Some Knowledge

Should you cheat at video or computer games?  Does it matter?  This is a question that has puzzled humanity since the invention of the computer.  How can I get unfair advantage against a machine that holds all the cards?

The thing about game cheats is that they are built into the system on purpose.  We’re not talking about speed hacks for an MMORPG here, we’re talking about cheat codes for published games.  When they make the game, they put in this feature where you can enter some meaningless code combination and access some different feature of the game.  Why do they even call this cheating?  It’s part of the game.  The only cheat is that they don’t tell you about this stuff when you buy the game, you have to find out about it on the Internet.

Some of these cheats are totally meaningless for anything but entertainment value.  For instance, the almost universal big head/small head cheat code.  What is the point of having your game character sport a huge head?  Just so you laugh, that’s all.  Then again, some of the cheats make gaming almost pointless.  Take for instance unlimited ammo or invulnerability to damage.  Then again, some people might enjoy a game if they play in god mode.  Sure it takes some of the thrill out of the game if you can’t die, but then, you get to see all the content in the game without annoying deaths.

Cheating in an online game is a whole different thing than cheating in a single player game.  Most online games come with some sort of a hack shield program these days to prevent people from using hacks to get infinite gold or from one-hitting players and mobs.  This makes sense.  If you are playing a game against other people you want it to be fair.  Unless of course you are some kind of a gerbil or power gamer.  A 1337 power gamer might get all kinds of laughs out of using a DNS attack on another players connection while they are fighting them in player kill areas.  One crude form of this is the old fashioned spam attack, where you send hundreds of messages to a player while they are trying to fight you.  Not only distracting, but it lags the connection as well.  Hopefully game designers know about these dirty tricks and disable spam before it can cause problems.

As far as cheat codes go, they are not really cheating.  It’s just a different way to play a game designed in there by the software engineers when they made the game.  The only reason they don’t tell you about these things when they sell you the game is because people get a thrill out of thinking they have beat the system.  You don’t hear about a lot of people using cheats to beat solitaire.  In theory, you could design a bot to totally play that game for you.   But why would you?  Watching a computer beat itself in a game of cards would be about as fun as watching sand drop through an hourglass.  If game designers wanted to really put some cheating into their games they could design bots to play the games and then you could sit back and watch the game unfold as if it were a movie, but then, what would be the point?