Bad behaviour online such as cheating in MMO games is strongly influenced by how players identify with gaming communities.
That's the conclusion reached by Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen (Nanyang Technological University) and Yuehua Wu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in a study of teenagers in Singapore published in the Behaviour and Information Technology journal. The research examined how anonymity and a sense of belonging to social groups within gaming affected in-game cheating -- something which has the capacity to affect both profitability of games and the experience of enjoyable gameplay.
Cheating can be pretty hard to define in relation to gaming -- you say "morally reprehensible actions", I say "totally legitimate exploit" -- but for the purposes of this study cheating was defined as "strategies that a player uses to gain an unfair advantage over his/her peer players or to achieve a target which is not supposed to be achieved according to the game rules or at the discretion of the game operator".
The study found that playing with strangers (which the researchers equate with anonymous gaming) significantly increased instances of cheating behaviour. But rather than anonymous cheating being the result of reduced self-awareness and reduced inhibition, the researchers say it's connected to identification with group norms. That means, rather than being a case of "I'm anonymous I can be as antisocial as I like", players are cheating because they feel it's a norm within that online gaming community.
A follow-up focus group study conducted after the main survey backed this up and "showed that all participants viewed game cheating as something 'everyone is doing' and 'If you don't do it, you will lose out'."
Obviously there are some limitations with the research -- most notably the survey was based around self-reporting which can be unreliable, and it couldn't assess more nuanced interpretations of cheating in relation to specific games, genres of game or contexts.
The study also focused exclusively on teens, meaning that it may not be broadly applicable to other demographics and there may be other factors relating to community interaction which are the "true" mediators of cheating.
Those concerns aside, the researchers concluded: "[The study] shows that deviant behaviours online such as game cheating are largely influenced by the online social groups people feel they belong to. An online group, despite its fluid, unstable and imaginary nature, is powerful in constructing and changing its members' attitudes and views on behaviours. Hence, a behaviour that is perceived as problematic and deviant can be reconstructed with a different interpretation."
The implication here being that if we can alter what is considered normal in online communities we might be better able to counter negative behaviour like cheating as well as flaming, trolling and other forms of abuse.
The full study, "Group identification as a mediator of the effect of players' anonymity on cheating in online games" is available online.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
