Cheating in computer games

[bigsharn]

We’ve all done it at some point, we’ve got stuck at a part of the game and gone to the internet for a solution. (admittedly I did it in Portal), but is it right to do this? I mean, computer games as we know them have been out for coming up to 40 years now, is it right to shortcut our way through the games?

Let’s go back to 1992. Super Mario World’s just been released on the SNES and the internet’s not out yet. I spent many an hour trying to get through the Forest of Illusion and managed to complete it after around 150 hours of game play. It was a hell of a feeling and all the way through school that was the way it was, never used a cheat or a game guide.
Out comes Command And Conquer for the PS1 and I start buying a magazine for it, which came with a cheat book, with Command And Conquer cheats in it. Being 9 at the time (I got it late… ok?) I figure there’s nothing wrong with cheating a little bit… but eventually it gets to the point where I complete the game wholly on cheats, and I don’t get that same sense of accomplishment because it’s so easy. Eventually I figured out why it was so easy and started playing properly, but the point is, why cheat?

Fair enough if you’re doing it for the laughs (hello Big Head mode from Goldeneye) or if you’ve finished a game (see also: all weapons and spawning tanks in Grand Theft Auto), but do any of us have a right to cheat just because we can? If you think about it, all those man-hours invested in creating those games and we’ve cheated our way past it, we’ve cheated those programmers and designers out of their creation. If a game’s made you resort to cheat because there are no ideas (or even subtle hints) where to go next and you look at a game guide just to fathom that then fair enough, that’s the programmers being stupid and they deserve to be cheated out of that.

There are hundreds of videos on how to get through a game on sites like Youtube and walkthroughs on various Google sites. Why? Because we, as a society, like the easy way out. People are seeing games more as a way to relax in current society but they’re not, they’re tools to challenge the mind and give you that feeling that something you’ve done is right.

But wait, why do game developers put cheats into their games? Well how else do they test? They don’t have time to go through and complete the game 100% before release and they just don’t take the codes out because it saves time. That doesn’t give us the right to exploit them just because they’re there.

I openly admit to cheating because I’m not ashamed to say I’m not as good as most other genuine gamers, but I still think it’s wrong to do.

What are your opinions on it?