TY  - JOUR
AU  - Richardson, Andrew
PY  - 2025/10/05
Y2  - 2025/10/22
TI  - An Updated Classification of Cheating in Esports
JF  - International Journal of Esports
JA  - IJE
VL  - 1
IS  - 1
SE  - Review
DO  - 
UR  - https://www.ijesports.org/article/149/html
SP  - 
AB  - <p>Cheating and doping are common in sports, with various methods to illicit physiological or technical advantages. Academic research has defined many ways and reasons one would cheat within a sporting context. Nevertheless, within esports, cheating is a real threat to the landscape's integrity. These issues have become such a significant problem that developers of these esports are creating anti-cheat software to combat these cheaters. Most esports research discussing cheating has only recounted a handful of methods to cheat, and there is no standalone review to synthesise all the different ways one has cheated in these games before. The work will set out to produce a review of all the current strategies that have been employed to cheat in competitions. The work will utilise Yan and Randell's original categorisation of cheating in video games (2005) and apply it to the esports landscape. Five additional categories were added to Yan and Randell's framework, recording all terminology used to describe cheating in video games and esports. The review has concluded that there are 54 different words or phrases to describe 20 methods to carry out a specific type of cheating, hacking or doping across the esports landscape. The implications of these results show there is more work to be done by esport organisations to make the environment less dopogenic and to invest more into anti-cheat software to curtail cheating proactively.</p>
ER  -