Cheats and Liars

Today I learned that if you win more than 1 million monetary units in gambling, The Land takes over and forces you to bet ridiculous amounts until you're knocked back down to a sensible level.

My employment of the ridiculously favorable gambling odds in The Land prompted a fun and interesting discussion on what does and does not constitute "cheating" in computer role-playing games. This subject has been on my mind since at least December, when I capitulated to looking at spoilers for NetHack.

But before I even begin to discuss these issues, I want to emphasize at the outset that I know it's just a game. All right? I don't want to see the comments flooded with people who feel like they need to tell me to "chill out, it's only a game." By even reading this posting, you're acknowledging that a blanket of triviality covers everything I'm about to say.

I do think, however, that it's worth thinking about right and wrong behavior even in something that's "just a game." Human beings have a limited amount of time in their lives, but unlike other animals are blessed with an abundance of choice in what to do with that time. Rule #1 of a good life is probably to invest that limited time in things that matter. If they don't matter because of their nature, then we can make them matter by the way we engage in them.

This is a topic perhaps better discussed in specifics rather than the abstract. Consider my second-favorite pastime: crossword puzles. The end result of a crossword puzzle--that I've managed to fill in 80 or so squares with letters--matters to absolutely nobody, and has no effect on the world except that I've spent however long it took me to do it. If I came running up to you with a crossword puzzle and said, "Look! I've filled a bunch of letters in these boxes!" you wouldn't be remotely impressed.

But the method by which I fill out a crossword puzzle can matter a great deal. If done right, it can exercise my mind, increase my capacity for lateral thinking, and teach me about new subjects. And when I come running to you and say, "Look! I finished the Saturday New York Times crossword in ink without any hints!," you're more likely to say "wow!" (Or, if you're Irene, "Weren't you going to fix the bathroom sink this morning?")

Now, if all I care about is filling in the blocks, there are a number of things I can do:

• Fill them in with pencil, so if I realize I've made a mistake, I can erase it
• Consult a crossword puzzle dictionary
• Consult an actual dictionary
• Use Wikipedia for the proper names
• Go onto crossword puzzle forums and get hints from other solvers
• If the solution has already been published, simply look at it 

These are in rough order of what I would consider least offensive to most offensive. I do most of my paper crosswords in pen, but only because I rarely carry around a pencil. Most crossword aficionados don't consider pencil even mildly cheating, and indeed pencils are used in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. A pen admittedly adds to the difficulty and would be akin to a "conduct" in NetHack.

A crossword puzzle dictionary only helps you with possible words given the positioning of various letters. You still have to match the right word to the clue. An actual dictionary might help you with definitions for unfamiliar clue words, but again, you still have to figure out the right answer. Wikipedia is more likely to just deliver the answer for proper names, historical references, and such, but at least you've learned something in the process.

In the last two examples, you're just looking up the answers, and you've circumvented anything positive that could come from the experience for the empty satisfaction of filling in the grid. You've taken time that you could have regarded as "invested" and turned it into time that you've simply "spent."

There are, similarly, a lot of ways to cheat at computer games, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that that winning screen is all that matters. There are few games in which it is particularly impossible to get that screen. Heck, if you have the computer skills, you could just peek into the source files and load it up. Even if you want to get there with your own party, there's no end of mechanisms: saved game editors, walkthroughs, cheat codes, bug exploitations, console commands, online hints, debug modes, save scumming, start scumming, inventory scumming, and a host of other tactics depending on the game. And in the end, you realized you didn't actually earn that "won!" screen, and the taste of victory turns to ashes in your mouth.

"So what?!" cry those of you who didn't internalize my first paragraph. "It's just a game!" No, it's not. It's a game that you spent 20 hours playing! If you want to trivialize the process, why do it at all?

Now, this isn't to say that every game needs to be a Sisyphean nightmare. There are, naturally, degrees of circumventing the intended difficulty of the game, some of them within the intended mechanics of the game, and some of them inescapably "cheating." They vary from game to game and platform to platform. I would like to suggest that there are five levels to consider, from the admirable to the reprehensible:

1. Adhering to a conduct. I'm taking this term from NetHack and applying it to other games. In NetHack, it refers to playing an already-difficult game with additional restrictions, such as "atheism" (never praying to a god or employing altars) to "vegetarianism" (never eating animal corpses). Examples in other games might include:

• Playing on the highest difficulty level throughout the game.
• Severely limiting the frequency of saved games.
• Deliberately role-playing a challenging party combination.
• Refusing to use certain in-game resources, such as quest logs or auto maps.

