Video game cheating

I'm curious to hear what others here think about video game cheating. I have a very clear philosophy on the subject, and I find it interesting to hear other peoples' opinions on the matter.

Here is my philosophy: as long as the cheating is completely confined to a single-player experience, there's nothing wrong with it.

I'll expand on this. I believe that implementing cheats on any kind of multiplayer game that gives a single person an advantage over the others is wrong. This covers any range of the spectrum: from some sort of God Mode in World of Warcraft, all the way down to unfair achievements in Steam or gamerscore boosting on XBox Live.

However, if you want to cheat on a game that has no element which leaves its system, I see no problem with it whatsoever. Why? Because, my friends, I AM A CHEATER. I've been a video game cheater for decades now, ever since the first Game Genie. I've cheated on every console I've used that has let me do it (mostly NES, SNES, and the PC).

Why? That's the other half of my philosophy. I've always loved video games, and I really enjoy playing them. However, I play games to have fun, and not to get frustrated. Games are a release for me, particularly when the rest of life is presenting the challenges. For that reason, there are often games I encounter where at some point the normal gameplay simply ceases being fun and starts raising my blood pressure. That's usually when I start cheating. A good example: Warcraft 3. I tried to play that game straight many times, but every time I start cheating around the time Arthas decides to kill everyone in that city. I don't enjoy starting a level over and over again.

This is not always the case (I've finished many games without cheating), and sometimes I cheat AFTER I've finished a game in order to eke more replay value out of it. For example, I've beaten Final Fantasy 2/VI at least 6 times playing it straight. But then I'd like to see what it would be like if I raised my characters to level 99 from the beginning. Or what it would be like to have unlimited money in Sim City. Or how much damage I could do with unlimited ammo in GTA.


The reason I bring this up is because I'm starting to lose this very specific avenue of entertainment from my games. The more that video games are connected to the web, the less I'm able to get this from them. I know it's a difficult thing to defend, but it's actually an important aspect of gaming for me. As I stated, I don't want to hurt any other players because of my cheating, but when I'm getting trophies and achievements for games I've bought through Steam - even when I didn't ask for them - clearly I don't feel right if I get them because I just wanted to have a little more fun from a game.

What do you folks think about this? Are there any other cheaters out there?

I don't know about anyone else, but I agree with you and have even applied some of the same cheats/methods you've mentioned.

I never really felt like using "cheat codes" and other things like that are cheating. I do not play anything online but I would agree that using those type of things when playing with others is cheating. I do not use many cheat codes I just don't like the type of games they keep making with online components now.

The only one I can think of I liked the online part of was Little Big Planet. I like trying content other people make I just don't want to play with them

I am with you on losing video games. I really haven't been interested in anything new for a while aside from android stuff. I will just keep going back and playing old console games there are so many I don't think I will run out and if I do my memory is so bad I replay games I played a few years ago and I don't remember anything in them anyway.

So maybe build in the ability to cheat but prevent that working in any online connection? Not sure that makes much difference really. Weren't things like Punkbuster created to prevent this?

People will still work around that and cheat in the same way people will still commit crimes (not that cheating is crime)

I agree 100%. I haven't played games in years, but back in the days I did, I also often cheated, as you say because I just wanted to have fun and not get frustrated by the game. I never gave that a second thought. It's just how I liked to play the game.

I feel that in single player games, you should be able to do whatever you want. If you want to use a trainer or cheat, have at it, it doesn't affect anybody else. I despise it in multiplayer games, though.

I don't cheat. I can't remember ever using iddqd or idkfa while playing DOOM. It was nice knowing that something like that existed in case I just got stuck.

I wonder how long it will take for cheats/hacks/trainers to show up for Dark Souls. If there was ever a game that is going to need it - that is the one.

This is the thing, cheating used to clearly be something that was built into the games. It seems the programmers got a kick out of it too, and that's how you ended up with the Konami code or idkfa in DOOM (thanks, Tim, that brought back memories). But it seems like now the emphasis is on multiplayer/social in all aspects of gaming, but the fact that I dislike multiplayer is actually beside the point. As we move towards online distribution, I should be allowed to turn off all this social stuff if I want to cheat, or the cheats should be built in so that the game can tell when you're doing it, and not have it impact your standing with the service you're using.

Steam has this VAC or whatever they called, that's designed to catch cheaters and boot them. That's what's worrying me. I don't want to get booted just because I wanted to screw around in a game I theoretically own.

