I have a sneaking suspicion that, given the appropriate battery of tests and surveys to complete, the vast majority of cheaters would display what is considered to be less than healthy levels of self-esteem and self-respect. These are the kids (and adults) who believe that they simply don’t have what it takes to compete on a level playing field with the rest of the world. These are the kids who, in the context of DeeJ’s article, modify their Xboxes to do things that they shouldn’t be able to do in Halo. They’re the ones who collect as many 2-month free trial memberships as they can, systematically using each to get one or two games in before “Bungie’s”:http://www.bungie.net fantastic programs detect and summarily ban them for cheating in multiplayer action and ruining the experience for everyone else. Ironically enough, these are also the kids who spend their entire time raging and ranting, heaping upon everyone else (who are, incidentally, _much_ better players than they are) a wide variety of disparaging, insulting, and racist epithets, who curse and swear in their high-pitched, pre-adolescent voices, who make the rest of us wonder where these kids’ parents are.
I suspect that these are the kids who have no idea how to interact with the real world, who have no social skills to speak of, who couldn’t get a prom date even if daddy gave the girl a financial incentive to date his son for even just one evening. These are the kids who, if you were to see them during the day, are hiding out in the corners of their middle and high schools, hoping that the lunchroom bully won’t find them and beat them up for their lunch money. They’re the ones who have no self-respect because no one has given them a reason to like themselves. It almost makes you feel sorry for them, except for the fact that they take out their pent-up aggression on everyone else via Live because that is, for them, a safe place to give back a little of what they’ve been taking. They haven’t realized yet that just because they’ve been bullied, just because they don’t feel good about themselves, it doesn’t give them the right to make others feel bad or to act aggressively toward everyone else. They haven’t yet realized that cheating and anger are not acceptable responses all the crap they take.
Of course, you have the genuinely narcissistic who believe it is their God-given right to dominate and bully in whatever method they can conceive. For them power is the ultimate high, and they get their jollies from beating other people in whatever way they can.
Most of us, though, prefer to earn our wins the old-fashioned way – through a little hard work. We prefer the respect of our peers because we actually won fair and square. And when we are faced with the esteem challenged and narcissist, we simply roll our eyes, put them on mute so we don’t have to listen to their verbal garbage, and report them to the appropriate cheating authorities. Sure, we’ll probably see them again, albeit under a different screen name, but ultimately they _are_ just little children who haven’t got a clue.
And the game goes on, without them.
