Hi! Lucky 10000, although this thread's a little crowded: The revelation principle [0] in game theory is a fundamental result that applies here. In a revealed game, there would be no need for anti-cheating components. Instead, every player would honestly submit their desired actions to an adjudicating trusted server which evaluates everybody's desires and computes the actual outcomes. This is how games like Diplomacy [1] or Civilization [2] maintain their sense of robust fairness in the presence of cheating: A cheater cannot do anything more than be dishonest about their desires, and the revelation principle guarantees that dishonesty harms the cheater.

To address a nuance: You might here object that players in Diplomacy and Civilization have private state. Kind of? The agents that are playing the game do not have private state in the game, and they cannot submit actions which rely crucially on some special state of the game board which is only visible to them. They can, of course, do whatever they like outside the game, because actions taken outside the game cannot affect the effect of actions inside the game. This is the distinction between the game and the metagame [3], or the ludic and narrative perspectives [4].

So, then, when one plays a game like Hearthstone or League of Legends, one might hope that, because there is an adjudicating trusted server, and because submitted actions are limited to those possible within the game, one doesn't need to worry about cheating. The worst a cheater could do, again, is dishonestly choose the wrong action and get a suboptimal result which harms their position.

At this point, some folks might want to get irritated at the poor quality of some game servers. Sure, but there's something more important for games like Counter-Strike or Fortnite, which we cannot overlook: In free-for-all or battle-royale mode, all participants have the same goal. Thus, in the revealed game, all participants would submit identical agents. So, which agent should win? The one with the best randomly-generated starting position? That's no better than a lottery. Instead, we must realize that we are looking at these games as athletic contests.

And now the problem is obvious! You are asking athletes to compete at home and submit proxy scores. All of the spyware in the world won't fix this; the correct answer is to set up stadiums and officiate matches. Sure, it's expensive, but it's the better way to make a competitive spectacle out of measuring things like whose hands twitch faster or whose eyes track tiny dots more accurately. Speedrunners already figured this out, with more and more communities requiring hand-cams and complete splits, and with live runs at events being considered more attested than pre-recorded at-home runs.

Edit: "stadia" -> "stadiums" after reading neighbor comments. I mean that you need arenas, not that you need to purchase Google products. Like, the folks converting paintball and laser-tag rooms into VR rooms are onto something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_principle

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies#%22Ludology%22_vs...