Has Cheating Ruined Gaming?

That seems like a straight-forward question, but what exactly is cheating? Indeed, “cheating” could refer to a hundred different things, from hacking a game to explore it beyond the way it was meant to be, typing in a code to enable a God mode, or to take advantage of a glitch to make your game life easier. The big question, though, is whether or not all cheating is bad, or if it has ruined gaming in general.

A good friend linked me to a brief article that discussed this exact same subject. The author first discovered a neat cheat in an old-school Pokemon game… yes, the infamous “MissingNo.” glitch. It seems simple, but the author found that over time, she was finding herself taking advantage of the glitch far too often, and it came to a point where the game was beat, without a real sense of accomplishment (or at least that’s the blank I filled).

I know this feeling all too well. In Final Fantasy for the Sony PSP, I stumbled on a glitch inadvertently that really helped give me ultimate power, and I just couldn’t resist… I ended up taking full advantage of that baby, giving high-end equipment to my characters that weren’t even suited to wear or use it. In the end, I played with this massive cheat for a little while, until I decided that it wasn’t how I wanted to play the game. So, I deleted the quest, and started over… legit.

For as long as I’ve been gaming, I’ve been cheating, but usually I cheat after the game’s been beat, and I want to really explore every nook and cranny of the game world. Or, just because I want to have a blast. There were few games back in the day that I played as much as Duke Nukem 3D, and let me tell you, I cheated in that game like there was no tomorrow – of course, I did beat the game legit the first time through. But, nothing is quite as satisfying as having an RPG with unlimited ammo. Well, almost nothing.

At least with cheats like that, though, I affect only myself, and if it’s fun, who cares? The real problem for me, is online cheaters… those creeps who somehow enjoy getting ahead by cheating and making other player’s lives miserable. This is usually due to the fact that these gamers have zero skill, and the only way they can get ahead is by cheating, but either way, it sucks.

I am not about to give up cheating, but I admit cheating doesn’t usually come into mind while going through a game for the first time, unless I hit a spot that’s brutally difficult. How do you guys feel about it? Do you make it a habit to cheat in games, even if it’s just to add to the fun?

The problem was that once the cheating bug gets you, it can take a while to shake. It can become an easy solution to when a game gets boring or too hard. Without realizing it, you sort of become a magnet for exploits and underhanded adventures. What started innocuously with the hunt for MissingNo consumed my early gaming years.