"Technically hacking does ruin games," John recently told me. "I do feel bad for doing it, ‘cause I know regular legit gamers—which I once was—just want to have fun and play the game with their friends. I basically go into servers and hack, because it's like releasing anger with my job. I fix Blackberrys for Rogers Wireless, and I get bitched at and get stressed out, because people are upset."
Cheating is John's anger outlet, one he's willing to pay up to $25 a month to keep using. His situation is the reverse of most video game scare stories. Video games have not compelled him to misbehave in the real world. A shooter video game didn't turn him into a hellion in real life. On the contrary, the real world, he says, is what has caused him to be a cheating terror in the video games he plays.
Paying cheaters like John are the steroid-users of video games, with two caveats: 1) nothing they do appears to be illegal; 2) nothing they do appears to require the skill that, say, still must be present to enable even the most chemically-enhanced baseball player to swat a 95-mph fastball over an outfield wall.
Paying cheaters certainly violate what some would say is the spirit of the game. They certainly spoil what other players might have thought was a fair competition contested among players of Battlefield or Call of Duty or any other competitive PC game.
A hacker uses cheats in Battlefield 3 in this clip that was uploaded to YouTube a few weeks before BF3 was officially released.
But, certainly, paying cheaters are also gamers, members of a growing tribe of humanity who want to win so badly in, say, Words with Friends that they will peek at dictionaries to help them defeat their best friends. Some people study YouTube clips to learn how to breach invisible walls in Call of Duty. Gamers break rules to gain advantages and even one of the Mt. Rushmore heads of this field, Sims creator Will Wright, says that the best way to play games—the way he plays—is to subvert the game's proper rules.
John is on the extreme end of a spectrum, because his tactics are so lethal, so outside of what the game's creators intended, so far beyond what rival players can defend against and, oh yeah, he paid some hackers money to have them. John pays to be able to kill your character instantly in Battlefield. He's surely crossed some line, though it's anyone's guess just where that line must be.
