform, recently updated their policies and tools for sharing games among family members. And they’re pretty consumer friendly! Basically, you can create a family and have your kin join it so that you can all play each other’s games with your own save files, achievements, etc.
One thing in the list of frequently asked questions that accompanied this announcement did catch my eye, though. It was about what happens when someone in your family misbehaves:
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game.
Woof, that’s rough. If your idiot younger brother is playing your copy of Helldivers II and tries to load up some cheats so that he gets banned, that’s it. You’re both banned from the game.
Valve, the owner of Steam, probably has various reasons for doing it, but it also reminds me of what I wrote in my book, Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People Who Play Them, about how cheating is a social disease that spreads among contacts.
To take a closer look at social networking among cheaters, University of South Florida’s Jeremy Blackburn and his colleagues decided to scrape a ton of data on such villains and their friends from Valve’s Steam platform. The computer program Steam not only acts as a digital storefront, but also has a number of features that facilitate social interaction and buddying up. Chief among these is its Friends list, which lets you keep track of your pals, send them messages, and invite them to play games with you. Valve also runs what it calls the Valve Anti-Cheat System, or “VAC” for short. This is a tool that’s in use by over 60 games to curb cheating and hacking by detecting such antics and placing a big red “CHEATER” flag on the offending user’s Steam account. Those who run multiplayer game servers usually configure them to kick such cheaters square in the crotch and off the server, so getting such a VAC ban has serious consequences. This is especially true considering that all the games you buy with a given Steam account are indelibly attached to that account, so getting around the ban usually requires re-purchasing games under a new identity. On top of that, a big “Bans on record” is displayed in red text on the cheater’s public profile –a mark that Blackburn wittily calls “The Scarlet C” in reference to another scarlet letter made famous by novelist Nathaniel Hawthorn. Valve likes to keep the details of how VAC works a secret for obvious reasons, but the website VACBanned.com estimates that it has resulted in over two million such bans since its release in 2002.
Blackburn and his colleagues pulled Steam profile information for over 12 million members of the Steam community through its website, including 700,000 or so marked with the scarlet C of a VAC ban. After running the data through complex social graphing methods, the researchers found several results that support the idea that people tend to cheat in video games more often when their friends cheat. “Cheating appears to spread through a social mechanism,” the researchers write of their analysis of known cheaters’ Friends lists. “The presence and the number of cheater friends of a [non-cheating] player is correlated with the likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future.” A full 15% of cheaters have mostly other cheaters on their friends list, and 70% of cheaters have friends lists that are at least 10% cheaters. This is far different than the population of non-cheaters, Blackburn and his co-authors note. While their analysis doesn’t preclude the contribution of other factors to this outcome (e.g., maybe cheaters find and befriend each other through their common interest in such knavery), it does show that having someone on your friend’s list who gets branded with the scarlet C increases the probability that you will join them.
So Valve’s sharing cheating bans across members of a family makes a certain amount of sense, especially if they want to prioritize getting rid of cheaters. For sure, another part of the reasoning for this rule is that it eases the administrative burden of making judgment calls and adjudicating the “It was my kid brother!” defense. But knowing that cheaters tend to flock together probably made deciding on this rule easier, as well.
