Does Cheating Make Video Games More Fun?

For as long as there have been video games, there have generally been ways to cheat at video games. The cheating methods have not always been easy to find, and sometimes there have been myths about cheat codes that didn’t actually exist. But if you are someone who plays a lot of games and has never cheated at any of them, then you’re a rare individual and probably someone with a greater degree of self-control than most of us. Cheating makes games easier. But does it make them more fun?

Is it moral to cheat on video games?
There is some question over the morality of using cheat codes and shortcuts in a video game, but let’s be honest: it’s not like a cyclist using banned medications to achieve greater speed and endurance or a golfer moving their ball to an easier lie. The fact that this code exists at all means that the game developers were prepared to make cheating possible, and in the end, you’re only really playing against yourself. So there’s no real morality issue here. If you use a random Pokemon generator to generate characters you were otherwise struggling to catch, it’s not going to make life harder for others. However, there are other questions to ask, too.

Is it satisfying to complete a game when you know you cheated?

When you defeat the final boss in a video game and set down the controller (or sit back from the PC keyboard), there is definitely a feeling that you’ve been through something, and that feeling is central to the satisfaction that comes from beating a game. But what if you cheated to get there? Was it easier to defeat the final boss because you’d entered a code that gave you more weaponry than the military of an average small country? Does that have an impact on how satisfied you’ll feel?

Only you can answer the above question, in fairness. For some people, the sense of a job well done that comes with completing a video game can only be enjoyed if you did it the hard way. For others, there is the fact that you still had to put hours in to complete all of the missions that went before, some of which couldn’t be short-cut and didn’t depend on your ability to fire a heat-seeking missile at the boss. And as we mentioned above, you’re only playing against yourself, which means there’s no real stolen valor in cheating to pass a mission in a game.

Does the presence of cheat methods make a game more enjoyable?

We can all think of a level or a mission on a game we’ve loved that made the game almost unplayable. It may be that you had to defeat an enemy that was faster than light, armor-plated beyond all reason, and which could fire with unerring accuracy from even the most unpromising of angles. After the 300th time trying to beat that level, it takes an inhuman level of patience to fire it up again and try to win without at least leveling the playing field a little. A cheat being active doesn’t mean it needs to be used all the time. You can use it to pass a level that is becoming a drag on the enjoyability of a game and then move on.

Why do cheat codes even exist in video games?

Some people, not unreasonably, ask why there are cheat modes available in a video game if we weren’t intended to use them. In fairness, this isn’t the slam-dunk argument many people think it is. Cheats are placed in the code of a video game at the development stage so that developers can access different parts of the game for testing without having to go through everything that has gone before. So they’re not really there for our use. But they are there, and if developers don’t want them to be used by the average player, they can always develop levels that don’t require a player to be at the level of an eSports champion.

There will always be easy and hard ways to play a video game. For some people, taking the easy way is something that they can’t imagine ever wanting to do. For others, being able to use cheat codes from time to time actually helps them enjoy the game more. There’s room in this world for both groups, and it’s probably a good idea to have an easygoing attitude to the existence of cheat codes for the benefits they bring.