There’s been a few solutions to the issues of multiplayer cheaters in games, but much of them like Valve Anti-cheat, Punkbuster and so on are software solutions. They can be coded around. Now, there’s a hardware solution to the problem being suggested.

Game:ref is the name of a prototype piece of hardware that can be connected to a PC to help detect cheats. The way it works is that it reads incoming data from your mouse and compares it to the data of what’s taking part in game to see if they match up, if they don’t then it knows there’s a good chance its caught a cheater. The makers claim that it is able to catch 100% of input-based hacks.

At first you wonder what good it is to have an anti-cheat device that only the cheater can see the feedback from, but then you consider tournaments and realise that there this could be a good thing if it works as well as it’s claimed to. If all computers were fitted with one and use was mandatory to take part, it’d give faith that all players were probably playing fairly.

The device is going to be open-source, with the idea of making collaboration with developers much easier. The project is planning to come to Kickstarter soon, hoping to raise the money to get the prototype turned into a real product.

I only hope it is as accurate as they say, otherwise it could cause a lot of confusion.