Cheating in video games wasn't always so scandalous: I'm old enough to have fond memories of swapping codes for Contra and Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! Riot Games Riot Games have responded on Reddit to accusations that the anti-cheat client for Valorant is malware. Valorant is one of the biggest games being talked about at the moment and lately. Only 30% of Chinese couples really love each other. The remaining 70% do not love each other, but they also have sex,” Pan said. But when asked what kind of people are more likely to cheat, he.
- Why Do The Chinese Cheat In Video Games So Much Fun
- Why Do The Chinese Cheat In Video Games So Much Money
He convinced me that kids really do not like educational games; in fact, they hate them. And as I watched more kids play video games, I realized Sid was 100% correct. If given a choice between a game designed with a learning goal or a commercial game designed for fun, kids’ll choose fun every time. This was a true turning point in my work. Other viable reasons I've seen is down to the 'everyone is cheating so I thought I would' logic and another one is that a lot of Chinese users aren't very good at the game so they have to cheat to stand a reasonable chance of making the top 20. If video games don’t eat up too much of his time and money, then it’s totally fine. If gaming starts to create obstacles in his work and/or personal life, then it’s time to say goodbye.” – Mary F. “Yes, I understand if they play once in a while, but if it becomes an obsession we won’t be dating for much longer.” – Elizabeth.
An advocate for educational video games realizes that our kids might actually learn more from Civilization, Minecraft, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.
Everything changed at a lunch with the legendary game designer Sid Meier.
For years, I’d been making the case that we should borrow from the games kids love to create new kinds of educational games. But after that one memorable lunch, I realized that we didn’t need to co-opt the mechanics of gaming at all. We could — and should — use the games that kids were already playing, the immersive, sometimes violent games that hold boys and girls enraptured for hours in a state of flow and focus.
Sid, the mind behind games like Civilization and Pirates, is a bold thinker. In our long chat, he gently suggested that my approach — basically, to ask companies like Blizzard and Rockstar to contribute to educational game design — was off base. He convinced me that kids really do not like educational games; in fact, they hate them. And as I watched more kids play video games, I realized Sid was 100% correct. If given a choice between a game designed with a learning goal or a commercial game designed for fun, kids’ll choose fun every time.
This was a true turning point in my work. I spoke to more game designers, particularly educational game designers. Some of them said that designing educational games was crucial because even though kids hate them, they’re “better than what they get in the classroom.” This seemed deplorable. No matter the media, the one thing that research shows most impacts learning is a caring teacher. Replacing a human being with a video game that kids hate, simply because the teacher, constrained in his or her own ways, cannot create an engaging experience … that didn’t seem a good swap to me — and I learned that it wasn’t a swap most teachers wanted either.
Games are surprisingly powerful learning tools on their own. How can they be applied to classroom learning?
Inspired by my observations of kids playing games like Civilization, Minecraft, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, I decided to try to figure out if they were learning anything inside these games that might translate to a traditional classroom. I wasn’t the only one looking at the connections between gaming and real-world success. As I read widely, I discovered things like:
- kids who gamed were less likely to re-offend if they’d been in trouble with the law.
- companies were hiring kids off leaderboards from major games because they believed them to have certain 21st-century skills like communication, grit, teamwork, leadership, followership and perseverance.
Something was happening here, and it wasn’t thanks to educational games.
Now I’m in the middle of a larger four-year research project, still ongoing, that focuses on boys, and what they learn when they game. And one major thing I’ve learned already is that when we reject the games that boys play, the games are merely a proxy for the boys themselves.We reject games because they’re violent, individualistic, competitive, engrossing and largely foreign to us as teachers, parents, leaders, adults. And these are the precise characteristics of boys that we reject when we enforce zero tolerance policies.
Instead, bringing these commercial games into schools will communicate to boys (and girls) that they are indeed valued, that their culture is welcome here, that the teachers, parents and adults in their lives respect who they are and want to learn from and with them as well as teach them.
Competitive, violent fantasy games contribute to the development of strong future leaders and citizens.
So far, this series of studies, led by the work of Jason Engerman, has resulted in some amazing findings. We heard boys describe failure in school as taboo, and failure in a game as desirable. We heard boys describe facile ways of dividing up leadership and recognizing one another’s expertise in the most collaborative and generative of ways — which also happens to be the key to a diverse workplace. We learned about boys and girls who had learned so much about a topic from a game that they realized, as author Kurt Squire learned in his own youth, that games are surprisingly powerful learning tools on their own. How can they be applied to classroom learning?
There are several things that we can do now. First, we can encourage our schools, teachers, boards, policy makers and other parents to value the gaming that our kids are engaged in. At least ten times a month, the parent of a young boy (usually) asks me: “Is it bad for my son to game? What limits do you place on gaming?” Myself, I strive for balance; we need to guard against addictive behaviors in all our life activities. My own sons play games, but they are also active in music, sports and scouting. We don’t have specific limits, because their lives are full of other things that are equally as fun and engaging for them. So, yes, it’s OK for your child to game, as long as they do it in a careful, balanced and sustained way (yes, sustained: deep engagement, grit, perseverance and other good skills are not built by grazing). Valuing their gaming activities amounts to respecting them and their culture.
Second, I’d very much like to gather stories of incidents where parents, teachers, and other adults were surprised by the kinds of learning that they realized their children (or even they) were engaging within games. Tell me your stories. I would love to compile a book of examples of ways that commercial gaming is contributing to real learning out in the world.