Have you ever spawned 50 cars in GTA and blown them all up? It's pretty darned fun if your video card doesn't explode too.

Anyway, thanks for the responses. It's good to hear that I'm not alone so far!

I am not a serious gamer. By that I mean that yes, I spend a fair bit of time (couple hours a week) playing games, but the only games I play are DOOM and Quake3 Arena.

I'm not looking for a challenge when I play. I just like to blow sh*t up, and shoot monsters before they shoot me. I have more than 1500 third-party DOOM levels, many of which I consider to be so difficult as to be unplayable. So I don't play them. Some of them are quite playable and fun with just a touch more ammo so I "idkfa" them, or throw in an occasional "idbeholdr" or "idbeholdl" and I'm ready to go. (But never "iddqd". After all, I'm not a complete wuss!)

It's my game, I play by myself, so I figure I can do whatever I like with it to make it enjoyable to me. As for the newer FPS games... I just don't want to work that hard in order to have my fun.

tanstaafl.

I'm completely with you. I hate having to restart a level over and over. One thing I loved about Mass Effect 3 was that they had a 'Story' mode. You took less damage, and dealt more to the bad guys. I didn't care about beating it in 'hardcore' mode, I was there for the story. Now Mass Effect 1 & 2 didn't have that mode, so I used cheats so I could get through the game without the replays. Life presents enough challenges in it, when I play games I'm looking for a break from those challenges.

Cheating online is best stamped out as fast as possible - if a particular server or game doesn't ban cheaters I won't go back.

But I also don't really get why you would cheat in a single player game at all. If it is a game you can play SP and then MP online, cheating at SP would prevent you learning enough to beat online opponents.

To me it's a part of my completion habit - I want to be able to complete the entire game myself. This means there are still some of the advanced challenges on Portal I haven't yet done, but I won't cheat to do them - that would defeat the entire purpose.

That, of course, depends entirely on what your purpose is!

My purpose is to take a few relaxing moments and blow things up without working too hard and getting frustrated. My challenge is to do a better job getting through the level than I did the last time. To that end, I have favorite DOOM levels that at first seemed unplayable and now I try and get through them without taking a single damage hit.

YMMV.

tanstaafl.

I completely agree.


That's an odd argument. First of all, you seem to be thinking of a very specific type of game: the kind that HAS online multiplayer. Not everything does, and I don't think I play ANY games that do. That said, wouldn't someone know they weren't properly preparing themselves? I don't think anyone practices for bicycle races by riding a moped everywhere, and is then surprised when they trail on race day. Why would this be different?


I get that view, and I share it on SOME things. In recent history (the past few years), I've unlocked every single part of Mario Kart Wii and Plants vs Zombies. I'll complete a game if I'm having fun while I'm being challenged, but not if I'm getting beaten down.


And surely you must condone cheating on replays to get more entertainment value out of a game?

Technical reasons:

Quality assurance teams depend upon cheat codes to be able to test things in a video game.

Marketing folks depend on cheat codes to demo certain sections of a game at trade shows without having to play through the game normally.

Sometimes an unfixed bug in a video game gets you stuck in a spot that you can't get out of unless you use a cheat code. An example would be if you fall into a crack in the world geometry that the QA team never caught, and you get stuck. A clip-through-walls cheat would get you out of there. And then there's the places where the game genuinely can't be finished without cheating because of an unfixed bug: Look at the Skyrim wiki sometime... Every single major quest in that game has a bug note saying, "If you accidentally do X before completing Y, then the Z quest will never finish. To get around this bug, type cheat code Q."

There might be a hidden easter egg of some kind that you want to see that isn't accessible without a cheat code (i.e., Romero's head in Doom).

Using things like clip-through-walls cheats is a great way for budding game designers to explore and investigate how the levels were created, to learn about game design.

Using cheats which change game mechanics is a great way for game designers to explore the various ramifications of different types of game mechanics and difficulty curves.



For a puzzle game like Portal, I completely agree. The point of those challenges is to have fun trying to do the difficult parts. Cheating would definitely defeat the purpose in that case.

In that case and in many other cases, single-player cheating turns out to be self-defeating. By cheating your way past the parts of the game that are difficult, you quickly discover that the difficulty was actually the part that you enjoyed, and the part that actually held your interest and concentration.

But there are other situations when using cheat codes can be useful in a single player situation, and increase your enjoyment of the game rather than spoil it.

