Regarding the Defense of Cheating (Game Studies)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er-E1vxEnic&feature=em-uploademail

Okay- I FINALLY got around to watching this video- it's been on my list for some months now.

I have a number of thoughts on this, since I love exploiting systems.

First and foremost, the video uses some terminology that I don't identify with terribly well.

So, for my own purposes, I'd like to narrow the lines a bit. The video uses:

1. Spoilsports

2. By the Code

3. Cheaters

For a broad discussion, I think these three distinctions are probably fine, but as someone pretty steeped in both game culture and the seedy underbelly therein, it's not fine for me.

Spoilsports come in many shapes and sizes, but to me, it's an indicator of a particular attitude, not a type of person necessarily. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me give you a jumble of examples of types of gamers that typically have this kind of attitude:

1. "Tryhards";

2. Scammers;

3. Hackers;

4. Legal positivists;

5. Abusers;

6. Sore losers; etc

Aptly named "spoilsports" take the fun out of the game in one way or another. These are the people who take rules to the letter in circumstances where it is inappropriate (taking advantage of a simple misunderstanding, for instance). They're the people who can't take losing, the people who make it agonizing to play the game in general. Much of this behavior does not fall under the realm of cheating in any way, shape, or form. Really, it's just behavior that makes other players hate you.

"By the Code" is a distinction that fails to differentiate between "glitches," "exploits," "scams," and even things like bots.

Glitches or bugs are programming errors that result in the game world not functioning properly. Some bugs are completely inert, and some can give players an enormous advantage.

Exploit, however, refers to both an action and a noun. An exploit is an advantage that one gets from something within the game. Exploiting is the act of taking that advantage.
For this reason, you can exploit a glitch/bug or you can exploit a game mechanic that is working 100% as intended. To give you an example of how these two things are different, let's look at an actual game scenario or two:

In an adventure game, you come across a wall that, if approached from the correct angle, you can pass through. Unfortunately, passing through it gets you stuck and gives you no advantages whatsoever. This is an example of a bug/glitch, but not an exploit.

Now take that same example and apply it to an online, first person shooter. You can't exit the wall, but it turns out you can shoot through the wall when on the side you're on. This means you're basically able to shoot people without being seen or shot in return. This is an exploit of a bug/glitch.

Finally, swapping to an economy-based MMO, let's say you find a shop where you can buy an item for 10 gold. It turns out, the game is programmed such that the same item can be sold back to the merchant for 15 gold. You buy and sell the item over and over for infinite money. This is a mechanic working correctly, but poorly considered that you're taking advantage of. Therefore, it's an exploit, but not a bug/glitch; you're simply using it to an unintended consequence.

While both of these are considered "in the code," one is clearly intentional (but ill-thought-out) while the other is not intentional at all. That important distinction is sometimes the cutoff point for what players find "acceptable" behavior.


After that, you have the weird territory of "bots" or the automation of any process in-game. A good example is that I'm playing a game right now where I can cast a buff on one of my characters every 8 seconds, but it's kind of hard to tell when those 8 seconds are up while all this other crap is going on. So, I modified an AutoHotKey (a program that automates keystrokes and mouse movements) script to do it for me. This represents an interesting area of the "cheating" discussion, since this is often considered smart playing rather than cheating. You're using a tool outside of the game to improve your performance inside the game, utilizing the game's programming only.

By contrast, you have "hacking," which is a process that involves changing how the game functions through use of outside programs. This is a misnomer, since actual hacking doesn't work quite like that, but in gaming, this is what "hacking" has come to mean. Few people consider "hacking" an appropriate means of gaining an edge since it requires both an outside program and it changes the way the game operates on a fundamental basis in order to give you an advantage.


All that said, this video raises a few interesting points about what these different tactics do to the evolution of gaming both on a macro level and on a micro level. However, this video blurs the line between strategy and cheating, which I don't think is necessarily appropriate. The zerg example, in particular, highlights what I mean here. This is an example of emergent gameplay. A strategy that develops by the players' ingenuity rather than the intention of the game designers necessarily.
This is very similar to the gold exploit I cited earlier, but with one very major difference:

In the case of the gold exploit, a designer's natural response will be "oops" and to come out with a patch to close the loophole. In the case of the zerg tactic, a designer will change nothing in the game, since it doesn't create an imbalance or effectively destroy any individual parts of the game.
In this way, both intention and consequence are important in determining what to label our actions in-game.

Moreover, there's no weight given in the video to the adequacy of the game design. Why does this matter? Well, the narrator addressed it a bit by noting that there are some games where a strategy comes out as the "dominant" strategy that pretty much everyone uses. A strategy that is objectively better than all the others, thus breaking a game and ruining any meta-strategies one might otherwise come up with. A good example of this is a card game, A Few Acres of Snow, which has a tactic that is virtually unbeatable if you use it. A tactic that only applies to one particular player per game. This is not an example of cheating or emergent gameplay, since it's within the game, intentional, and based on the fundamentally poor design of a game's mechanics rather than anything else. The big difference between this and an exploit as cited before is that this cannot be fixed (or at the very least, it cannot be fixed easily). It is too foundational to how the game functions and would require basically remaking the game from the ground up to fix.


In every single one of these circumstances, as the narrator points out, players and designers are being encouraged to collectively determine what is "acceptable" gameplay behavior, what is "good" game design, and how to best progress from where we are to where we want to be in terms of games. I think to that end, there's definitely an extent to which much of this behavior does help the evolution of gaming. Some of it, however, represents a re-affirmation of behavior we already knew we didn't want in games. A lot of this comes in the form of spoilsports who hack. Players who deliberately ruin the game for others at no benefit to anyone using outside programs that are not accessible to other players.
Rightly so, these people are "jerks."