[UPDATE] Microsoft Devastates Autistic Child By Labeling Him a Cheater

[Anton P. Nym]

And you completely miss my point; I take it you weren't gaming in the 90's?

*smirk* I'd been gaming for over a decade by the period you describe; depending upon how you define it, I could've been near the end of my second decade of gaming since I started hitting arcade consoles about the time that Star Wars came out. I will admit that the bulk of that gaming was either on arcade consoles or home computers (C-64 in the '80s, then various PCs) on titles that did not have "completion counters". (I gamed on a VAX smart-terminal a few times, too. Ph3ar my cyb3rgeezerness.) The first console I owned was the Xbox 1.

Because I'm not simply talking about getting to the end of the story. I'm talking about the completion counters that, last gen and earlier, kept track of pretty much the exact same thing that gamer score does today.

No, they don't; your clinging to that paradigm demonstrates clearly that you don't play Xbox games with any frequency. Many Achievements have nothing to do with direct game content. I'd argue that most Achievements can be accomplished without doing missions or sidequests... the Multiplayer ones in particular, as I've said before, as they measure individual feats played against other players. (Kill/Death ratios, heals on other players, flag captures, etc.) Even in single-player, though, many Achievements have nothing to do with finding content; Crackdown's "Car Juggler", for instance, was granted for using high explosives to loft a vehicle for 30(? something like that) seconds before allowing it to return to the ground. That's well outside the "completion meter" paradigm, rewarding players for emergent play.

They're not the same concepts, unless you broaden the term "completion meter" until the term is meaningless.

And yes, tampering with the scores in an arcade is worth getting fired over. However, tampering with them in a singleplayer console game really has no bearing on anything. Your suggestion to unplug the Xbox from live is patently absurd. What you're saying is to have a singleplayer experience, I have to completely disconnect from the internet -- even when the game is singlelplayer only.

Hey, that's the way all '90s games were played. If you want to return to that play style, then go all the way.

If you want to play in the 21st century, though, you're going to have to take into account how gaming has changed in the intevening decades... and one such way is the social aspect of play granted by ubiquitous, persistant, networked gaming.

Xbox Live is a world-spanning arcade. That's how it was conceived, and that's how it works. You can always opt out... MS doesn't care if you don't subscribe, it only cares if your actions have bad repercussions on other subscribers; and whatever you think, the vast majority of players on Live do want their Achievements to have some sort of meaning over the network and don't appreciate someone claiming Achievements falsely.

-- Steve

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

And you completely miss my point; I take it you weren't gaming in the 90's?

*smirk* I'd been gaming for over a decade by the period you describe; depending upon how you define it, I could've been near the end of my second decade of gaming since I started hitting arcade consoles about the time that Star Wars came out. I will admit that the bulk of that gaming was either on arcade consoles or home computers (C-64 in the '80s, then various PCs) on titles that did not have "completion counters". (I gamed on a VAX smart-terminal a few times, too. Ph3ar my cyb3rgeezerness.) The first console I owned was the Xbox 1.

Because I'm not simply talking about getting to the end of the story. I'm talking about the completion counters that, last gen and earlier, kept track of pretty much the exact same thing that gamer score does today.

No, they don't; your clinging to that paradigm demonstrates clearly that you don't play Xbox games with any frequency. Many Achievements have nothing to do with direct game content. I'd argue that most Achievements can be accomplished without doing missions or sidequests... the Multiplayer ones in particular, as I've said before, as they measure individual feats played against other players. (Kill/Death ratios, heals on other players, flag captures, etc.) Even in single-player, though, many Achievements have nothing to do with finding content; Crackdown's "Car Juggler", for instance, was granted for using high explosives to loft a vehicle for 30(? something like that) seconds before allowing it to return to the ground. That's well outside the "completion meter" paradigm, rewarding players for emergent play.

They're not the same concepts, unless you broaden the term "completion meter" until the term is meaningless.

And yes, tampering with the scores in an arcade is worth getting fired over. However, tampering with them in a singleplayer console game really has no bearing on anything. Your suggestion to unplug the Xbox from live is patently absurd. What you're saying is to have a singleplayer experience, I have to completely disconnect from the internet -- even when the game is singlelplayer only.

Hey, that's the way all '90s games were played. If you want to return to that play style, then go all the way.

If you want to play in the 21st century, though, you're going to have to take into account how gaming has changed in the intevening decades... and one such way is the social aspect of play granted by ubiquitous, persistant, networked gaming.

Xbox Live is a world-spanning arcade. That's how it was conceived, and that's how it works. You can always opt out... MS doesn't care if you don't subscribe, it only cares if your actions have bad repercussions on other subscribers; and whatever you think, the vast majority of players on Live do want their Achievements to have some sort of meaning over the network and don't appreciate someone claiming Achievements falsely.

-- Steve

Bold part mine.

You just proved that you haven't played the kind of game I was talking about. If the developers went to the trouble of creating an achievement for it, it's not "emergent gameplay," it's the player doing something that they had planned, but isn't necessary for completion. Just because the side quest is given in a non-standard way doesn't make it something completely thought up by the player. Oddly enough, you've been playing both too long and not long enough to really get what I'm talking about.

As for the whole "unhook your console from the internet if you want to cheat" thing, that's like saying "If you want to hack in a singleplayer game of GalCivII, you should be prepared to be banned from playing TF2. Nevermind the fact that one is singleplayer only, and the other is a completely different game, which you haven't cheated at." Just because something is hooked up to the internet shouldn't mean anything for a piece of software that doesn't need to connect to it.

As for the arcade thing, the world can't be an arcade, unless you broaden the term "arcade" until the term is meaningless. A local score board and a world wide one are two very different things.