Third, I’d love to see more gaming. Like Jane McGonigal, I believe that gaming can make the world a better place. I feel that competitive, violent fantasy games contribute to the development of strong future leaders and citizens. Therefore, I’d challenge all readers to pick up a game their kids or their neighbors’ kids are playing, and play for at least one full hour in sincere and earnest game play. You’ll be amazed at what you learn about yourself, about the game, about your preconceptions about games and gamers, and likely about that kid.
What is it that drives women to cheat, and what can men do to prevent it? An infidelity researcher weighs in.
Most married couples don’t ever imagine their relationship ending in infidelity. But the truth is that even the happiest marriages can be and often are rocked by cheating. There are many reasons for cheating women. The same applies to men. Loneliness might play a major role, as do boredom and alcohol. Sometimes a close relationship with a colleague is taken too far during a long night at the office. Other times a spouse turns to infidelity to fill a physical or emotional void left unfilled by their partner. The root causes of cheating are varied, but infidelity is common. And it’s not just men who are unfaithful. Women cheat on their husbands more than we think.
“We have this idea socially that men are cheaters, all men are susceptible to cheating, that men are dogs, right?” says Alicia M. Walker, an associate professor of sociology at Missouri State University. “But the data tells a very different story.”
In the process of writing her book, The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity, Walker learned that women cheat at the same rates as men, if not more. Turns out, the cheating wife is not an anomaly. And depending on the age group and behavior, sometimes women cheat even more often than men. “Way more women are cheating than we think,” she says. “We just don’t like to talk about it and we don’t like to think about it. You don’t want to think that your neighbor, your Sunday school teacher, or your friend is doing this. But the reality is, you know a woman who’s cheating, you just don’t know that she is.”
Why Do Women Cheat?
So why do women cheat? The reasons for infidelity are complex and unique to each relationship. Walker makes clear, there’s no one specific reason for infidelity within a marriage. Some women cheat to avoid boredom; other women cheat because they feel neglected. Still, other women say they cheat just because they want to.
“A lot of the time the reasons are physical, sometimes they’re emotional, and, sometimes, as much as we don’t want to admit this or know this, sometimes it’s just a matter of somebody having an opportunity,” says Walker. “There’s a lot of data showing that a woman will have an affair with a coworker and are more likely to report that ‘My marriage is great and I’m super satisfied. I literally saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.'”
The concept of a cheating wife contrasts a lot of what our culture tells us about women. “We want to think of women as not particularly sexual unless they’re deeply in love or they’re married or in some monogamous relationship of some kind. We just don’t want to think that women are just as sexual and just as interested in having sex with multiple partners or a variety of partners or they get bored with marital sex.”
What to Do About Cheating in Marriage
Given the emotional and financial tolls of cheating, (not to even mention their impact on children, which is bigger still) rethinking our preconceptions about female infidelity is only the beginning. Open minds are important, but when it comes to preventing infidelity, communication is paramount. All relationships need to begin with honest conversations about sex, preferably before marriage.
“Something that some of the women in my study brought up that I never thought about was that when they were searching for an affair partner, they were having these candid, frank discussions about sexual compatibility and sexual preferences,” says Walker. “When I got married, I never had any of these conversations, and I started thinking, ‘You know, that’s true, we don’t have those conversations.’ We kind of wander into these romantic pairings and we fall in love and we kind of think that the sex is going to take care of itself. But, according to the data, that’s not true.”
A big component of those frank discussions should be openness to what your spouse is interested in. A lot of the women Walker interviewed said that when they talked openly about their fantasies or desires to their husbands, they were met with disgust that made them feel ashamed. Cheating presented them with an opportunity to feel validated and accepted.
“It was really pretty sobering, to be honest with you,” Walker says. “This is a person who’s pledged to love you for all time and you say to them, ‘Hey, I want to try role-playing,’ or whatever it is, and then think about having the person that you love and trust the most say, ‘That’s disgusting. What’s wrong with you?’ If you listen to that for years, and then in walks somebody who’s not only like, ‘That’s not disgusting,’ but they’re into it, you can see how attractive that would be.”
Infidelity Versus Open Marriages
Why Do The Chinese Cheat In Video Games So Much Fun
In conducting her research, Walker was surprised to learn that a lot of the women that she interviewed were interested in the prospect of an open marriage.
“They don’t want to leave their husband, they love their husband, they’ve got a great life, but what they really want is variety in their sexual partners,” she says. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, I want my husband, and I want this one affair,’ it’s: ‘I want my husband and I want to taste all the parts of the menu!'”
Why Do The Chinese Cheat In Video Games So Much Money
Walker also discovered that women who cheat see it as an exercise in power. The socially accepted norm when it comes to coupling is that the man asks the woman out, the man pays for dinner, the man proposes marriage. While the ideas behind these traditions may be chivalrous, Walker says that the women she spoke to eventually felt confined by these actions.
“They always felt like they had been chosen, rather than choosing themselves,” she says. “And then they go online to Ashley Madison, or any other site, and there are all these men, and now they’re choosing rather than being chosen.”
In the end, attentiveness is the key. When you’re with your spouse, Walker says it’s vital to make sure you’re thinking of her needs as well as your own.
“Any man who is concerned about this,” she says, “you should really start looking at your own behavior in the bedroom and really make sure that you’re holding up your end of the table. Because, if you’re not, there’s somebody out there who’s more than willing to do that.”