Abstract
Sometimes, it can be harder for young people to form friendships than it should be. College is supposed to be a great time to make friends, but finding friends can be difficult in a new, busy environment where it is easy to feel like the odd one out. Online video games also seem like a great way to make friends, but it can be hard to trust fellow players and have an enjoyable game experience when there is always the possibility of other players cheating.
My technical project is focused on the problem of loneliness within the population of college students. Active Minds (2024) found that 64.7% of college students report feeling lonely, with transfer students and first-year students being particularly vulnerable to loneliness. Students who face loneliness are at risk for serious health and wellness repercussions such as depression and anxiety, heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, and suicidality and self-harm (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024). On the other hand, having friends available contributes to a more fulfilling and satisfying life for students. Our team’s solution was to build a web application called Chat Hoolette allowing users to create profiles reflecting their interests and personality, which informs an algorithm that periodically matches users in groups of three. The algorithm suggests ways for groups of students to meet and spend time together based on their profiles. This process reduces the ambiguity of online connection by providing users with clearly identified individuals to contact and concrete activities that work for everyone.
My STS project is focused on the problem of cheating in online video games. Every month, between 30,000 and 174,000 players buy cheats from online sellers, which generates an annual income of around $12.8M to $73.2M (Collins et al., 2024, p. 35). Currently, anticheat software running on players’ computers is the standard approach to combat cheating in online video games, but is this the most effective solution? In my STS research, I first justify the categorization of anticheat software as a technical fix by showing that game companies, developers, and players alike treat anticheat software as the only way to combat cheating, while the technology itself doesn’t actually fully prevent cheating and can even pose security risks or barriers for entry for players while remaining an opaque system.
Chat Hoolette was successful in forming compatible groups, but we found that compatibility alone was not sufficient for getting students to meet up and spend time together. The majority of groups had difficulty or hesitation in coordinating action following their matching, which indicates that our app and other similar apps must prudently design a post-matching process that facilitates actual responses from users. For a solution to cheating in online video games that isn’t a technological fix, I propose a jury system composed of trusted community members similar to one previously used in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) called “the Overwatch.” This system gives players the power to stop cheating instead of relying on developers and proved to be accurate when it was used in CS:GO (Valve Corporation, 2013b). However, Overwatch was removed from CS:GO for unknown reasons and no such system is used in other games, so further research should continue to evaluate the viability of such a system and improve on it.
Special thanks to Caitlin Wylie, Edward Boehling, and Ryley Butler for guiding and revising my sociotechnical research paper, Mark Sheriff, Jack Heavey, Srikar Mutnuri, and the students of CS 4971 for providing feedback on my technical project, and the dozens of beta testers of my technical project for participating in an exciting first trial. And of course, many thanks to Andy Liang, Bhargav Garre Venkata, and Alex Yung for being great teammates to work with on the technical project.
