A few days ago, Major Nelson, the czar of Xbox Live, announced that Microsoft's war on terror gamerscore cheating has entered the next phase. Imagine the shock and awe of turning on your 360 one day and finding your gamerscore reset to zero (0). Well, that's just what happened on march 25, 2008 for a small but insidious group of xbox live users. Known as gamesavers, these individuals employ "nefarious techniques" to unlock ill-gotten achievements and artificially increase their gamerscore. in addition to having their gamerscore "corrected", their Xbox.com gamercards have been permanently branded.



To the uninformed gamer, "gamesaving" sounds innocent enough. After all, nearly every gamer saves their progress whenever they reach a checkpoint or complete a level. However gamesaving as it applies to achievements on the xbox 360 is actually a complicated form of gamerscore cheating. By hooking up a third-party accessory in between their PC and their 360, gamesavers are actually able to download pre-made "saved game states" off the internet and load that saved state on their Xbox 360. These saved-states allow the cheater to bypass all the work and unnecessary fun that might come with earning an achievement themself. By loading the game to a saved-state an instant before an achievement was unlocked, gamesavers get all of the gamerscore with none of the effort or skill.

Two lesser forms of gamerscore cheating are boosting and account sharing. Boosting is a method of unlocking multiplayer-based achievements by setting up a game with fellow cheaters and taking turns killing each other or letting the other team win. Shadowrun, for example has a particularly impossible difficult achievement entitled Godlike. It requires you to single-handedly eliminate the entire enemy team of at least 6 players without taking any damage. Even if you haven't played Shadowrun, it should be obvious that this achievement is near-impossible and requires a "perfect storm" of circumstances: useless teammates, newbish opponents, exceptional skill and a lot of luck. Boosters simply join a game of co-conspirators and take turns allowing each other to fulfill the requirements - *bloop* achievement unlocked.

Account sharing on the other hand, is often used in the case of very difficult single-player achievements. To obtain all 200 gamerscore in Geometry Wars Evolved, for example, requires a level of skill and reaction time that I (and many other gamers) do not possess. An unscrupulous user (player A) desiring ill-gotten gamerscore from GW might contact another who does possess this skill (player B) and ask them to unlock the achievements for them. Player B recovers player A's gamertag onto their console, and unlocks the desired achievements. here may even be  payment involved, whereby player B purchases premium content using player A's profile (digitally signing the content to player B's console), thus allowing player B to access it with his own gamertag once the "dark contract" is fulfilled.

Finally, achievement glitching, involves any form of interacting with the game that unlocks an achievement without fulfilling the necessary requirements. For example, Gears of War features an achievement called Seriously for 10,000 online kills, and by glitching, it can be unlocked without the necessary online grinding. Through stat tracking of kill counts, some people have been seriously caught with their hand in the achievement cookie jar. Major Nelson has spoken out against all these forms of gamerscore cheating, confirming that the "best way to increase your Gamerscore or gain that Achievement is to earn it like a real gamer; play the game. Then you can rightly be proud of your Gamerscore as you earned it yourself and not have to worry about anything". Well-said, Major: Achievements were meant to be EARNED (otherwise, it's not really an achievement, is it?).

"but our cheating doesn't affect anyone but ourself!" is a common argument of the gamerscore cheater and their sockpuppets. "gamerscore is meaningless!", they exclaim; not realizing the irony dripping from the statement coming from the very individual who spends their time cheating to increase that same so-called "meaningless" number. To counter this argument, I ask - what exactly is gamerscore? achievements, and the gamerscore they contribute to, are the virtual equivalents of "street credibility" for gamers: earning a difficult achievement grants bragging rights. even before the 360, gamers competed in oneupmanship - "I beat Contra without using the konami code", "I completed Punchout without being knocked out", "I finished Super Mario Bros. in 8 minutes", etc. With achievements, you've now got badges of honour to prove such accomplishments and a way to easily compare them with your friends.

Gamerscore is anything but meaningless. Clearly, it carries meaning for millions of gamers the world-over. Achievements are perhaps Microsoft's greatest innovation with respect to gaming. chievements increase the game-attachment ratio by encouraging gamers to hold onto their games after they "beat the game" (i.e. finish the last level) as there may be dividends involved in replaying it for the entire 1000 gamerscore ("completing the game"). Achievements compel owners of multiple systems to purchase non-exclusive titles on the 360. Achievements keep gamers coming back for more and have contributing to increased revenues of both store and and mail-order based rental companies as gamers rent "B-list" titles such as CSI: Hard Evidence and Avatar: The Burning Earth for a quick injection of 1000 points in a gamerscore competition against their friends.

Gamerscore cheaters dilute the institution of gamerscore. While gamerscore is not meaningless, when boosting, account sharing, glitching for achievements, and gamesaving runs rampant, it tends towards meaninglessness as the waters become muddy. For example, because so many have boosted Godlike, on the off-chance that anyone is able to earn it legitimately they will find that they are automatically assumed to be a booster (some have even speculated that "Godlike" was designed to be a litmus test for boosters). Similarly, anyone with a gamerscore over 100,000 will often be accused of gamesaving. In this regard, gamerscore cheaters have diluted the sacred institution of gamerscore. With the recent "gamerscore correction" of the worst offenders, Microsoft has taken the first steps towards curing Xbox Live of the disease that is gamerscore cheating. In doing so, they may have even reduced their revenue from the gamerscore cheaters, should they decide to leave Xbox Live altogether. but I say - good riddance - and kudos to Microsoft for drawing a line in the sand and proving that it is the legitimate gamers to whom they are marketing their products.