Virtual Life and Passive Cheating
Cho Jin-seo writes in The Korea Times Mouse Plays When Gamer’s Away. It’s about macros that automagically plan an online game (to accumulate wealth) and external hardware devices used to automate play.
[tease]
Just before connecting to the game’s main server, Shin, who doesn’t want to give his full name, quickly deactivates the game window and clicks on a cheating program called Joy Mac. When he returns to the game screen, and presses “Insert’’ on the keyboard, the cheating program kicks in and starts to control the game character automatically, without any controls by the gamer.
Throughout the day, Joy Mac repeats the job — searching for a weak monster, killing it, picking up the money and items the monster drops, and recovering strength by drinking a magic potion, all of which many gamers find too tedious — until Kim returns home after dark and takes the controls over from his electronic servant.
“People do not want to do such monotonous, routine things for hours. But Joy Mac does it without complaining,” Shin said. “It is an essential tool for players of RF Online.”
[tease]
It is practically impossible for outsiders to tell whether a human or a computer program is playing a game character. Also, it is not against Korean law to use a macro of an auto-mouse, as they do no damage to the game’s main server.
Virtual life imitates real life. I do not understand why smart people become addicted to massive multiplayer online games (MMOG). Why can’t they become addicted to blogging like regular people? [grin]
[via unmediated]