IDKFA
You know it makes sense.
This, I think, is the fundamental disconnect. Not all games are played, or necessarily have to be played, to be won.
Obviously, a game like solitaire is only played to be won, but even then there’s some room for cheating to keep it interesting. Like “hmm, I wonder what would have happened if I’d moved the 2 of clubs onto the red three instead of the 2 of spades” and then you find that, as luck would have it, all the cards you would have needed were in that pile.
For story based games (like RPGs), some people really are much more interested in seeing how the storyline unfolds, especially if they can effect changes in it through their actions. If, for instance, someone is playing an RPG with that mindset and can’t beat a certain boss. He can try over and over again or he can grind out a few levels, but both of those options are boring, and the first may take dozens of tries to master a frustrating mechanic that is an otherwise easy fight, and the latter may still not be enough to deal with a bad mechanic. Or, he can just use a cheat to beat the boss and keep going with the part he’s interested in.
As others have mentioned, this is also something that comes up in strategy games. Sometimes there’s just a certain mechanic that you just don’t enjoy where, if it weren’t there, you’d find the game more fun. If it’s something like the economics, an infinite resource code could essentially remove that component while still leaving the parts you like in tact.
Games are about a lot more than just the end result of winning or losing. It’s far more important that you enjoy the experience, and sometimes a little bit of tweaking can make a game more enjoyable or bring added replay value.
Now, I will say it’s silly to get a brand new game on openning day, go home, immediately look up god-mode codes, beat it in an hour, and complain that the game was too short or uninteresting. I DO think those sorts of people are idiots because they didn’t even try the game legitimately first, but I would think they’re a small minority.
I thump the computer regularly at Civ 4, but will never raise the difficulty past noble because after that your guys do not equal their guys. It may be a challenge but when it takes 3 of your swordsmen to beat one of theirs I want to stomp the keyboard. I will however take minor empires in hard scenarios filled with18 civs or more.
Madden '09 gets reset if I lose a player to a season ending injury or continue to lose to a team thats beneath my contempt.
You like a game in general and it has a point you won’t ever get through. I use a cheat. Others quit and never play again. I bought the game for entertainment, not to stop at a point that I can’t do. It’s not about winning every part of a game for me it’s about playing the game some more.
Mods get added to expand the game or make it better fit what some people prefer. Why do you think the seller sold the ultimate product that is optimized for everybody?
I don’t really think of reloading when things don’t go your way as “cheating”. It’s “refining your game”. If you mess something up and know your game is going to suffer because of it, why suffer through that when you can try again to do it better? You’re still accomplishing whatever you wanted to accomplish, even if it takes 5, 10, or 100 tries.
The Lions? 
Seriously, there’s somebody who thinks I’m a low down dirty cheater because I set the game on easy? I paid for the damned game, I’m not good at games where you shoot things, I want to enjoy the thing. It isn’t fun to die and die and die and die and never get to play the damned game - so conveniently, the game developers realized that people have different skill levels and gave me an easy setting, so I can enjoy a game I paid for. I didn’t realize it made me a bad person.
Honestly, if you’re so tired of “cheating”, go out to a real irradiated wasteland and learn how to kill mercenaries and scavenge your own food and water. Playing Fallout instead is just cheating!
Having played computer games for a LONG time (like, way back into the late 70s :eek:), I believe there are two sides to this issue.
On the one side, it’s understandable that you want to retry things to see if you can create a better outcome with a different decision. Thus, in a strategy or 4-X game, jumping back in time to build unit X instead of building Y makes some sense. It’s a learning process, in other words. And it can be understandable that you want to progress past a sticking point so that you don’t end up having to give up on the game in disgust at your own inability to figure something out. Thus, reading up on how Link can defeat a certain boss to get to the next level makes sense.
But on the other hand, cheating always has the unfortunate effect of handicapping your own progression in ability. If you don’t learn from your mistakes to overcome a problem, you never get past a certain level of ability. Thus, if you insist upon reloads simply to hope for better random outcomes in a battle, and need to do this regularly to avoid losing the game, your ability becomes stunted. If you ever end up playing multi-player, you’ll get stomped because you never forced yourself to overcome the problem through figuring out how to keep the bad result from happening, or to keep it from resulting in your eventual loss in the game.
And, as pointed out, if the only way you win your games is to cheat at them, where is the legitimate sense of accomplishment? All that does is reinforce in you a tendency to avoid hard challenges. I see this in students of mine a lot. 
This pretty much sums it up for me. Also I like to see the story unfold. I don’t play games “for the challenge.” I just play for fun. If I needed to do something hard and challenging to feel fulfilled, it certainly wouldn’t be video game.
