Disobeying The Game - Is Cheating Really 'Cheating' In Videogames?

The saying goes that ‘cheaters never prosper’ – but technically, they sort of do.

After all, if you cheat at a game and win, that’s still a ‘victory’ in the literal sense, is it not? Granted, you might not be as skilled as your rivals at whatever it was you were supposed to have done, but you’ve proven your ingenuity by devising an entirely different way of doing it. Whoever came up with the saying was probably just not very inventive, or possibly a sore loser.

Of course, most people aren’t ready for such dangerous thinking – particularly where sports are concerned. According to the International Fair Play Committee (yes, that is a thing), disobeying the rules destroys all the respect, integrity and fairness in a sport. And it ruins the fun of it for everybody else. Therefore any athlete caught cheating should expect to face some serious consequences.

Thankfully, in the world of videogames, cheating is not viewed as dimly…most of the time. To the contrary, cheating in videogames is rampant. Whether we’re inputting cheat codes, ‘hacking’ games or exploiting technical weaknesses in their programming, gamers are all guilty of having ‘disobeyed’ the game at one time or another (with the exception of those morally-upstanding gamers like Waluigi who, of course, never cheats). Despite videogames typically imposing more rules than sports, cheating is now part of the very lifeblood of gaming and it can involve just as much fun - and skill - as playing by the rules.

So, what of us gamers then? Are we all unethical, unprincipled charlatans who would cheat on our college examinations as surely as we would input the Super Password in Crash Bandicoot? Fortunately, no. You see, ‘cheating’ takes on an entirely different meaning when applied to videogames. Yes, we’re certainly breaking the rules and ‘disobeying’ the game, but our intention (in most cases) is not to deceive anyone or gain undeserved advantages. We cheat because as gamers, we’re naturally curious about the games that we love so much and cheating gives us ways of satisfying those curiosities.

SOURCE: GeekPr0n

Firstly, cheating allows us to discover secrets that developers have hidden in games and to experiment with changing a game’s rules.

How will my experience of playing this game change if I can remove a certain rule? Will it be easier or more difficult to play? Will I have more fun or less fun playing it that way? Thinking back to my childhood, one of the most exciting things about playing a videogame (other than telling my friends about it at school) was uncovering secrets and messing about with rules using cheat codes. As early as during the 1980s, videogame developers would program these codes into their games in the play-testing process – often as a means to quickly access specific levels for testing, or to experiment with rules and conditions. These codes were typically removed from games prior to their release but increasingly as time went on (whether accidentally or deliberately), they would be left in. In certain games, with the correct series of button presses on a controller, players could accomplish anything from unlocking hidden levels to making their character nigh-invulnerable. The ubiquitous example is ‘up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A’ or the ‘Konami Code’. Famously, this code would reward the player with an additional 30 lives when entered at the title screen of Contra. Another (more cosmetic) example is Big Head Mode, a cheat code common to many games released during the 1990s for enlarging characters’ heads for a laugh.

Of course, it is virtually impossible to simply happen upon a cheat code. Luckily, there were books, magazines and websites dedicated to collecting and listing all known cheat codes for a particular game (does anybody else remember cheat planet dot com?). These were great fun to read and to pass around between friends.

Cheat codes were once a staple of the medium. Sadly, they’re increasingly rare in the games of today. The reason for this is simple; online multiplayer.

Cheating against your friends, siblings or a computer-controlled player is harmless enough. Just look at Screencheat, a game that you must cheat at to win (although, not to be pedantic, is it really ‘cheating’ if its required by the rules?). But to developers, cheating against strangers crosses a line. Which is fair enough, if you think about it. The commercial success of games like Overwatch or Splatoon depends heavily on their online gameplay experiences being fun and of high quality. And (again, like Waluigi), we hate playing games if every other player is cheating. So, if developers were to allow cheating, nobody would want to buy (much less play) these kinds of games. And there are plenty of technologically-proficient gamers who hack or otherwise illicitly tamper with online games. They already force publishers to invest considerable time and resources into software that can police servers and maintain fairness for gamers. Cheating is just bad for business, and cheat codes have fallen victim to this philosophy, it seems.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find all of the original cheat codes from Crash Team Racing intact in Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, released in June. Unsurprisingly (and understandably), any entered cheat codes are disabled upon entering an online lobby. Just imagine if all 12 players in a race could equip infinite bowling bombs or invisibility!

We may also have the competitive, highly-lucrative world of esports to thank for the death of cheat codes in videogames. By reconceiving competitive online videogames as ‘sports’, we attract the same disapproval and dire (i.e career-ending) consequences for cheating professional gamers as for cheating athletes. Add onto that questions of the appropriateness of cheating in streaming and content creation, and boundaries begin to blur. Earlier this month, Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins sparked controversy online by suggesting that a professional gamer or content creator should be excused from cheating because that’s ‘what makes him money’. Whether or not there is entertainment to be had in watching somebody cheat at an online videogame is another question, but publishers are likely to err on the side of caution and impose blanket bans against cheating in all its forms.

Secondly, we might ‘cheat’ at a game to deepen our understanding of how it was put together by its developers, and to come up with completely new ways of playing it.

Technical weaknesses in a game’s programming can cause glitches that allow players to skip over large sections of games. These shortcuts are almost always unintentional on the part of developers, so an argument could be made that using these is ‘disobeying’ the game as it was intended to be. However, we can learn much about a game’s construction by exploring these weaknesses.

‘Speedrunners’ will rely on their incredible familiarity with a game to devise new timesaving techniques in attempting to finish it as quickly as possible. But, they also rely heavily on glitches to set their speed records. Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, which normally takes 10 hours to finish can, infamously, be finished in just over a minute in this way. Speedrunners passionately maintain that discovering and causing glitches takes practice and skill, and that they contribute to the collective knowledge of gaming communities by posting their record attempts online.

There are many ways in which gamers can ‘disobey’ the game, but we don’t use them to deceive or because we desperately need to gain an unfair advantage.

The very nature of videogames is that they are constructed and invite careful inspection, like great films or fine art. But because of their technological nature, they are also malleable; like cars they can be tinkered with and deconstructed for that extra level of intimacy. It is our desire to know the ins and outs of our all-time favourite games that drives gamers to “cheat”.

The history of cheating in videogames is not one dominated by scandal and disrespect, but one of wide-eyed discovery and of having deep connections between gamers and games. We seem to have lost those simple things in the noise and bright lights of competitive gaming, but in this writer’s view, it never hurts to ‘disobey’ the game every now and again (offline, of course; I’m not entirely unethical, after all)!

All that being said, if you’ve just arrived after skimming through this article in the hopes of finding a quick summary at the end, I have only this to say: “you cheated not only the article, but yourself. You didn’t grow. You didn’t improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. It’s sad that you don’t know the difference.”

This feature article was originally published in the ‘Disobey’ Edition of the University of Western Australia’s Pelican Magazine (October 2019).