Tag: GAMING

By Andrew Wailes, Founder and CEO, PlaySafe ID 

Social contracts are everywhere. They’re the guardrails that enable the world to function. We drive on the correct side of the road, we trust that our surgeon is qualified before they operate, and we play football knowing other players will keep the ball between the lines. 

Simply put, we live our lives assuming that rules will be followed, or consequences will be dealt to those who break them. 

I genuinely love that my life and career has revolved around games, gaming, and the relationships I’ve developed from this shared hobby. Despite the decades of technical upgrades and changing business models, the basic social contract of gaming is the same:

You don’t cheat and you don’t abuse your opponent. 

These seem like fair rules, but relying on a social contract isn’t working for gaming’s 3.6 billion players. The games industry now faces a point where there are so many people playing, across so many demographics, that online play can often be an unfair and even dangerous place. One where players can even face death threats and racial slurs for simply playing online games.

Likewise, cheating is all too common, and hackers and bots appear in every game. More extremely, child abuse and child grooming has become increasingly common across many titles and technologies. The majority of players play by the rules, but those who don’t are ruining the experience for everyone.

These are serious and genuinely life-threatening issues which the industry has not yet found a solution to put an end to. 

This poses a really critical question for games, gamers, and the industry as a whole: why is the social contract not working, and what role can identification play in fixing it?

Unaccountability is killing gaming

The core issue of gaming’s cheating problem is a lack of accountability. 

Studios, moderation and anti-cheat companies invest huge resources into tools designed to detect cheaters and dangerous language in games. This work is vital and I’m proud to call many pros in this area personal friends. 

The challenge is that while these tools are highly effective in detecting cheaters and predators, they’re not designed to stop them from returning. The growing value of the £140 billion gaming market has created a parallel black market for cheat software, ensuring that the workarounds to anti-cheat tools always keep pace with the protections. After getting caught, offenders simply create a new email address, perhaps change their IP or spoof their HWID, start a new account and return straight back to the game. 

And the cycle repeats.

Again, again, and again.

No parent expects their child to play with child predators; and no player chooses to invest time and money into an experience where their opponents are cheaters. There’s a huge commercial impact on studios too: 55% of players have either reduced or stopped spending on in-game purchases because of cheating.

When the social contract in a game is broken, there’s no enforcement solution. Unlike other social constructs in life, if a player cheats or commits abuse, they don’t face a driving ban or a ban from a sport. 

Punishments need to have a meaningful consequence that can’t be circumvented in 30 seconds, and that requires an anchor point of identity that cannot be changed, spoofed, or tampered with.

Finding the anchor point

To no surprise, given that you’re reading this in Biometric Update, I believe that biometrics are this anchor point. 

A person cannot be truly spoofed. The use of biometrics and KYC checks are the only reliable anchor point because the structure of every player’s face is unique, and verifiable by matching it to an official government ID. This  is not easily worked around; attempting to break this system escalates the act from a violation of game rules to identity fraud.

This solution allows the industry to break the cycle of unaccountability and to create a social contract with consequence. When a player’s unique biometrics are verified and connected to their gaming identity, they can no longer create new, disposable accounts to hide behind. Consequences are tied to the human being, not the easily replaced username. 

However we need to remember two perfectly reasonable asks from players: privacy and optionality. Passport details and facial biometrics are hugely sensitive pieces of data. Data which games studios do not need to store to create a safe environment.

Know your players?

As an industry, we need to shift the conversation from requiring a player’s identity to confirming a reliable identifier. The goal is for studios not to know a player’s passport information, but to know three things: 

Has this player’s identity been verified? Is this a player facing a penalty for cheating? And has this player been inappropriate to children children? 

If the answer to the last two is “yes,” they shouldn’t be able to join verified matchmaking in games where everyone else has signed this social contract. 

Creating this reliable identifier is made possible through zero-knowledge verification. 

In our own approach at PlaySafe ID, we partner with Onfido, an Entrust company. This approach to verification is crucial because their ID and biometric check happens on their secure platform under stringent privacy rules. We – and games studios – do not store any data, documents, or biometrics from the verification. Instead, we are simply notified of a successful check, at which point the source ID document is hashed and immediately deleted. The only info generated and passed back to games studios is the identifier: a random, anonymised token. This token confirms the player is a real, unique human without revealing who they are. It’s a system built on the principle of minimal data retention and ensures a truly private digital identity.

Identifier tokens, or tokens that represent a person, are also important because they can be used across games. When a studio accurately detects an instance of cheating, a penalty can be applied to the token; and this means the player is blocked across all games using this token check system. It creates accountability throughout the entire gaming ecosystem; without exposing any personal or sensitive data to the games studios. 

Throughout all of this, optionality is vital. Having to verify your identity shouldn’t be a barrier to play, but it should be an option for those desiring an improved experience. When players are given the opportunity to verify their identity and join multiplayer lobbies where their fellow players are accountable, they engage in a social contract where cheating once again matters; and this leads to fewer instances of bad play.

Conclusion

The crisis facing the games industry is an accountability crisis. Every other major social construct is underpinned by guardrails that ensure consequences are real and meaningful. In gaming, the punishment has to finally matter. By leveraging biometric identifiers and zero-knowledge data handling, the industry can secure the one anchor point that cannot be spoofed: the human. This system is the most viable way forward to restore the social contract, protect billions of players, and guarantee that gaming remains the fun, fair, and thriving culture it deserves to be.

About the author

Andrew Wailes is the CEO and founder of PlaySafe ID, the platform dedicated to keeping cheaters, bots, and predators out of video games.

Frustrated after repeatedly encountering cheaters in games, Andrew founded PlaySafe ID to champion player accountability and reduce the amount of revenue lost by game studios because of cheaters. Drawing on senior career experience at tech start-ups Nefta and Metanomic, he mobilised a team to build a system that issues penalties across games. 

He soon realized this approach could also prevent predators from returning as well as cheaters. Spurred by a motive to keep his child safe in digital spaces for years to come, Andrew has since raised $1.12 million to tackle gaming’s biggest safety and cheating challenges head-on.