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.