Want to Thwart Screenchecking?

It’s a tactic as old as the hills: screenchecking. It’s when you’re playing a two-player game with a split screen, and you see where the other person is located by glancing at their screen.
This is probably the weakest form of cheating ever, heck, barely cheating at all: after all, it’s not like you have some magical ability to check their screen while they can’t check yours. But, as we all know, there are people who take competitive gaming seriously. Very, very seriously. And they want to eliminate any unfair advantage, no matter how closely shared, no matter how deeply rooted in video game tradition it may be, no matter how much of a bunch of huge dorks they look like.
On the next slides, the efforts of these noble souls to protect fairness at the cost of dignity.

Here we see the burqua method, where a blanket is methodically taped to the screen and player two crawls under it. Highly effective, if making player two look less like a grown man and more like an overgrown twelve-year-old.
And here we have the box method, which at least has the advantage of looking neater, although it does proclaim “I spend far too much time and energy solving trivial problems”. It also seems to give player one an unfair advantage, what with the fact he doesn’t have a column blocking half the screen.
[ via the campers at Kotaku ]

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