Of these, I only typically do the second one with most games, though I wish I'd done the last one with the last two Elder Scrolls games. I did play Skyrim on the highest difficulty from the outset--it was the only way to make the game truly challenging--but that can be a killer in other games.

2. Not cheating. It's not cheating when the player uses in-game elements in a way intended by, or easily foreseen by, the developer, and consistent with the ideas of role-playing. CRPGs, like all games, are meant to supply certain avenues and advantages to the player to make it possible to win. Simply using these avenues as intended, even if it makes the game a bit easier, even if it makes the game a lot easier, is not cheating. Any in-game avenue that makes the game absurdly simple is  a matter of poor game design, not poor player ethics. Examples:

• Grinding against any creature that the game offers as a matter of course. This includes "pudding farming" in NetHack, no matter what NetHack purists may say.
• Using the full maneuverability that the game gives you, for instance to bob and weave around enemies in Dungeon Master.
• Setting the difficulty level (if the game offers one) to whatever you prefer at the outset of the game.
• Outfitting yourself with the best equipment available (including hammering your armor to godlike levels of protection in Skyrim).
• Reaping the rewards of gambling in games that have gambling.
• Stealing lots of things in games that have a theft mechanic.
• Saving at reasonable intervals if the game allows saving-at-will.
• Taking external notes and making external maps (another area in which I disagree with some NetHack purists).
• Asking other players for hints (including limited searches of walkthroughs and FAQs) when you've honestly reached a point that you're stuck and cannot otherwise continue after exhausting all options you can think of.

I have to regard my use of gambling in both The Land and Questron II as not cheating. The programmers deliberately put in gambling systems that offered absurdly favorable odds to the player, and in the case of The Land, the developer had 12 years of updates to fix it. I can only imagine that it was intentional (the advantage conveyed by it only held for a few dungeons, as you'll hear about next time). In neither case was I doing anything that the game manifestly did not intend.

I would argue the same about the Cuisinarts in Might & Magic II. It's a clear mechanic of that game that enemies respawn, and the player is clearly meant to engage in some level of grinding against them. The inclusion of an enemy who is so easy to defeat and conveys such ridiculous experience rewards was a bad decision on the developer's part; it's not the player's fault for just wandering into their square. A player who wants a challenge wouldn't fight them more than once, but he's not doing anything wrong if he does.

This is poor game design, not cheating.

3. Playing like a jackass. These are things that are not technically "cheating," and they would normally be allowed under my categorization above, except that they constitute a certain abuse of the flexibility that the developers have provided, or they break the idea of role-playing. They're lame rather than dishonest. Examples:

• Creating characters, stealing their equipment and gold, and deleting them.
• Murdering NPCs for their equipment (possibly defensible in some games if you have a particularly apt evil role-playing reason).
• Saving constantly and re-loading just because you don't like the outcome of a decision.
• Using walkthroughs and hints with abandon instead of putting in the time to solve problems yourself.
• Changing the difficulty level of the game in the middle of combat.
• Exhaustively consulting material on the game before you start with the intention of creating an "optimal" character or party instead of using the clues the game gives you and living with both strengths and weaknesses.
• In some modern games like the Neverwinter Nights franchise that allow transferring characters aross multiple modules, starting a character in a module that immediately elevates him to a high level, then saving him for use in a lower-level module.

This would qualify in this category if it wasn't so damned funny.

4. Exploiting. The player exploits the game when he takes advantage of a bug or game mechanic that the developer clearly didn't foresee or intend. Examples:

• Using item-duplication glitches to give all your characters long swords +5 (Curse of the Azure Bonds) or load up on expensive inventory to sell (Diablo).
• Abusing glitches that allow you to turn in the same quest multiple times and get the experience and gold rewards. There's a famous one in Might & Magic VI.
• The old Ultima IV trick by which if you "accidentally" put in the wrong disk during certain loading times, chests spawned everywhere.
• Killing shopkeepers and reloading to get their inventories to reset in Skyrim.
• Repeatedly restarting your party to take advantage of the skill point reward in the Dragon Wars underworld.

