In my experience with cheaters (primarily catching them), the hyper competitive crowd aren't necessarily the ones who cheat. Besides a few outliers in the group who want to keep up, most of them genuinely want to be good at the game. They truly want to see how good they can be.
The most common cases of confirmed cheating were members of gaming groups who play multiple games together. For fear of being chastised by their peers, they turned to cheats to keep up in the games in which they aren't as good. They can't be a top player in one game, and be respected as such but then treated as a n00b in another game. They can get extremely defensive about denying it and might eventually become true jerks as a method of coping. Eventually they can wind up deluding themselves into believing they are good without the cheats, but use them anyway because it's "fun".
Trolling, or the love of pissing others off, is pretty common these days. In reality, it can be indicative of sociopathy, but I digress as it's not necessarily the case in the gaming world. They can have motivations ranging from pure lulz to vengeance. They are annoying and can ruin the fun for a lot of people, but they'll usually admit the cheating and not actually do it all the time anyway.
It's important to give positive and negative reinforcement when it's appropriate. If you or your friend does something that is socially unacceptable, like bigotry or cheating, be sure you aren't tacitly approving the behavior by laughing and not expressing disapproval. This is true all the time, but especially potent when you are looked up to by someone.
Edited by MadLibrarian, 14 December 2014 - 04:37 PM.
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xti, on 14 July 2012 - 06:12 AM, said:
