I’m sure you’ve all been there before at some point in your life:  playing a friendly game of Monopoly, enjoying the zesty give-and-take of shifting the same pile of money back and forth between players, when suddenly you notice that the banker took $300 when he paid himself for passing Go instead of the mandated $200.  Perhaps it was an accident, you think to yourself – it would be easy to be distracted by the pure fun of Monopoly and make such a mistake.  And yet, on the next go-round the board, you see him do it again.  That’s when you realize: you’re dealing with a cheater.  You respond the only way you know how; driving the Thimble playing piece into his eyeball while screaming about the “integrity of the game.”

Cheating in board games is a proud tradition that we all learn from an early age.  At the same time, we also learn the proper response to discovering we’ve been cheated, which usually involves a lot of yelling and hitting.  But what do we do when the opponent cheating us doesn’t really exist? When we have no recourse against them?

I recall quite clearly the first time I ever truly noticed that I was being cheated in a video game: It was the original Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo.  Having instantly fallen in love with the game, I had been playing and playing, steadily improving my game, moving up to the higher CC difficulty levels.  Up to that point, I’d felt the game was giving me a good challenge, but my practice was paying off and I was just getting better.  That’s when it happened: it was a ghost track level (I don’t quite recall which one), and my current nemesis, Donkey Kong, was just ahead of me on the final lap.  With a well-timed mushroom burst, I slammed into him from behind, bumping him out of my way, and, more importantly, off the track; with half a lap to go, he was pretty much out of the race.  Confident, I sped towards the finish line.

Suddenly, though, I’m being thrust aside as Donkey Kong suddenly comes racing past me.  How was this possible? I’d just left him soaking in the putrid waters mere moments ago. That was when I realized something fishy was going on in the Mushroom Kingdom.  Wary, I began to watch how the AI racers handled themselves in different situations, and I quickly realized that, yes, the game was quite obviously cheating.  Once the game selected a “rival” for the human player, that racer would always manage to keep themselves at the front of the pack, ready to harass the human.  Often, this would involve simply teleporting back to the fore if necessary.  I was baffled; humans cheated – computers were simply supposed to do what they were programmed to do.

The obvious truth here: sometimes games are programmed to cheat. With my innocence shattered, I began to pay far more attention to how the AI behaved in the games I played, and I quickly realized that games were cheating all over the place.  The reason, as I came to determine, was a matter of challenge.  AI, though we call it “intelligence,” can really only do what it’s told. Game AI, as it currently stands, lacks creativity, or the ability to think beyond what it’s been told to do (in most cases). In this fashion, the AI stands at big disadvantage to a human player who can act unexpectedly, or can make seemingly disadvantageous decisions that can become advantageous further down the line.  By sneaking the AI some hidden bonuses, designers try to ensure that they are giving human players a proper run for their money.

This is all well and good, but problems start to arise when a player no longer feels like they are being challenged, but instead feel like they are being outright cheated.  The key here, as I see it, is subtlety.  Let’s be honest, teleporting Donkey Kong halfway around the track and into 2nd place is somewhat lacking in the subtlety department.  Later installments in the series removed the teleporting AI in favor of more low-key methods of AI chicanery.  In Mario Kart Wii, though I have no proof, I do suspect that the AI gets items on a less-than-random basis in order to show me a tough time, but at least that’s something that fits with established gameplay.

The Civilization series is one that I have always found has a tendency to tread into the “obvious” side of AI cheating.  Civilization is a very complicated game, and while that means ample options for the human player, it also means a lot of headaches in trying to design an AI that can take them all into account.  To help alleviate some of the problems inherent in that, the AI gets a series of little cheats over the human player to help keep things competitive.  What forms those cheats take have changed from installment to installment in the series, and some are more successful in keeping the appearance of fairness than others.  In Civ III, for example, the AI always knows the location of any hidden resources from the beginning of the game.  So, while they may not have the proper technology to reveal them, they will still happily plop a city down to stake a claim on them.  From the human player’s point of view, this initially looks like the AI is functioning at toaster-level, building cities on 2-tile tundra islands in the middle of the ocean.  When oil suddenly appears there a few hundred turns later, however, the truth is revealed.

This kind of cheating, while obvious, is at least somewhat balanced by the fact that once a player sees the AI putting cities in strange places, they know that something valuable will be there at some point.  This, in a way, puts the advantage back in human hands.  Conversely, in Civ IV, the AI is allowed to upgrade at a very steep discount.  For the human player, unit upgrades cost very large piles of money.  What this leads to in many cases is a human player happily building a large army to wreck havoc upon their enemies, marching up with a pile of Rifleman (or what have you) to an enemy city garrisoned only by pitiful old Longbowman and Catapults, and suddenly having them transform into a stack of Infantry and Cannons.  As you might imagine, this can be a little frustrating.

Other games handle giving the AI an edge in many different ways; some successfully, some less so.  Fantasy General, for instance, always knows the composition of my forces, and plans accordingly in each mission (whereas the human player does not know the AI forces ahead of time).  What this means is that if I overload on Cavalry, for instance, the AI will counter with piles of Heavy Infantry.  While I know that the AI is acting on information it shouldn’t have, it still works out because it does create a new challenge, while also encouraging me as the player not to fall into any set pattern.

Oblivion, on the other hand, tries to keep things tough for the player by scaling the levels of all enemies in the game in accordance with the player’s level.  First of all, this is an incredibly obvious method from the player’s point of view, as the enemies they encounter are always at exactly the right level to provide a challenge.  This also results in rather jarring inconsistencies, such as the simple highway bandit decked out in incredibly valuable suits of glass armor.  This also led to some easy exploitation on the part of the player, who could simply not level up and breeze through the game with little difficulty.

Another problem that arises with easy-to-spot AI cheats is that once the player realizes they are being used, they are apt to suspect that they are always coming into play, and may swap recognition of their own bad play for anger at that dirty, stinkin’, cheatin’ AI.  I know I have, right or wrong, blamed many a loss on faceless developers who designed AI that simply couldn’t hold up to my skill without cheating (it’s hard being that good).

So, designers, just remember that when you want to keep things tough for gamers, make sure you try to do it through established gameplay and design.  If you really feel that the AI is in dire need of a little behind-the-scenes help, make sure to implement it in ways that don’t put it right in the player’s face; starting an AI with an extra archer is ok; having your opponents in RC Pro-Am enter permanent overdrive is not.  Once a player realizes they’re being cheated, anger and recrimination are soon to follow.  And trust me, if we end up yelling and putting our fists through a screen, that’s just going to make us even more upset.