Cheating Week #4: You’re Only Cheating Yourself, Aaaaah

I thought I’d pull back slightly from just talking about specific games and their cheats – after all, now that you know what I have to say about Speedball II, you can use that to work out what I might say about New Zealand Story, where there’s a very similar Infinite Lives/Impossible Game mechanic at play. So I don’t really need to blather on uselessly about that.

I’d rather blather on uselessly about the larger morality of cheating at computer games, and how our moral attitude to it has changed. That seems to me to be a much more interesting and stimulating waste of everybody’s time.

I suppose back in the day playing a computer game would be a bit like playing Solitaire or Patience – yes, you could cheat, but all you’d be cheating would be yourself. With the old style games where there was never a victory or even a completion, there was even less incentive to cheat – yes, maybe you could get God Mode in Space Invaders, but that would just mean that you’d be sat forever, eternally blazing away at the alien foe or occasionally trundling over them when they impotently landed, horrified to discover that their touchdown on Earth’s soil brought them not the instant Game Over they craved but only a hollow, ignominious defeat. Eventually you’d still lose, because you’d get bored and turn the game off at the switch, which isn’t really winning it or you’d just do that all the time with every game. “I found turning off Marvel: Ultimate Alliance to be one of the most satisfying switchings-off of a game I’ve ever done, much better than turning off Metal Gear Solid in the middle of the first cut-scene, which was my previous gaming high. I recommend it to everyone – the Iron Man character is especially fun to consign to the infinite darkness of oblivion, but I also like to play as Luke Cage and Spider-Woman and imagine their screams as I defeat them once and for all with my godlike command of the switch at the back of the PS2.”

One workable theory would be that the balance started to tip with games that you could actually complete. You could face off against El Presidente in Ikari Warriors, or against the big walrus in New Zealand Story, and you could romp to victory in Speedball II. But you’re still only cheating yourself – it’s probably more exciting and sexy to complete these things using your own skill than to simply empower yourself with godlike abilities and clean everybody’s clock for them.

So a better theory of when cheating started to become acceptable would be with a game that was impossible to ever complete, that actually could be played forever if you had enough skillful players willing to work in shifts. I’m talking about Pac-Man here.

Pac-Man was interesting in that it did reward you for completing a couple of levels in a row by putting on a little cartoon show of the titular yellow blob and his ghostly chums. (This may have only been on the original arcade machine, mind.) Some ghosts might chase the Pacster across the screen, for example, and then return being chased by a significantly larger Pac-Man. if you survived four levels, you’d have a different cartoon again – something short and sweet, but still a reward for playing that went beyond a simple high score. Also, every level had a different fruit, so if you were curious, you could play on and see what other fruits or fruit-like objects might be lurking in wait.

So suddenly, there was a point to cheating – you could see what all the cartoons were, and see what all the fruit was. Suddenly it’s no longer about hollow victory over the game, but about exploration of the game. I’ve probably touched on this already, but as games have evolved over the decades, we’ve moved out of a ‘challenge’ paradigm and into an ‘immersion’ paradigm, in which we immerse ourselves in a virtual world, something that wasn’t really possible when it was just some blocky shapes chasing each other about while electronic farty sounds played over the top. So cheating becomes more about exploring new corners of the game world, finding places we couldn’t otherwise get to. There’s less of a moral problem about that – we’re not cheating ourselves any more, because since the purpose of games has changed, we’re not destroying the whole point of the game by cheating at it. All we’re denying ourselves is the opportunity to be really frustrated, which as I get older, and more conscious of how much time I’m wasting at any given moment, doesn’t seem quite so much fun as it used to.

Tomorrow I’ll take this a step further and put forward the startling theory that we are all cheaters now, returning to something I touched on right at the start – that games have progressed to the point where cheating is so encouraged that it’s actually part of the game, and there’s no longer a difference between playing a game and cheating at it.

First, though, I’m going to press the direction controller in a particular way and hold down both the shoulder buttons, which will grant me Infinite Persuasiveness so that you all automatically agree with everything I say. It should make writing tomorrow’s entry a lot easier.