Alistair Aitcheson is a one-man studio working in Wiltshire, UK. He is the developer of the Greedy Bankers series of iOS games and a founding member of indie collective Best of British.

Deep down, everyone's a rebel.

As a game designer, I'm fascinated by how much we humans love to cheat. A couple of years ago I released Greedy Bankers vs The World for iPad - a puzzle game with simple rules, where players could reach over the screen and physically steal gems from each other.

Every gem stolen from an opponent doubled in value, giving players an incentive to play dirty. It played beautifully to the theme of the game: "greed is good."

Originally left in by accident, this element became the killer feature of the game. Players loved feeling like they were cheating the system: breaking the standard "your side/my side" rules of play and tricking the iPad, who couldn't recognise whose hands were whose.

But it also validated further foul play in the game. Because the points bonus made reaching across the screen seem okay, other non-standard interaction became okay too - particularly arm-grabbing and finger-jousting.

This made for exciting new play experiences, and helped push the physicality of play that I feel is hugely important.

Where it's okay to play dirty

Cheating is creative, social and expressive. New control mechanisms, including motion control and touch screens, allow us to involve the physical in our games more than ever.

And involving the real world exposes countless ways to break the rules.


Players loved to play dirty in Greedy Bankers vs. The World

It's a great contrast with traditional multiplayer games on controller-based consoles. If I pulled the controller out of your hand in Street Fighter, for example, you'd lose all ability to interact in the game. An instant checkmate that invalidates any prior progress.

Similarly, in competitive games, we expect to play within a fixed set of rules. These games are designed to be tests of skill and strategy, and we expect victory to come through optimal use of the rule-set.

If I could win by exploiting a bug, pushing my opponent, or - in the case of sports - taking performance-enhancing drugs, I'd invalidate the fairness of the test.

To create a space where cheating is okay, we need to persuade players away from this mindset. So the game should not emphasise testing skill, but promote social interaction and imagination: focusing our attention on doing something funny or unusual, rather than proving technical ability.

We also need a space where including the physical - especially coming between player and device - does not kill the flow. This is something tablets are well designed for. The bigger the touch-screen, the more ways there are to get your digits on the device.

Cheating within the rules

Cheating diverts gameplay away from its perceived focus, and that's what makes it feel deliciously rebellious. When the device is ignorant to the shenanigans going on around it, we only need players to set aside notions of fair play.

But is foul play something that can be deliberately included in game systems? Can we still call it cheating if it's intentionally written into the game code?

Yes we can. We all have a perception of "fair" and "unfair" within us, based on concepts of honesty and balance. If we have a safe space to break these moral rules it can be just as liberating as the physical cheating encouraged in my games, Greedy Bankers and Slamjet Stadium.

In the classic card game Cheat, for example, lying is core to the rules.

Players place cards down in sequence. All cards are played face-down, so you can get rid of bad cards by lying, claiming they are next in the sequence. If you believe an opponent has cheated you can call it, but risk picking up all the cards if they were being actually being honest.

It's near impossible to win without lying, and trickery is built into the rule-set. But it gives the same buzz as genuine rule-breaking. Why is this? This is a game which allows us to be deceitful, even if we usually aren't in real life.

We know it is wrong to lie, but games can give us a safe space to step outside our usual morality. We can express the inner Machiavelli that we usually hold back.

Later in the life of 22Cans' Curiosity, a mechanic was added that allowed paying players to add layers to the cube, undoing others' hard work. In other words, pay-to-troll.


Curiosity allowed players to add layers later on

It offers up some interesting questions: what if IAP could be used to trick or sabotage rivals? Would players pay for schadenfreude? Would the inclusion of money destroy the sense that dishonesty is okay in-game?

Making a space for cheating

So how can we entice players to cheat?

Making dishonesty part of the rule-set worked in Greedy Bankers, where theft was rewarded with points. By rewarding stealing, players felt validated to find other social rules to break.

It's all down to the mindset of the players. MIT professor Dan Ariely ran many experiments on cheating. One of these showed that getting candidates to recall the Ten Commandments before taking a test made them less likely to cheat, even if it was easy to do and there was no policing.

We can do the opposite in our game designs, by suggesting schadenfreude and dishonesty are part of the game world.

It's why my latest game, Slamjet Stadium, was themed around futuristic deathsports - to suggest players adopt the same no-mercy mentality as the characters they were controlling.

I also made a very obvious suggestion to players. On the loading screens, tips are given on how to cheat and dirty tricks you can play. If the game's telling you to grab each other's arms then it's probably within the creator's intentions!

Everyone's a rebel

Cheating in games is an opportunity. It allows us to interact on a social level, beyond the basic mechanics of the game world. It offers space for creative thinking, and a safe environment to break free from morality.

But to make cheating okay, we need to consider how we control the game, so that cheating does not become a game-breaker.

We need to embrace the world around our input devices, and let social play happen beyond the boundaries of the screen. We can even make dishonesty part of the rules.

If we can create a safe space for it, a little immorality will do us all good.