Gilbert Arenas admits to padding Halo 3 stats

It's no secret that Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas is a gamer. The NBA all-star expressed his genuine exuberance over landing the cover spot of Electronic Arts' NBA Live 08, and blogged about celebrating the launch of Halo 3 by playing the game for 16 hours straight.

It turns out he's so into games, and Halo 3 in particular, that he's willing to manufacture stats in order to reach the game's higher rankings. According to The Washington Post sports writer Dan Steinberg, a reader tip sent him to the Bungie.net forums, where a thread had started accusing the NBA star of stat-padding by creating nonranking games of Halo 3 and playing against dummy accounts in order to quickly and easily boost his gamertag's skill level.Steinberg went straight to Arenas to confront him with the allegations, which he readily admitted to."It's a glitch in the game," Arenas told Steinberg. "I seen some kids that were like 600s, they won 600 Halo games and we only had that game for two weeks. And all the kids go to school. So I'm like, 'What the hell you all doing?' And they said that's what they doing, two-on-two."As for Arenas, he didn't really understand why people were getting upset about the matter."Who is it hurting," he asked Steinberg. "It's two dummy players playing against each other. It's not messing with anybody. 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."