Ryan MacMillan

Hello, I’m Rob.

I have very slightly long hair, but it’s not vertical. I’m not a punk. I play an online multi-player computer game called Battlefield 2142, from which “punks” (cheats) get kicked every day. This sort of punk is not interested in swearing on TV though.

The software Electronic Arts use to detect cheaters is called “punkbuster”. While it detects “known” hacks, there are always hackers coding new hacks which take time to be detected. This cat and mouse game leaves EA a step behind, and so they often look over the leader boards and wipe the stats of players who seem to have scored “too highly”. If you just happen to be a good player, and your stats get wiped in error (as mine were about 6 weeks ago) then you have to write a lot of very passionate letters explaining that you are not a cheat before you have your stats restored. Basically, that’s not exactly a great system.

The behaviour of virtual soldiers on a virtual battlefield may seem quite trivial to the average businessman or consumer…

Well, apply the brakes here. When real money gets involved in non-real stuff, the virtual can suddenly become very real, and vice versa.

An example of a move from the real to the virtual might be traditional “real life” games such as poker starting to get a huge online following, whereas an example of a move from the virtual to the real might be online worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life producing virtual objects which are being bought and sold for money that can buy things in the real world.

With lots of money changing hands around these platforms, security is vital, and if someone can cheat at an online computer game, then perhaps they can cheat within other, more financially significant electronic worlds? Actually, it turns out that the software on which all these systems rely is very similar, and the security issues are technically side-by-side.

We all have bank accounts. A great many of us use online banking and are increasingly engaging with e-commerce. Almost none of us know about the technical process of making this secure.

The parallels between maintaining an online economy and an online gaming community are sufficiently numerous, and close enough in nature that we should all start thinking about how they are going to affect our ability to trust and be trusted in virtual online environments.

If someone cheats me out of my stats in a computer game, that’s annoying. If someone cheats me out my life savings though, that’s probably going to sting more.