I forget where I read this, but somehow, some people have the "brain stimuli award" associated with the "winning" aspect even when they are using cheats. So winning is winning.

I'm still having hard time believing in this, but I haven't found better explanation for cheaters.

For a single player game, that might be a good explanation.

For a multiplayer game, though, it's not hard at all to see what's happening. If a cheater cheats and gets away with it, then they rationally should expect to receive social reputational credit, which I want to believe is something that instinctively makes most of us feel good, us being social creatures.

Maybe the Octalysis Framework? That is the most well known material that covers this tangentially. There are a good number of whitepapers on this type of research in Adtech/Social Media, though you need to know the specialized language they use to search for it.

This is not a new concept, in fact many games and apps use this research which includes sophisticated operant conditioning to induce associations, which then later trigger dopamine spikes through those associations.

Its why people who spend most of their time gaming or using their phones start acting like junkies. Its completely destroyed the dating scene because they do this in dating apps. Nothing is a bigger turn off then dating a junky, and they often don't even realize it.

Much of this type of game design material has been rebranded from its original contextual use. It originates in PoW torture camps during the Korean Conflict, and narcosynthesis/narco-analysis was known all the way back to WW2.

Victims are easily controllable, misled, and often gullible, since rational thought is greatly reduced as they fall into an involuntary state of hypnosis and become highly suggestible.

Brain development to combat addiction also doesn't fully develop until your early 20s for most.

You see this element embedded in almost any FPS that has an audio trigger associated with a headshot. I know for a fact BF1942 did this with a cha-ching sound. Games, and apps too.