Right now, I’m near the end of a playthrough of Civ3 where I’m using every exploit I know of, just to see how high I can crank up the score: Saving before and after every random event, setting only one opponent, etc. It doesn’t mean I always do that: Usually, I play it straight, and even disable the options that would make it possible to cheat.
On the other end of the scale, I had a roommate once who absolutely loved the Doom II level “Barrels of Fun”, where you start off completely surrounded by exploding barrels. He loved it because he couldn’t figure out any way to beat it without cheating, and thought it was absolutely great that the programmers would force you to cheat to beat a level. It then became my favorite level of the game, too, when I figured out how to do it without cheating.
I see it like this:
When i play something I always roleplay, what I mean is that internally I suspend disbelief and think like the game is real, I think about my X-Com soldiers as having personalities, and roleplay them, I internally “simulate” the politics of my Civilization, is much more fun that way for me.
So, when a X-com soldier dies, or an army is destroyed, I cannot reload without compromising the internal “reality” of the situation.
Also, the defeats are part of the game experience, if you never lose a soldier, never lose a battle you are cheating yourself for fully experiencing the game, what civilization never lost a battle?, what special forces squad never lost a soldier?.
I can understand why people think like this. I believe it comes down to the following.
Player A plays through game exactly as it was meant to be played, and completes it.
Player B uses cheats/exploits and completes the game much quicker and more easily than Player A, whilst gaining the same benefits.
The insinuation here being that B’s actions detract from the accomplishment of A’s, or that B is robbing himself of the satisfaction of victory. I can understand why A would be pissed at B. B has gained the exact same result for less effort.
I don’t use cheats much myself, although I metagame like a mother - fail? Reload! It’s a function of the game, ergo, not cheating. Cheating implies a violation of preset rules, if the method to facilitate progress is already in the game it is hardly a violation, eh? A slight hijack but I feel there needs to be that distinction.
However, it come down to this: B doesn’t care about A’s abstract sense of self-satisfaction, and rightly so. In multiplayer games cheaters should be hung, drawn and quartered because they are actively detracting from the experience. In single player games though; it’s your money, your product, do what you want with it. Rule of Fun clearly applies too.
Dad? I didn’t know you were on the dope!
Exactly.
Or fix what people think was broken in vanilla mode.
Exactly - I don’t get my “legitimate sense of accomplishment” from playing video games, I get it from baking a pie crust or finally teaching my dog not to pull on the leash or knocking a reference question out of the park. I have a real life - I play video games to enjoy them.
And it still cracks me up that somebody thinks I should be ashamed of letting people know in public that I set a game to “easy”.
I never cheat in RPGs the first time through. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to replay and cheat.
I never cheated in Oblivion or Falliut but you can bet I have the difficulty set to low. I want to enjoy it, not have impossible fights!
And I did cheat pretty much all the way through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Why? I am not that great at FPS (though not bad either) but it was the first time in a FPS that I really liked the story. A lot.
What’s it to ya? I like playing it, I bought it, I play it the way I want. Why is it any skin off your back? I never understand people who have to judge other people’s personal activities.
Hey, I knit too, and have never finished a project. No really! I just like the clacking of the needles and the repetitive motions - it’s a kind of Zen for me - and making little squares. I can afford the yarn, I can afford the needles, I do it. Wanna judge me on that, too?
Oh yeah. All you people that are jonesing for tough video games? Google “I wanna be the guy”. Watch some of the videos. Play it. Get back to me and tell if that is fun or arduous. We just set our definition of “arduous” at different places.
I see nothing wrong with setting the game to “easy”, how would one learn to play in “Fricking Absolutely Impossible” if one is not allowed to start in “easy”
(FTR: I play mostly on Normal, but if i really like a game i will not stop until i finish it on its toughest setting)
I suck at video games, basically. Crappy reflexes/hand-eye coordination. However, I like RPG games that have good plots, especially Bioware’s. So I crank the difficulty all the way down to the lowest possible, and if I keep banging my head against a particular spot, I cheat my way past it. I don’t brag or care about “beating” games, I don’t talk about how good I am, and I fully admit that I cheat.
I use addons for some of these games, especially Baldur’s Gate 2. I’ve played that game more times than I can think of because of new NPCs to interact with via addons, and I really don’t want to grind through certain spots again, just to interact with these new characters, because it gets boring. So I cheat.
:eek: HEATHEN!, burn her!
Actually, I Wanna Be The Guy kinda looks fun, although painful.