Via our tipline comes a disturbing allegation about Washington’s beloved NBA all-star, Gilbert Arenas. Game-fixing! Encouraging teammates to take dives to pad his own stats! And an unrepentant attitude that makes it all that much worse.
Of course, the competitive enterprise in question is Halo 3, not NBA basketball. But that makes it no less disturbing. The allegations of Agent Zero’s ill-gotten swag surfaced this morning on the forums of Bungie, the company responsible for the Halo franchise. The irate posters allege that Gil’s been logging into Xbox Live games with friends and then having them quit, awarding him first place in that game and driving up his ranking. This joyless farce is repeated until the perpetrator is satisfied with his place in the hierarchy of racial-epithet-spewing prepubescents that comprise Xbox Live. You can see Gilbert’s suspiciously-accomplished account here.
What does Mr. Arenas have to say in his defense? Nothing — he’s guilty as charged. Dan Steinberg is on the case:
“Gilbert,” I asked, approximately,” are you creating dummy games with two fake friends and using the wins to rack up experience points?”
“Yeah,” he said, laughing. “Yeah.”
But wait! There’s a justification coming:
“They go around killing you and get the win every time; there’s people who’ve played the game 200 times and have 200 wins,” he said. “People do that and they don’t get complaints,” Gilbert said. “But if I go two-on-two to get experience points?… I have my friend, it’ll be him and his fake friend, me and my fake friend, we’ll take turns losing back and forth. There’s nobody involved. I can see if we were playing against other people, [but] it’s not ranked games, it’s social games.”
In other words: Social games? We talkin’ about social games? Social games? Not a ranked game. We’re talking about cheating in social games.
Well, yes. And it’s true that this isn’t as vile as the glitch-based cheating that’s also rampant on XBL. So it may not be necessary to call David Stern just yet. Tell you what, Gilbert: bring home a playoff appearance this season and we’ll forget the whole thing ever happened.
