Playing online games has become a popular form of entertainment, but it has also attracted antisocial users who can spoil other players’ game experience by using cheats. This paper attempts to characterize cheaters who are banned from a game by comparing them to non-cheaters. We extracted the gaming habits and teammates of players from the publicly available log data of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which is a popular online first-person shooter (FPS) game. We tend to believe that cheaters would be isolated and that players would feel negative about cheaters in general gaming communities. That is, prevailing perception is that cheaters are loners who find pleasure in purposefully irritating other players. However, this study characterizes cheaters as active, sociable, and cooperative. We have found that cheaters actively socialize with their friends more than non-cheaters by playing in duo or squad mode. The findings also indicate that cheaters have more friends than non-cheaters. Finally, cheaters are found to be more interested in winning matches than damaging their team members. Cheaters contribute more to the team than non-cheating players by causing significant damage to opponents during matches. This paper extends our knowledge about online deviance and may be applied to developing anti-cheat solutions.
1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Data
4. Results
5. Discussion