The one topic I feel is a bit left out of our conversation on failure (and maybe gaming in general) is cheating. Especially when reading Ruberg's piece, I was wondering how we as critical analysts should think about cheating. If failure is the key aspect that gives depth to our enjoyment and makes winning meaningful, does cheating do the opposite? I have certainly played games that frustrated me, and turned to cheating to complete them. Most of the time, I felt hollow about cheating, it took the purpose of the game away. But sometimes I only used a cheat to pass an especially frustrating stage, to reach a point I knew I would be unable to get to otherwise. At those points, I did feel genuine enjoyment even after breaking the rules of the game.
Outside of the virtual world, cheating also makes me think about playground games. The concept of cheating is first introduced here, when kids realize they can break any rule they want and have not yet had much consequence for doing so. Do other children playing games together enforce rules on cheaters simply to make their own experience better? Or on another level is it to preserve the game for everyone, including the cheater?
In another sense, does cheating simply change the concept of failure, instead of removing it? For example, I would argue there are plenty of ways to fail in creative mode in Minecraft. In some older online games, like Counter Strike and Modern Warfare, the servers are not highly monitored and hackers run wild. Many players fly around the map, through walls, instant-killing non-cheating players. While this clearly ruins the fun and competitive spirit of the non-cheaters, does it create new rules for the hackers? When they fight each other, is this an entirely separate game? If games are intimately and undeniably connected to failure, I definitely think cheating is something to have a much more in-depth conversation about.
I also can think of lots of times I've used "cheating" to create a different game entirely - on my Action Replay I used to create games with my friends where we could see how many walls we could walk through before the game spazzed out. I'm not sure cheating is inherently the maker or destroyer of a game, its just a broader category of having the ability to choose rules, which is why it can take on so many uses.
As the Ruberg piece discussed, there is a difference in games about failing in a way the game wants you to and failing in a way it doesn't. I believe the same is the case with cheating. After all, many games come pre-packaged with cheats that can be used to change up game-play or speed it up. I feel that this should be an important part of the conversation, as a game that explicitly allows you to use cheats is allowing you to actively circumvent failure. It begs the question. if you were given assistance to win, did you fail or succeed? Many might express they feel they failed, yet many need or enjoy that assistance. Meanwhile, if you use…
I've always thought of cheating as a fundamentally different experience from a base game. I myself very regularly cheat in games, usually story driven ones that I don't really enjoy from a mechanical perspective. If a game with cheats is a fundamentally different experience, I think its also fair to say the failure condition (if it even still has one) is fundamentally different. In my case the failure condition would probably go beyond the game, say if I ended up not completing the entire story of the game, or just read a plot summary online
I too have turned to cheating (or at the very least, walkthroughs) to get through particularly difficult games. I admit that most of the time when I've cheated it has been, like you said, to get to a new level or part of the game that I wouldn't have been able to access otherwise. In this case especially, I don't think cheating is diametrically opposed to/negates failure. Juul argues that failure is a sort of humbling experience. Yes, failure is an inherent part of games, but sometimes "failure" in games can mean you literally cannot progress in the game. At that point, after many many failures, you're frustrated. You want to move on. So you cheat. But only after many…