Customer Reviews

Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames

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If you're looking for an academic discussion of gameplay and player behavior and attitudes, this is the book for you. It covers topics like the magic circle of gameplay, types of cheating, and what players consider acceptable or unacceptable cheating. It's well researched and unusually interesting to read for an academic study.

If you're a gamer interested in a journalistic look into the world of modders, botters, and gold sellers, you won't find it here. People who sell in-game currency for real money or hack into video game code aren't discussed. The book focuses on normal players, some of whom cheat at video games. If you have a level 70 Hunter or are playing Halo 3 on heroic, you probably won't learn anything new because this book is really about you.

In this book, Mia Consalvo thoroughly exposes the various layers of cheating in relation to video game playing. She also elegantly develops the notion of how players develop gaming capital through their experience and expertise in playing games. This combined with her concluding thoughts on ethics got me thinking about video games in new ways.

This discussion of cheating in video games was surprisingly dry. Not very much in the way of interesting stories. If you've played a few video games, and thought a little about the nature of cheating in those games, you won't find much insight here. There is a little insight into how cheating makes people feel in the games, but not enough for a whole book. The book attempts to build on an extended theory of why people cheat, but the theory mostly bookends the chapters on types of cheating, and doesn't provide much insight.