title: “Multiplayer Cheating Is A Social Problem” date: 2025-08-16 author: “Hanif Bin Ariffin” draft: false

Recently, there have been some discussion in tackling cheating in video games using kernal anti-cheat. This allows the program to run at a much lower level layer of the machine so that it can own and observe the whole system. This is basically giving the program root access to your computer and so it can do whatever it want. In general, you do not want to have other people to own your system.

However, I would argue that does not fix the problem. It misses the point. Even if they have complete control over the machine, what prevents someone from having a coach besides them? What if they recruit slaves to play the game in some MMO gold farm? What if they have better computer and accessories? What if they have better ping? What if they have been playing the game much longer or is simply better?

Ultimately, multiplayer games is a social game, which requires social solution. And a social system works on reputation. Reputation involves social currency. And internet social currency is so cheap to forge, you can simply create new account to mint them.

That is to say, kenel anti-cheat does not actually solve the problem. It simply made backdoors widespread and acceptable.