Runescape was one of the first really big, popular online games. Soon, people wrote bot programs to do repetitive tasks for you. Then the game designers started fighting back from the bots.

What came next was the rise of the back and forth arms race with attack and counter-attack that created a lot of early MMORPG memes and cultural touchpoints. Today the arms race has advanced to ill-advised kernel based anti-cheat system and even AI based cheat detection.

Learning how and why these systems developed is an important part of any software engineers toolbag.