Growing up when I was gaming in the 90s and on, I knew of the stigma of cheating in video games. You were seen as stupid, someone incapable of completing challenges on your own. You were seen as lowly, someone who can never go through life without cheating. Like, it was a pretty big deal as I grew up, hearing all of this for years on end.
I’ve been able to beat games without cheating, of course. But during my late teens and early adulthood, I just tried going past the stigma. Cheating in video games don’t necessarily reflect how you handle life and don’t translate. I’ve found it quite fun to cheat in video games. Probably not in multiplayer and especially on the receiving end.
I even use cheats just to beat games anymore, who the hell cares. People only care if you want to make a big deal about it, by showing it to everyone and boast how you’ve beaten a game in record times. I’ve tried beating some games head on without cheats but there just comes a point where you ask yourself if it is fun dying a hundred times at some part of a game. I don’t think so, personally.
So yeah, I don’t have the stigma anymore. I kinda like how gamers today only care about cheating if it was done in multiplayer or if you’re trying to beat a speedrunning record or some score record. Fun is meant to be how you find it.
Never. I literally never use cheats. I do not even use mods.
I’m super interested by this. Do you have a moral opposition, just ceebs, or is the vibe just not right? One of my mates feels like games need to be “officially sanctioned” somewhat and mods ruin that.
Well it depends on what you mean by cheating. Cheating tends to be a concept where more than one player is agreeing to a single ruleset and when one of those players breaks that ruleset, that’s the cheating.
You cannot compete in a system if you don’t both work in the same system. How do you know who’s won in a game of chess for example if the other player is playing as if all of their pawns are queens, and you are not? From their perspective they won, but from yours, they didn’t play the same game you’re playing.
So it changes when you play a game by yourself. In my view, the ruleset was created by the developers. Now clearly you could say that maybe the devs wanted additional rulesets and didn’t have the time, money, or inclination to make them, and you could also say that some devs are actively accepting of alterations to their game, but you have to ask yourself then what the rulesets of that game really are.
For me, and this is just for me, even when the devs themselves make sweeping changes to a game I can lose interest - especially when those changes “dumb down” the content and make it more accessible/simpler. Take mmo’s for example: If for 2 years the game required other players and a lot of time investment and then suddenly the devs make a huge patch where you can now solo everything and achieve the same past accomplishments in a quarter of the time, I feel like that’s “cheating”. Generally I just quit when that happens.
Obviously this isn’t an objective thing here, it’s just my personal opinion. I think generally the original vision of the game is the “intended” vision, so altering it in certain ways just seems like it’s going against the spirit of the game itself.
Thanks for the detailed response! I’m 100% with you regarding any online/interpersonal cheating. I think I understand your sentiment too regarding solo play. I guess that with mods I sort of have the attitude that they represent an acceptable mutually beneficial customization. It’s like devs putting down an amazing baseline, which you can tailor just a little to yourself. You can do this in a way that devs could never do to precisely suit the tastes of thousands of individual olayers.
I know some games/devs encourage you to use mods. In these cases, I feel that they enhance the original intention. That said, mods can also absolutely breach the intention of a game as you described. It’s a bit situational.
So I guess I see where you’re coming from and its a totally valid take. I believe that in some cases the “original” version or vision actually endorses mods, but devs do need to be conscious that not everybody wants to engage with mods as a concept. Some assembly required can be a bug, not a feature.
While I accept that for many developers, mods are seen as welcome, my problem with mods is, if you’re playing a game of chess with someone and both of you agree to change the rules, then that’s perfectly fine, but that’s no longer chess. You could in theory not even know the rules of chess and make up your own game using the chessboard and its pieces, but if someone were to ask you if you know how to play chess and you say yes, you wouldn’t be able to explain a single rule, so you don’t really know how to play chess at all.
If you’re modding a game, it’s no longer that game anymore, it’s something else - which is fine. Some people prefer mods over the “vanilla” game itself, but then we should be honest with the fact that you don’t really like the game as much as the version you’ve frankensteined together.
In addition, a lot of mods make games easier, which is the reason why many players “enjoy them”. Some people - and I’ve been gaming since I was about 3 on an Atari 2600 for over 40 years - seem to just enjoy when a game is “easy” and do not really like anything that makes it harder for them to “win”, but those people rarely realize - from my experience, anyway - that this is what they are actually enjoying about mods.
For example, you could play a game that introduces new vehicles or weapons, not understanding that these vehicles and weapons are better than those currently in the vanilla build of the game.
Game developers often do this to their own games in the form of power creep, which almost ALWAYS ruins games (compared to their initial release and/or their highest point.) Take World of Warcraft as an example of this. The power creep got so ridiculous multiple times that they had to rework the entire game’s mechanics, skills, and even numbers just to keep the game “working” on a fundamental level.
In single player yes, because I play how I want to play.
In MP with friends, no I don’t.