Provisioning on-line games: a traffic analysis of a busy counter-strike server
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment
On the geographic distribution of on-line game servers and players
NetGames '03 Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games
A traffic characterization of popular on-line games
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames
Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames
Distribution of online hardcore player behavior: (how hardcore are you?)
NetGames '06 Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in world of warcraft
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Cheating Behaviors in Online Gaming
OCSC '09 Proceedings of the 3d International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing: Held as Part of HCI International 2009
An empirical analysis of online gaming crime characteristics from 2002 to 2004
PAISI'07 Proceedings of the 2007 Pacific Asia conference on Intelligence and security informatics
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
Diffusion dynamics of games on online social networks
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
Distance matters: geo-social metrics for online social networks
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
Dark Gold: Statistical Properties of Clandestine Networks in Massively Multiplayer Online Games
SOCIALCOM '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing
Sociable killers: understanding social relationships in an online first-person shooter game
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
K-path centrality: a new centrality measure in social networks
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Social Network Systems
An analysis of social gaming networks in online and face to face bridge communities
Proceedings of the third international workshop on Large-scale system and application performance
Gender swapping and user behaviors in online social games
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
STFU NOOB!: predicting crowdsourced decisions on toxic behavior in online games
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
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Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. One unfortunate phenomenon, however, poisons the competition and the fun: cheating. The costs of cheating span from industry-supported expenditures to detect and limit cheating, to victims' monetary losses due to cyber crime. This paper studies cheaters in the Steam Community, an online social network built on top of the world's dominant digital game delivery platform. We collected information about more than 12 million gamers connected in a global social network, of which more than 700 thousand have their profiles flagged as cheaters. We also collected in-game interaction data of over 10 thousand players from a popular multiplayer gaming server. We show that cheaters are well embedded in the social and interaction networks: their network position is largely indistinguishable from that of fair players. We observe that the cheating behavior appears to spread through a social mechanism: the presence and the number of cheater friends of a fair player is correlated with the likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future. Also, we observe that there is a social penalty involved with being labeled as a cheater: cheaters are likely to switch to more restrictive privacy settings once they are tagged and they lose more friends than fair players. Finally, we observe that the number of cheaters is not correlated with the geographical, real-world population density, or with the local popularity of the Steam Community.