My favorite example of this is encumberance in RPGs. It's a game mechanic that the designers deliberately insert into the game to make the player backtrack to town to sell goods after adventuring in a dungeon. It's a boring mechanic that I find exceedingly tedious, and which makes me shelve certain RPGs fairly quickly. In most RPGs, I would never have the patience to finish the game if I didn't have access to an encumberance cheat. This isn't a case of making a difficult thing easier... there's nothing difficult about going back to town and selling your loot, it's just tedious. Having to stop your adventure mid-dungeon because your inventory is full is simply annoying.

Basically, that's making a choice to change a game mechanic that you dislike. If you can enjoy the rest of the game while fixing that one game mechanic, there's no problem with using a cheat code. And if removing that game mechanic unbalances the whole game experience, making the game un-fun, well, then that's the self-defeating thing mentioned above: you simply come to the realization that the difficulty was part of the game, and you either stop playing the game (the annoying game mechanic was the deal-breaker for you in that case, oh well), or you go back to playing the game without the cheat code.

Sometimes game designers will eventually acknowledge that an annoying game mechanic was bad to begin with, and it's cheaters who convince them of this. Witness Doom 3, which originally had a game mechanic where you could EITHER have a flashlight OR a gun, but not both. The game experience was designed around the "boo" moments in dark corridors, and the Cameron-Aliens-style gunfights in the dark where the only light was muzzle flashes. They released Doom 3 like that, and critics and players universally lambasted it for not allowing flashlights and guns at the same time. The first user cheat for the game was called the Duct Tape Mod, which allowed you to "duct tape" a flashlight to your gun. Players actually enjoyed the game more with the mod than without it. And now, they're re-releasing it for the Xbox this year, and guess what? You can have flashlight and guns at the same time in the Xbox version. (And they're touting that as a big feature. Ha!)

But what about times when the game mechanics aren't annoying, rather, they're simply too hard for some players? In action games, some players lack the skill to defeat the toughest bosses. I think they have every right to cheat themselves a bit of extra health or ammo so that they can bring that last boss down and see the ending of the game. I know that if I'd paid 60 bucks for a game and then hit a brick wall in the difficulty curve, I'd feel it was my right to get as much enjoyment out of the game as I'd paid for. Here's an example: I bought Lost Planet for the Xbox a few years ago. Instead of having a standard save-game system, it has a checkpoint system. Well, one of the checkpoints mid-game was poorly placed, and it saved my player's progression at a point where the player had no way to progress forward without dying at the hands of a very powerful monster, but also no way to go back to get health and ammo. If I'd had access to a health cheat, I would have used it there, and continued the game on to the end. Instead, I have shelved that game, never finished it, and never played its sequels.

Damned fine post, Tony.

Okay - those are all good points. I don't do them, but they all make sense. I probably do have a couple of games I never completed and shelved eventually, because I decided I just didn't have the time to get good enough to beat them. Wouldn't want to use a cheat code to get past them though - maybe I'm just a bit CDO (that's like OCD but the letters are ALL IN THE CORRECT ORDER!! :-)

At least some designers are finally realizing that this mechanic sucks and doesn't really add to the enjoyment of the game. Off the top of my head Runic Games with Torchlight 1 and 2 as well as Bioware in SW:The Old Republic added in the option for your companion/pet to take off to town to sell your vendor trash for you. That doesn't work for anything other than vendor trash, though. Maybe someday there will be an option list saying to vendor something or save it so you can through it on the broker or stuff it in your bank vault and the pet/companion will take care of all the inventory issues (at that point, a lot of games would lose a money sink though, which adds different problems).

Example: The Binding of Isaac

I saw the game in Steam's Summer Sale, saw it had good reviews, and picked it up. Now I'm frustrated beyond belief.

The game randomly generates its levels, which would be fine if it weren't a game where dying brings you back to the beginning of the game. In the end, getting anywhere in the game requires more luck than I'm willing to put up with. I don't want to keep starting the game over and over again. Some might find that fun but I don't.

I had to deal with a very frustrating Realtor this afternoon, and I wanted to sit down and blow off steam (no pun intended) with a dumb little game. Instead I'm more aggravated now than I was before I started playing the game.*

If I had the ability to simply type in a little cheat code and get some more health or something, instead of banging my head against a wall I could just merrily go through and experience the game. Instead I'm just experiencing the first three levels over and over again.

Fortunately I only spent something like $2 on this game...


*I just wanted to insist that my aggravation has nothing to do with the subject matter of the game. It's horribly dark and gross, and probably offensive to some. Still, I wanted to see it through and it's the gameplay that's pissing me off...