When it comes to unfair tactics, some of us are just better at bending the rules. But, the urge to cheat at games is easier to understand when you examine how they are designed.

There is a grey area between being a little dishonest and actively cheating. Who hasn't failed to draw attention to their presence on a rival's property in Monopoly or snuck a glance at opponents' cards in Cluedo? Even if we never intended to deceive, the little rush of adrenaline from not paying rent or gaining an edge over others feels good.

While it might lead to a few family disputes over the holidays, and perhaps the odd overturned board, cheating is a major problem in professional gaming. Coaches of Counter Strike esports teams have been handed bans for exploiting bugs and match fixing. Top esports players can earn millions of dollars, so any suggestion of cheating is hotly investigated. The worlds of professional poker and bridge have also found themselves rocked by recent cheating scandals.

But, despite attempts in both professional and amateur games alike to stop it, cheating is more common than we might think. Surprisingly, it can also be a good thing.

Whyville, created in 1999 as an educational game for children aged eight and over, might seem like an unlikely place to investigate cheating. But it is evidence that cheats appear anywhere and everywhere, says Mia Consalvo, author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, and professor in game studies and design, and communication studies at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada.

Players complete science and maths puzzles in return for "clams" – the virtual currency used in the Whyville world. Clams could be exchanged for avatar upgrades like new facial features, haircuts or possessions, while players were able to design their own upgrades to sell at any price they wished at the trading post.

The game won plaudits for its innovative use of virtual currencies and for engaging a younger, mostly female audience in science and maths (at one point a virus – Whypox – spread across avatars' faces, and players had to work out how to stop it).

"When I heard that this game was for tween girls, I asked the developers, 'Oh, so you probably don't have any problems with cheating,’" says Consalvo. She had good reason to believe this was the case. Most of the research on cheating at that point focused on men, she says – it was thought that men cheated more than women.

But the developers of Whyville noticed something unusual – here was a game where 68% of the audience were female aged 8-13, but in which cheating was rife. Like many games, there were cheat codes and walkthrough guides. But players also hacked each others' accounts or set up secondary accounts to scam their way to more clams, found Yasmin Kafai, a professor of learning at the University of Pennsylvania, US, and Deborah Fields, at Utah State University, US.

Consalvo was also captivated by another kind of cheating in the game – something she had rarely seen elsewhere. Using the chat function, some of the girls were manipulating the clam market by conspiring to drive up the value of their goods. Groups of girls would publicly say how rare or sought-after a particular upgrade was, and how much they would be willing to pay, to trick other players into overpaying for their goods. Consalvo calls this a kind of "social arbitrage", a form of market manipulation.

"That's brilliant, right?," says Consalvo, of the ingenuity of the girls. "You never can predict who is going to be doing what in a game, there will always be something new and interesting coming along."

Why were they cheating? In her book, Consalvo describes an idea called "gaming capital". Being good at a game brings a social cachet that elevates you within the community. Good players want to maintain their statuses and be sought out as experts.

"There's this knowledge that you get from deep play of a particular game… and that's something that you can share with other folks," says Consalvo. "The idea is that you have a kind of cultural capital."

But to maintain this status, sometimes players might need to cheat. Curiously, it might be the case that better players feel the need to cheat more than players who are worse than them. The fear of losing something appears to be a greater motivator to cheat than the lure of a gain.

This might be because the loss a player feels in a game is real. It hurts to have your gaming capital taken away from you, even if what you are losing are Monopoly dollars or Whyville clams.

The idea of cheating to maintain status might be supported by evidence from other areas. Kerry Ritchie, who researches how to improve teaching at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, says the majority of academic cheating is conducted by high-achieving students, (60% of offenders earned grades 80% or more). While cheating in education is not the same as cheating during play, if there are similarities it's that those at the top feel a pressure to maintain their status.

But there are other factors that influence whether we cheat or not. The more cheating friends a player has, for example, the more likely they are to cheat in the future. This could be for two reasons: social influence – where the actions of our friends causes us to alter our behaviour – or homophily, where we seek friends who are like ourselves. "People will say, 'Well, other people are cheating too, so I need every advantage that I can get,’" adds Consalvo.

So, were honest Whyvillians being egged on to cheat by their dishonest friends? Or do people who are more likely to cheat seek each other out to be friends? There is research that indicates it could be the latter as we tend to be friends with people who show similar levels of trustworthiness. But Kafai and Fields note that market manipulation in Whyville requires a lot of social interaction, so friends might be influencing each other.

Players are more likely to behave dishonestly if they can say that it benefits other people as well as themselves
Cheating as a group might also allow some players to justify their behaviour. Players are more likely to behave dishonestly if they can say that it benefits other people as well as themselves.

In a 10-year follow up to their study of cheating in Whyville, Kafai and Fields found that (while the average age of players had increased a bit) it was still common and openly discussed among people playing the game. Kafai and Fields say that this can be a positive thing – it encourages the young players to wrestle with moral judgements, and because cheating is commonly a communal activity, it requires negotiation.

However, they also observed the negative effects of cheating. While some of the cheating was fairly innocuous, being cheated out of clams hurt players. Kafai and Fields give one example of a 12-year-old girl, Zoe, who after being scammed out of her earnings turned to scamming for the first time the following day. Then, two weeks later, stopped playing altogether. The magic of the game had been ruined.

Kafai and Fields explain that scamming is an activity that is directed at other players and not the design of the game, and also speculate that it could be linked to cyberbullying. They say that the high rate of scamming in the game demonstrates the need to educate children about the effects of their actions.

Aside from multiplayer games, cheating might make single-player games better, and doesn't come at the cost of another player's enjoyment. When playing alone, cheating can repair moods, provide stress relief and satisfy psychological needs.

Consalvo puts this down to several reasons. Firstly, sometimes games are less than perfect. A small flaw or oversight might mean a player gets stuck – and that's no fun for anyone. Consalvo says that this is overwhelmingly the reason most people cheat. She compares this to reading a book. If the reader has to fully understand a chapter before moving onto the next, people might lose interest and put the book down. Many games, though, are designed so that a player has to complete a level before moving on. Unlike a book, the difficult bits can't be skipped.

Some games are boring too, says Consalvo, and it might be more fun to "play God" and experiment with the game. Players can show their creativity by finding new ways to play the game – using cheats to set new boundaries.

If all that is at stake is imaginary currency or our own pride for completing a game fairly, maybe cheating isn't so bad. The deceptive Whyvillians who manipulated the market were certainly demonstrating their creativity – let's hope that they also learned where the boundary is between right and wrong.

BBC

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