Game Cheats
What's the Deal with Game Cheats?

Game cheats. It seems odd that people should have such an interest in game cheats. Don't get me wrong. Many's the game I have played, played poorly I should say, where I wanted to know what the secrets were to getting a good score, maybe even a high score. I remember playing Galaga for a long time, being blasted into oblivion, wasting my quarters, until a friend showed me a neat little trick where you move the spaceship over to the left side of the screen for some length of time and you get a blank check to wreak havoc.

When I first placed Sid Meier's Civilization, if the Barbarians didn't chew me up and spit me out, the Zulus or the Mongols would. I couldn't figure out how the computer opponents consistently performed so well. I finally reverse engineered the save files and learned -- by interrupting the game and examining the files -- that the computer opponents didn't have to build anything. The game cheated by just giving things to the computer players. So the great secret to game AI is that the programmers cheat.

In fact, there was a well-known cheat in Civilization where if you hit some function key combination you had access to the AI's map. You could see exactly when the computer opponents produced new units, where their units were, etc. The game cheat was so well known that a Cheat Mode was added to Civilization II -- and a worthwhile Cheat Mode it was. The AI still needed to cheat in order to win.

Civilization III does not -- so far as I have learned -- have a cheat mode, either hidden or openly disclosed. I haven't yet looked at Civilization IV, but I guess the online strategy sites for the Civ games make it relatively unnecessary for the programmers to incorporate game cheats into the user interface.

Nonetheless, game cheats have become a big deal. They are currently the most searched expression reported by WordTracker. That's a lot of frustrated gamers out there looking for short cuts. Makes me wonder what the point of playing the games is, since if you have to cheat so much you might as well just find an easier game.

Cheating has become a way of life for young Americans. Many students now regularly cheat in school. Cheating has become so commonplace that many Web sites have been created to cater to the intense demand for pre-written term papers, test answers, and lecture notes. Sports scandals about chemical-based cheating pop up every few months.

What is the purpose of wanting to play a game that you have to cheat at? What is the purpose of designing a game that is so cryptic and challenging, or so dependent upon computer-side cheating, that the players are not only expected to cheat, but are apparently encouraged to do so?

Game cheats just take all the fun out of playing a game. If the point of the game is to find the cheats and move through the various levels quickly, then maybe it's time to take games to a new level and make them more like virtual rides that are completely in the user's control.

It would be more interesting to tour a virtual world than have to cheat a game.