New data reveals Colorado in the top ten states most likely to cheat when playing video games…
— from a press release promoting the website ReplayPoker.com
A new study, carried out on behalf of the online poker platform, Replay Poker, analyzed over 200 search terms related to cheating such as ‘hacks’, ‘cheats’ and ‘mods’ for various computer games across the U.S., to determine which states have been seeking sneaky ways to win.
Washington State took the top spot in the survey, with Oregon in second place.
Colorado was in tenth place.
Not that the entire state is a bunch of cheaters, of course. The survey didn’t actually count the number of cheaters; it only counted the Google searches aimed at finding possible ways to cheat. And only on computer games.
It could have been a small handful of cheaters who kept searching and searching, endlessly, for ways to cheat.
Colorado saw an average of 246 monthly cheat-related searches per 100k people, which totals about 14,268 monthly searches in the state. The most-searched-for term in Colorado was “wordle cheats”… suggesting “a high proportion of players are likely cheating when playing Wordle against their friends.”
If you are planning on playing Wordle against your friends, I recommend that you avoid doing it with friends living in Washington, Oregon, or Colorado. They are probably cheating.
Or at least, looking for ways to cheat. Which raises the question. Were they really your friends?
I assume ReplayPoker.com was interested in knowing which online poker players were cheating, because poker sometimes involves large amounts of money. My dad, for example, nearly lost all of the money he needed to pay for my mom’s wedding ring, in a game of poker. If he hadn’t been dealt three aces, I probably wouldn’t have been born. So I truly understand how serious poker can be.
Wordle, not so serious. I really can’t imagine a wedding, getting ruined because someone lost at Wordle. But maybe a friendship could be ruined.
The thing about games, though, is that when you cheat, you don’t actually “win”. Yes, you might walk away with the money — enough to buy a wedding ring, even — but you didn’t actually “win”. You only truly “win” if you play fair and square. Like my football coach used to tell us, “Winners never cheat and cheaters never win.”
(Actually, what he used to say was, “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” But I’m writing about cheating, not quitting… so I’m making us, here, of my ‘artistic license’. Which is something journalists are allowed to do, and it’s not considered cheating.)
The Replay Poker study concluded that Mississippi is the state with the most honest game players, with just 183 cheat-related searches reported per 100k population. But I wonder if maybe people in Mississippi are simply less familiar with how to do a Google search? Or don’t even own a computer?
As I confessed earlier this month, I don’t believe in statistics. It’s too easy to cheat, and make the numbers say what you want them to say.
And that brings me around to an interesting story by Gideon Lewis-Kraus that I found on NewYorker.com about a couple of well-published ‘original thinkers’ — behavioral economists Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino — who frequently collaborated on sociological experiments, and published studies with titles like, for example, “The Dark Side of Creativity,” wherein they showed that ‘original thinkers,’ who can dream up convincing justifications, tend to lie more easily. (Or alternatively, make use of ‘artistic license’.)
Dr. Ariely wrote a best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, and Dr. Gino was one of the highest-paid professors at Harvard University.
A lot of their published studies had to do with the reasons that people lie, and clever ways to influence them, so that they they behaved more truthfully.
In his New Yorker article, Mr. Lewis-Krause presents compelling evidence, that the conclusions contained in some of the most important studies performed by Dr. Ariely and Dr. Gino were apparently based on data that was simply created out of thin air, or highly manipulated, so that the data seemed to support the conclusions the professors had set out to prove.
I ended up personally convinced that, sadly enough, ‘original thinkers’ are probably more prone to lying than the rest of humanity.
Except, perhaps, in Mississippi.