I normally wouldn’t cheat at a game, but sometimes I feel almost forced to, due to poor design. A couple of examples:
Civilization 4. One of the things I found very tedious about Civ 3 was cleaning pollution. There was nothing fun about that at all. So when Civ 4 came out, I was quite pleased to see they’d replaced pollution with the health system. All was well and good, until the expansions came out: the game designers put the tedium right back into the game, in the form of the espionage system and spies. Now, instead of cleaning pollution all over the place every turn, I found myself sending workers everywhere to repair the improvements the AI spies had torn up. Or having to go through my cities and rebuild buildings the AI spies had destroyed. Every. Damn. Turn. There is nothing fun about this! I quickly got sick of this shit, so I “cheated” - I modded the game, removing spies altogether. Blessed peace! I could now proceed with the game and have fun.
Heroes of Might and Magic. I’ve followed this series since the beginning, and as far back as I can remember, the game designers love to use this little “trick” when designing maps: put a portal exit near the player’s home town, so that enemy heroes can come through and attack, but the player can’t retaliate short of killing off said heroes, or slogging across the entire map to get to the enemy’s town. Really? That’s the best they can think of to make a map “challenging?” This doesn’t make the game fun or challenging, it makes it fucking annoying. You wind up spending the majority of your time swatting flies, and can’t get anything accomplished.
Of course, I learned a long time ago that the game designers suck at designing maps; whenever I install a HoMM game the first thing I do is empty the maps directory and download user-created maps. But there’s still the campaigns, which can be fun, except for this tired one-way portal trick that the designers like to use over and over. I always put up with it, though, as much as it annoyed me - until I got to the Dwarf campaign in HoMM 5. One of the maps has two of these exit portals near the player’s home base - and you cannot even get to the enemy’s castle to put an end to the swarms of heroes attacking your castle! Enough of this shit. I hired two heroes, gave each of them 5000 black dragons, and parked them at the portal exits. Problem solved, and I went back to enjoying the game, exploring the map in peace.
So, if an otherwise cool game has a “feature” that dampens the fun of the game, do you cheat?
Hell yes. I game to have fun, not to be frustrated, irritated, and angry. There’ve been more than a few games over the years that I’d never have finished if I hadn’t cheated. I’m generally not willing to keep doing something 9,000,000 times 'til I get it exactly freaking right. For example, my daughter has a Scooby Doo game for the PS2 that is, overall, a pretty good game except for one nearly impossible platform-jumping bit. We cheated, finished the game, and enjoyed it. If not for the cheat, we’d have ended up bitterly hating the game and feeling that we’d been scammed out of our money.
Modding a game that’s designed to be modded isn’t cheating, unless you’re using the mods in multiplayer with someone who doesn’t know about them. That’s like saying that the dealer declaring a wild card in poker is cheating.
I will even go so far as to say that you cannot cheat a single player game.* You only alter the completion criteria for your own maximum fun. Some people are completists - they must do everything available in the game. Some like the challenge of the most hardcore settings (and then go brag on message boards about how good they are at beating the hardcore settings); some like the challenge of flying through a game as quickly as possible. I like to play FPS and RPGs casually, 30-60 minutes at a time. If I have to do the same sequence over 10 times, I’m not making any progress and not enjoying myself. (I also get a little perturbed when I’m supposed to remember some obscure fact for a puzzle that I encountered two weeks ago in real time. Hey designers, not everyone plays 20 hours / session!)
*This is not as true anymore, as PC single player games now are adding ‘achievements’ to share online as a measure of sizing a gamer’s dick to other gamers.
This is why I don’t feel bad about the changes I’ve made to Civ 4 - in my example, the AI can no longer annoy me with spies, but I can’t use them either.
In my HoMM 5 example, though, I’ve blatantly used the cheat console to defeat the map in a way not intended by the game designers. In this case, I don’t really care - when they choose to make it frustrating to the point I’m tearing my hair out, I choose to cheat.
The Sims games without using the money cheat are boring and frustrating and completely pointless. The game becomes 100 times more fun if you just give yourself a shit ton of money at the start and make a house exactly like you want it.
Actually I played Sims 2 without ever cheating and thought it was fun starting from a shithole apartment and finishing with a giant mansion. By the time I ended it my character was an eternally youthful rockstar superhero with a hot wife and a daughter who’d just left for college. I thought that was a pretty good happily ever after for the guy.
Elder Scrolls games are made of this. It’s pretty painful to play them plain-vanilla, particularly Oblivion. While Daggerfall and Arena didn’t have mods, they did have enough character creation changes to make a huge difference in gameplay, to the point where you could easily avoid almost any feature you didn’t like for the entire game.
I hate it when base-building RTS games try and shake things up by removing the base-building element and forcing you to escort a pre-defined group of troops through a maze-like map.
I’m looking at you Age Of Empires 2 and Starcraft!
Not only that, but sometimes you get your home base and a worker unit and if you lift the fog of war, their economy is already booming. Sometimes those REALLY suck.
I’m trying to think of examples where I’ve cheated in video games, but I can’t. I’ve used mods, but they weren’t cheat-mods, like extra life or money or anything. Just new characters and clothing types and stuff.
There are some people who get a hard on for yelling at people who cheat, I’m not one of those types. I don’t have anything against “cheating,” I just haven’t.
Wait! As I write this I can think of one. My friend and I played Morrowind for probably a year straight. Every single day at school, for an entire school year, we’d briefly discuss what shit we’d done in Morrowind. That game was so fucking huge, there was always little shit that we’d discover. About three quarters of the way into the year I discovered that I could drink poison to lower my stats to near zero and then talk to trainers, get trained up, then heal the poison and presto, I had stats above the game’s imposed limit.
Because of that, I wound up having a character who could, not kidding or exaggerating, stand on one end of the continent, jump, then land in the ocean on the other side of the continent, all without touching the ground.
I don’t often cheat (especially on my first time through a game), though I will install mods and the like that I find improve the gaming experience without affecting the challenge of the game (such as inventory system mods for Oblivion).
IIRC, the most recent cheating I did was in Fallout 3, where I used the console to alter the running speed. It just seemed like it took forever to get anywhere in the wastes.
Modding the game isn’t the same as cheating at all. It’s just changing the rules of the game. If there’s no spies, you can’t use them either.
That said, I don’t think “cheat” is a term that really works at all if you’re playing against a machine. “Cheating” implies a violation of fairness. My PC is just a tool; I can’t be fair or unfair to it any more than it’s unfair to my television to make it easier to watch by plugging in a DVR.
Enhancing the gaming experience by changing the game just means you’re getting more value out of the game.
My policy is if I’m enjoying the game and good at it, but reach a point where the game design doesn’t make sense or unreasonable, or there is a bug, it’s ok to cheat a little to continue the game.
Case in point: Half-Life. When you get to the Xen levels late in the game turns from a cinematic shooter into a low-gravity jumping puzzle in an alternate dimension, while you’re getting attacked from multiple directions. Very frustrating, I “nocliped” myself through a couple of the worst sections.
I’m a professional game designer. In my experience, most designers don’t give a crap whether you cheat in single-player or not, as long as you buy the game and have fun with it. Play the way you want to play, it’s your game!
