Game Changers

I have played a fair amount of Atari video games as a kid, but I never became a game junkie/addict. And yet I found this Michael Thomsen article on cheating in video games very interesting and thought provoking.

But first, let’s be clear what does not constitute online game cheating. In many online games, you could play them the old fashioned way (advancing by your skills). Or you could pay the game maker to get extra lives or to increase your farm produce or to skip levels! (In case you’re wondering, most such games are free and such purchases are the way the game makers make money. It’s just a different business model). But at least those games were designed with such options in mind and everyone knows that some of the others would be employing such techniques.

So what about games where cheat codes were never intended to be part of the game? Your instinctive reaction about using such cheat codes might be, to quote Johan Huizinga:

“as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play world collapses.”

Anarchy, chaos…just as in the real world.

And yes, in some games, cheating would violate the philosophy of the game:

“Making use of this exploit (It also allows first-time players to skip some of the game’s most imbalanced and exploitative areas) destroys the Dark Souls’ core values, built around the tolerance of suffering. If you haven’t suffered the unfairness of fighting giant skeletons on narrow cliff ledges in the pitch dark, and later having to choose between holding a lantern or a shield, you haven’t suffered enough, you haven’t understood the game, you haven’t gone deep enough into your submission to the logic of its rules.”

That game’s theme almost reads like a modern day religion’s theme!

Now consider this alternate perspective that Thomsen describes:

“Cheaters can be considered anyone interested in having an experience not predetermined by a rule or limit, someone intent on antagonizing those whose adherence to artificial rules numb their awareness of possibilities outside those other prescribed by the game’s systems. In this light, cheating is the only ethical action one can take in a game, forcing play to be a consideration of the rules themselves and not an obedient exploration of how to best follow them. Cheaters are not enemies of game culture and good design, but an essential group whose persistence should be embraced, internalized, and allowed to flourish into new ways of playing that even our most celebrated proctors would never have thought up on their own.”

Is cheating at games the same mindset that causes some to push the boundaries, to question the rules, and to change the world in real life?