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Breaking reality: exploring pervasive cheating in Foursquare
Abstract
This paper explores the notion of cheating in location-based mobile applications. Using the popular smartphone app Foursquare as main case study, I address the question if and how devious practices impact the boundaries between play and reality as a negotiated space of interaction. After establishing Foursquare as a prime example of the gamification phenomenon and pervasive gaming, both of which require us to rethink notions of game and play, I will argue that cheating in location-based mobile applications challenges not just the boundaries of play, but also of playful identity.
... Users of a gamified campus orientation application, which enables students to unlock achievements upon arrival to certain locations around campus, exploited the widely-defined GPS detection radius to unlock achievements without actually visiting the required locations [10]. Similarly, false check-ins occurred in Foursquare – a locationbased mobile application enabling users to check-in at real-world venues to earn points and badges [2] [11]. ...
Gamification of fitness applications opens the door to cheating by exploiting inherent limitations of sensing, in order to advance in the game without performing the required physical activity. While this type of behavior is usually conceptualized negatively, we propose it could actually be beneficial for encouraging physical activity. We integrate prior work on cheating in online games with prior work on embracing non-normative behavior, and suggest design opportunities for embracing cheating in gamified fitness applications.
... In fact, Foursquare, one of the most popular location-based social networks and an early innovator in gamification, has experienced "pervasive" cheating [Glas 2011]. In Foursquare, users "check-in" to physical locations, receiving points for various tasks. ...
Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. One unfortunate phenomenon, however, poisons the competition and spoils the fun: cheating. The costs of cheating span from industry-supported expenditures to detect and limit it, to victims’ monetary losses due to cyber crime.
This article 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 observed timing information of the cheater flags, as well as the dynamics of the cheaters’ social neighborhoods.
We discovered that cheaters are well embedded in the social and interaction networks: their network position is largely indistinguishable from that of fair players. Moreover, we noticed that the number of cheaters is not correlated with the geographical, real-world population density, or with the local popularity of the Steam Community. Also, we observed a social penalty involved with being labeled as a cheater: cheaters lose friends immediately after the cheating label is publicly applied.
Most importantly, we observed that cheating behavior spreads through a social mechanism: the number of cheater friends of a fair player is correlated with the likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future. This allows us to propose ideas for limiting cheating contagion.
Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives.
This chapter enhances the dyadic gain-loss concept by presenting findings of a research project on uncovering whether the efficiency component of gamification could be better attained by balancing a shift from gain to loss, or completely avoiding it altogether. The gamification of any system requires a good selection and balance of game design elements to make the overall experience fun, as well as gaming emotions to keep it intrinsically rewarding. However, if not designed properly, participators of a gamified system that expect the prospect of gaining rewards, may ultimately realize a shift of engagement from gain to avoiding losses any earned status, badge, experience, or popularity often defined within the periphery of the gamified system. Findings reveal changing levels of motivation within different participatory foci, where loss avoidance (punishment scenarios) generates more motivation than the prospect of gaining rewards.
The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing
speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this
number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we
communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises
questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties
and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through
stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how
technologies shape identities. The mobile phone mediates identities on
four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the
mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media
bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In
this dialectic we become moving circles.
Huizinga's concept of a 'magic circle' has been used to depict computer games and gaming activities as something separate from ordinary life. In this view, games are special (magical) and they only come to life within temporal and spatial borders that are enacted and performed by the participants. This article discusses the concept of a 'magic circle' and finds that it lacks specificity. Attempts to use the concept of a magic circle create a number of anomalies that are problematic. This is not, as has been suggested earlier, primarily a matter of the genre of the game, or a discussion of what an appropriate definition of a 'game' might be. Rather, in this study with hardcore gamers, playing computer games is a routine and mundane activity, making the boundary between play and non-play tenuous to say the least. This article presents an alternative theoretical framework which should be explored further.
Location-based mobile social network services such as Foursquare and Gowalla have grown exponentially over the past several years. These location-based services utilize the geographical position to enrich user experiences in a variety of contexts, including location-based searching and location-based mobile advertising. To attract more users, the location-based mobile social network services provide real-world rewards to the user, when a user checks in at a certain venue or location. This gives incentives for users to cheat on their locations.
In this thesis, we investigate the threat of location cheating attacks, find the root cause of the vulnerability, and outline the possible defending mechanisms. We use Foursquare as an example to introduce a novel location cheating attack, which can easily pass the current location verification mechanism (e.g., cheater code of Foursquare). We also crawl the Foursquare's website. By analyzing the crawled data, we show that automated large scale cheating is possible. Throughout this work, we aim to call attention to location cheating in mobile social network services and provide insights into the defending mechanisms.
Advisers: Lisong Xu and Wenbo He
A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.
The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games, and what happens when they can't always play the way they'd like. She explores a broad range of player behavior, including cheating (alone and in groups), examines the varying ways that players and industry define cheating, describes how the game industry itself has helped systematize cheating, and studies online cheating in context in an online ethnography of Final Fantasy XI. She develops the concept of "gaming capital" as a key way to understand individuals' interaction with games, information about games, the game industry, and other players.
Consalvo provides a cultural history of cheating in videogames, looking at how the packaging and selling of such cheat-enablers as cheat books, GameSharks, and mod chips created a cheat industry. She investigates how players themselves define cheating and how their playing choices can be understood, with particular attention to online cheating. Finally, she examines the growth of the peripheral game industries that produce information about games rather than actual games. Digital games are spaces for play and experimentation; the way we use and think about digital games, Consalvo argues, is crucially important and reflects ethical choices in gameplay and elsewhere.
Games are created through the act of gameplay, which is contingent on player acts. However, to understand gameplay, we must also investigate contexts, justifications, and limitations. Cheating can be an excellent path into studying the gameplay situation, because it lays bare player's frustrations and limitations. It points to ludic hopes and activities, and it causes us to question our values, our ethics. In comparison, the concept of the magic circle seems static and overly formalist. Structures may be necessary to begin gameplay, but we cannot stop at structures as a way of understanding the gameplay experience. Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules and in relation to multiple contexts, across varying cultures, and into different groups, legal situations, and homes. One evening in the central city of Jeuno, in the world of Vana'diel, individuals of various races, ages, and genders were gathered by the auction house to buy and sell items of great and little value. It was a normal evening, filled with the usual chatter related to battles, monsters, and socializing, barring one exception. An individual was being taken to task by many others, who slapped, poked, and shouted at him, complaining that he (Kofgood) was ruining the economy of the world with his (and his associate's) activities. No one defended him, and Kofgood himself said nothing, calmly completed his transactions, and then left. Yet, talk about Kofgood and his ilk continued and certainly did not end when he or other individuals left Jeuno.
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