The Morality of Cheating

April 25th, 2007 | jchaager | commentary, websites

Cheating in games is a long tradition that most everyone has done before. Be it peeking at your neighbors cards, or moving pieces around on the game board, most everyone has cheated at one point or another. But Clive Thompson at Wired ponders how cheating and views of it have changed in the computer age.

Cheating in a multiplayer game is pretty easy to identify. Anyone using a hack to the game to gain an advantage is clearly cheating.

If somebody uses an illicit aimbot to give themselves perfect targeting ability, most gamers agree that’s unfair. But where things get super weird is with single-player video games.

Clive’s article includes a discussion of some research that was done on people’s perception of cheating in single player games. The results showed three clearly defined categories: those that thought any outside assistance, including hint books, was cheating; those that thought hint books were okay, but using “god mode” was unacceptable; and those that believe that anything goes in a single player game.

I tend to fall somewhere between the first two groups. I’d rather make it through a game on my own, without outside help. But that is becoming more and more difficult as the game industry begins to co-opt the whole cheating debate through the creation of strategy guides that have become almost a necessity in order to complete games.

It would be nearly impossible to complete a game such as Final Fantasy X (the last one I played) without either finding a walkthrough on-line or buying the official strategy guide. Without it, you have no way of knowing what off the wall combination is necessary to kill the late game bosses.

It is obvious that the game companies have discovered a new source of revenue in the strategy guides. Why only get $50 from some kid for the game when you can squeeze another $25 out of him for the strategy guide. This trend really lessens the entertainment value of the games.

I can remember way back in the day playing King’s Quest and Space Quest on my old PC. In those days, the only strategy guides to be found were 3rd party. And it was possible to complete the game without using it. The stories were internally consistent, and solving the puzzles usually just relied on figuring out logically what item you need to use. No longer is this the case. Now, you are forced to discover illogical or un-obvious actions in order to progress to the next level.

Can this trend continue? I’ve pretty much fallen out of the gaming market in the last 5 years. The last game I bought was Lego Star Wars, which I throughly enjoyed even though I lost it before finishing the game. And I was able to do so without the need to purchase any auxiliary information, or go trolling the Internet for a walkthrough. More games like this, please!