Can video game cheating be prevented?

One problem is that these observer programs are invasive, since they must access the underlying operating system in a player's PC in order to sniff nefarious code. McGraw believes the Warden might even violate California's anti-spyware law.

Sometimes, there appears to be financial incentive for the game makers to be good — but not terrific — at stopping cheating. Consider this: Cheaters who get banned from games often immediately sign back up under a different user name, paying money for a new account in hopes of trying again. If cheating protections were significantly stronger, fewer perpetrators would continue to buy accounts.

Game companies might have better luck relying on reports of suspicious activity from legitimate players. One issue that irks aficionados is "gold farming," whereby people pay real money to companies like IGE.com in order to buy in-game currency. A recent check showed a "World of Warcraft" player could pay $420 to get 6,000 pieces of gold — enough to buy one of the game's pricey flying mounts. Other players have to laboriously work their way up to such achievements.

Buying gold breaks the game's terms of service — and it degrades the overall experience for everyone, said Hubert Thieblot, who leads Curse, one of the largest teams in "World of Warcraft." A cheating player who takes all the targets in a certain area, for example, leaves too few for everyone else.

"You change your experience with how you play and how you behave," Thieblot said. "If you just buy gold you aren't going to do extra quests, you're not exploring areas as they want you to."

Although Intel's anti-cheating idea is still in the research phase, it could aid people like Thieblot.

Intel's technology would embed a module in a PC's circuitry that would analyze data coming off the keyboard and the mouse and compare it to what a game actually processes. If there are conflicts — the player clicked the mouse just once but the game read that as "fire 100 shots" — the Intel system would be able to signal the game makers or other players. The system could also put a "trusted" stamp on seemingly legitimate players.

Intel says its system would not degrade PC performance or be noticeable in game play, but the concept still needs work. Notably, it would require the support of PC makers as well as the game companies that would have to build in ties to the Intel system.

Meanwhile, Starr Long, who with industry veteran Richard Garriott is wrapping up the online sci-fi game "Tabula Rasa" for NCSoft Inc., worries that cheating can now ruin entire game worlds.

Like other game makers, Long won't get into specifics but says his programmers have done all they can to thwart cheating in "Tabula Rasa."

"In the old days we didn't really think through what would happen once we started letting people play together," Long said. Now, Long says, "every single piece of content we put in the game, the first thing we say is `Here's what we want this thing to do.' And the second thing we say is, `OK, how are players going to try to exploit this?'"

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