Captcah: Cessibl (insert three Hebrew characters here)

Alright ReCaptcha, now you know my keyboard can't reproduce Hebrew.

 

[kypsilon]

I'm disappointed in the human species that stuff like this not only merits the attention of a company like Microsoft but the world at large. Somebody got paid to investigate this incident. Paid to investigate tampering of a score that means nothing. Don't put that money into game development or anything...

 

[sonofzoltan]

Equal rights for mentally disabled children vs. gamerscore.... hmm thats tough.....

 

[D_987]

You just proved that you haven't played the kind of game I was talking about. If the developers went to the trouble of creating an achievement for it, it's not "emergent gameplay," it's the player doing something that they had planned, but isn't necessary for completion.

Wow, talk about clutching at straws - just let it go, you're defiantly in the wrong here. It's as Anton stated, achievements offer longer life to a game, to a wider audience. That emergent gameplay element is still there, and is entirely optional as always, more players are just likely to attempt these little feats due to an additional reward. Gaming has changed, developers don't want players to cheat anymore, thus they remove them from the game, or punish them through loss of achievements [ala GTA IV]. Lament that all you want, but you'll be part of a dwindling minority - to be honest it just seems like you're arguing this point for the sake of it, I really can't beleive anyone would care this strongly about cheating in single-player games...

 

[ryanxm]

well like everyone else im sad if he was innocent but if he cheated well i dont really care

 

[Char-Nobyl]

I'm going to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. Unlike what Hollywood would have you believe, having a mental disorder does not give you intellectual superpowers. I sincerely doubt that this 11 year old used the magical power of autism to boost his gamerscore so high and so quickly that it resembled cheating.

Also doesn't Silicon Valley have the highest concentration of autistic people in the world? Not to sound crass but if anyone knows autism it's Microsoft.

Beats me. As I said, autism isn't a superpower in the slightest. It's far more likely to leave you intellectually impaired than with above-average intelligence.

 

[Callate]

Many things have value only when people believe that they do. More things than often bears thinking about. Money, for example.

But it's an either-or proposition. Either it doesn't matter- in which it makes no difference whether the alleged cheater gets his precious achievements back, so there's no good reason to complain- or it does matter, in which case Microsoft is perfectly entitled to enforce their codes as they surely warned in their documentation that they would.

You don't get to participate in a money economy, then start making counterfeit money, and then when you're caught say "But it doesn't matter, I'm not into this whole 'money' thing anyway."

Achievements mean something to some people and nothing to others, but it's in no one's interest to devalue them for the people they do matter to.

 

[bob1052]

Equal rights for mentally disabled children vs. gamerscore.... hmm thats tough.....

Equal rights would be his account getting banned for hacking when his account is used for hacking. He was treated equally and they are still complaining because no one likes to be punished, no matter how fair it is.

 

[Alizee Serenity]

Ya know, there are some people who just have the time and the skill to excel at a game more so then others, I think they may have jumped at it rather quickly instead of stepping back and looking into it. Then again, Microsoft might just be too busy for full blown cheating investigation with as many players game a day, a month, a year; still its worth chewing on. People aren't right all the time.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

You just proved that you haven't played the kind of game I was talking about. If the developers went to the trouble of creating an achievement for it, it's not "emergent gameplay," it's the player doing something that they had planned, but isn't necessary for completion.

Wow, talk about clutching at straws - just let it go, you're defiantly in the wrong here. It's as Anton stated, achievements offer longer life to a game, to a wider audience. That emergent gameplay element is still there, and is entirely optional as always, more players are just likely to attempt these little feats due to an additional reward. Gaming has changed, developers don't want players to cheat anymore, thus they remove them from the game, or punish them through loss of achievements [ala GTA IV]. Lament that all you want, but you'll be part of a dwindling minority - to be honest it just seems like you're arguing this point for the sake of it, I really can't beleive anyone would care this strongly about cheating in single-player games...

I believe very strongly that gaming companies shouldn't be able to tell me what to do with hardware and software I've already paid for. This extends to cheating in single player games if I so desire, but that's a small aspect of a larger belief.

 

[Ghengis John]

Wow way to slant the story. You guys have re-written that headline twice now and each time it sounds meaner and meaner. You might wanna throw some bleach in there, your journalism is looking a little yellow. It's entirely possible the kid was cheating. Autistic or not. For that matter, autistic does not mean retarded or in any way disabled. You're tying to make it sound like "this poor sick child" but he's 11 and perfectly capable of cheating.

 

[D_987]

You're tying to make it sound like "this poor sick child" but he's 13 and perfectly capable of cheating.

I agree the article is mostly hyperbole, that the kid was defiantly cheating and that he deserves his punishment. But the OP clearly states in the second line the kid is 11, not 13.

 

[D_987]

I believe very strongly that gaming companies shouldn't be able to tell me what to do with hardware and software I've already paid for. This extends to cheating in single player games if I so desire, but that's a small aspect of a larger belief.

If you beleive that then don't sign up for Xbox Live, you wave away that right by accepting the terms and conditions. It's really not that difficult to understand...

 

[Ghengis John]

You're tying to make it sound like "this poor sick child" but he's 13 and perfectly capable of cheating.

I agree the article is mostly hyperbole, that the kid was defiantly cheating and that he deserves his punishment. But the OP clearly states in the second line the kid is 11, not 13.

Ty, fixed.

 

[Bernzz]

might be better to save some face and some PR by giving it back to him. even if he did cheat.

But will he learn? If they just give it back, if he cheated, then he won't learn a thing. Nothing about his autism, neither would anyone if the same thing happened to them.

 

[Supp]

"devastates"

Really, The Escapist, really?

Devastation is when you lose your whole fucking town to a tornado.

This is something on a level slightly less life changing than this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YersIyzsOpc