In the original version, you could click on "Quest" as many times as you wanted and get the experience for finishing the quest over and over.

I see exploits as only slightly less dishonest than outright cheating, and it's probably done by people who simply don't know how to use hex editors and console commands. I suppose, however, there's room for someone who accidentally stumbles on an exploit and doesn't realize what's happened until it's too late to undo it. At that point, I grant that the player isn't obligated to restart the game or anything, as long as he doesn't continue taking advantage of the exploit.

5. Cheating. Outright "cheating," to me, is when the player uses external resources to actually modify the game program or files. The examples should be obvious:

• Using a hex editor or special "character editor" program to improve attributes, experience, or gold.
• Backing up saved games in games where permadeath is intended.
• Using emulators with save states to circumvent the game's intentions about where you save.
• Cracking the game files to look up information that you're not intended to have.
• Employing console commands to kill enemies, improve the character, or otherwise circumvent some part of the game's difficulty.

With this category, though, we almost come full circle, as there are legitimate and defensible applications of the above. For instance, I've used save-state emulators in playing the early Apple II games simply because I've found the saving process so glitchy that I risk losing my progress otherwise. Console commands can help resolve unfixed bugs in complex games like Skyrim. Without an external patch, I wouldn't have been able to leave the first level in Bloodwych. It's unclear in some early games (like the Wizardry franchise) whether the developers intended that you create copies of your saved games. Ian Kelley's walkthrough of Knights of Legend describes how he would compensate for the game's broken training system by using a hex editor to increase his weapon skills while simultaneously decreasing his adventure points and gold by a commensurate amount. I could see a good argument for using a save-state version of DOSBox for Knights of Legend to be more in the "playing like a jackass" territory than all the way up here in "Cheating." There are times, no doubt, where it feels like the game "forces" you to play like a jackass, exploit, or cheat.

Me cheating at Mission: Mainframe.

My playing has not always been pristine. Despite my rules, I've occasionally dipped into a walkthrough when I was completely stymied, and I relied on walkthroughs entirely to get out of Wizardry V and Drakkhen. I used a hex editor to see the ending of Mission: Mainframe. I "won" Omega by taking advantage of a game bug. I save-scummed on Mike's Adventure Game. Though everyone seemed to agree it was okay, I looked up spoilers for NetHack. Some of these abuses were in the name of documenting the endings of otherwise-obscure game, but all constitute cheating under my own rules. Nonetheless, I've played 101 games at this point, and if I've cheated at less than 10% of them, I feel like I'm doing well. The one thing I haven't done, however, is lie about any of the above. When I've broken my own rules, I've been up front about it.

Again, you may ask, what difference does it make? Isn't the point to have fun? Perhaps. But once again, I am of the mind that if you're going to spend any amount of time on an activity, you might as well do it right. Even in the most purely hedonistic pursuits, there are ways to do them that demonstrate class and character, and there are ways to do them that demonstrate tactlessness and disrespect. I'm sure that in their lives, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall got just as drunk as David Hasselhoff and Lindsay Lohan, but there's a reason we don't remember Bogart and Bacall as national jokes.

I suppose that in the end, you could argue that what you do in the privacy of your own gaming room doesn't matter to anyone but you. But by coming on sites like this and talking about these games, we make ourselves part of a community, and that community ought to have some shared expectation of what constitutes an accomplishment. It was for this reason that I was so determined to win NetHack honestly. It's a silly thing to be proud of, but I'm nonetheless proud of my winning streak for the last 22 winnable games. I'd have no right to that pride if I'd won them by hacking and exploiting the games, no more than an "artist" who simply runs a photograph through PhotoShop's charcoal drawing filter, or a marathon runner who takes the subway to the finish line, or a woman who joins a book club and just watches the films.

I acknowledge that these opinions are all my own, and there's plenty of room for debate in here, as well as extra examples in all of the levels. I look forward to your comments.