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June 18, 2019 5:30 AM   Subscribe

A brief history of cheating at video games [Engadget] “For as long as we've played games, there have been players willing to break the rules in order to win. Whether it's rolling weighted dice, counting cards, or hip checking pinball machines, you can bet your bottom dollar that if there's a game of chance, someone's working to work the odds in their favor. [...] Whether you exploit them or not, cheats are an intractable facet of modern gaming. They help developers test and debug their programs faster, with less effort, while providing a leg up for players otherwise overwhelmed by a game's difficulty.”

• The Speedrunner Who Wasn’t: How a Community Dealt with an Elaborate Cheater [Vice Gaming]
“In April, Ryan did what a lot of speedrunners do: attempted a world record, trying to beat a video game faster than anyone else, in ways the developers never anticipated. His speedrun, a full eight minutes under the previous record, was met with suspicion, leading to the unprecedented formation of an investigatory council, the expunging of Ryan’s runs, and weeks of vitriolic back-and-forth. On one side, a community trying to protect the integrity of their game. On the other, a person claiming they were targeted for the great crime of having good luck. The whole time, though, Ryan knew the truth: He was a cheater. There was no world record. But first, he would spend weeks denying it with defensive public statements, private battles, Reddit threads, hostile exchanges with the reporter writing this very story, and eventually paying a random online video editor to “pretend” to discover exonerating evidence before Ryan would confess some form of the truth to a community he claimed to adore.”
• Yes, I ‘cheat’ at video games – it’s half the fun [The Guardian]
“I see no such moral dilemma in enhancing my performance by mining gamers’ collective experience, for example. I fully endorse Googling “how the hell do I complete the Wrong Side of the Tracks mission on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas”. I’m also not above looking up the solutions to all the riddles in Assassin’s Creed Unity, because, seriously, who has time for that? Internet gaming advice is a wonderful thing. From details of where to find loot boxes and other collectibles to bug solutions and guides on making the right choices to get a particular ending to a story: the little tips and tricks that the gaming community provide can make games more rewarding, taking much of the frustration out, and leaving only unbridled joy. As individuals we choose how we play and what we get out of video games.”
• AIs Are Getting Better At Playing Video Games...By Cheating [Kotaku]
“Earlier this year, researchers tried teaching an AI to play the original Sonic the Hedgehog as part of the The OpenAI Retro Contest. The AI was told to prioritize increasing its score, which in Sonic means doing stuff like defeating enemies and collecting rings while also trying to beat a level as fast as possible. This dogged pursuit of one particular definition of success led to strange results: In one case, the AI began glitching through walls in the game’s water zones in order to finish more quickly. It was a creative solution to the problem laid out in front of the AI, which ended up discovering accidental shortcuts while trying to move right. But it wasn’t quite what the researchers had intended.”
• South Korean Overwatch hacker handed suspended prison sentence [Dot ESPORTS]
“An Overwatch hack creator in South Korea could face jail time after violating the Game Industry Promotion Law and Information and Communication Technology Protection Law. A 28-year old man was handed a suspended one-year prison sentence and two year’s probation, according to South Korean news broadcaster SBS News. The hacker reportedly collected a large sum of money in exchange for the program—200 million won, or around $180,000, SBS News said. [...] Overwatch developer Blizzard Entertainment has been working with the Seoul National Police Agency’s cyber security department to catch illegal program developers in South Korea. A violation to the Game Industry Promotion Law and Information and Communication Technology Protection Law warrants a maximum punishment of two years in jail and a $18,000 fine, thanks to a June 2017 amendment to the law.”
posted by Fizz (24 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'd love to know how things like Justin Bailey and the Konami code were just known in elementary school as soon as the NES and those games appeared.

I also remember poring over hint books sort of like these ones from Sierra Games, though I remember ones with a purple cover and which used a special highlighter to reveal the text for hints on games like King's Quest.
posted by msbrauer at 5:51 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


One odd bit in the VICE story is the accusation that "Ryan" had suspiciously good "luck" with a game anonymized as simply a "Japanese RPG". But for speedrunners operating on pretty much any system with no persistent on-system storage of a RNG seed (especially the NES, whose on-board RNG was infamously predictable), gaming the underlying randomness system is part of the process, especially for RPGs. It's worked through in some detail in this speedrun of Dragon Warrior. The speedrun they describe might well be hinky, but suspiciously good "luck" isn't proof of that --- on a lot of systems, manipulating your luck is standard practice.
posted by jackbishop at 6:04 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


I remember the Shame Penguin in Mario 64 well. I remember actually feeling remorseful and bad that I'd cheated...even though I'm pretty sure that the first time I found the cheat by accident.

Penguins, man. So judgmental.

I had no ethical problems cheating at Sim City. I felt it was my duty, really. I had people to take care of!!
posted by Gray Duck at 6:27 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


I often replay single-player games with cheats turned on, as a kind on New Game+ mode. It lets you take your time and enjoy the environment you blitzed through the first time, and hunt for all the hidden content you overlooked. In some games it's almost like a sandbox mode: Want to play through a game of Total Warhammer but with an army of twenty gigantic dragons? Now you can!

Well designed cheats can also make a game more accessible. They have obvious applications in removing isolated difficulty spikes for people with co-ordination or cognitive issues, but you can also change the nature of the game with cheats to open it up to new audiences. There's a certain popular cheat program that has a speed hack that can be used as a real-time with pause mode (a bit like the combat in the Dragon Age) but in games that weren't designed for it. The idea is you play normally until you reach a challenge, then use the cheat to halt the game, select an input, then advance a few frames and repeat. I have seen someone beat the latest Devil May Cry game using two elbows and a custom controller using this method, and his replays are pretty epic.
posted by Eleven at 6:34 AM on June 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


In before someone makes the same gag as the post title
posted by thelonius at 6:47 AM on June 18, 2019


Dunno if this is mentioned in the links (skimmed 'em, sorry) but, among those who love cheats, there tends to be a strong cultural push away from multiplayer cheats. Granted, the largest reason for this is that companies enforce bans and sometimes bring harder punishments against multiplayer cheats. That said, there is a moral reason : singleplayer cheats only give players options and tools. Nothing is truly taken from the player, or anyone (except in the context of competitions, which are multiplayer by definition). Multiplayer cheats will almost always take things from players who do not cheat.

There's also the fun of building the cheats themselves, but that's definitely a questionable area.
posted by suckerpunch at 7:14 AM on June 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


The first cheat code I ever used was the Konami code to gain 30 extra lives for Contra on NES. I absolutely would have never seen the end of that game had I not used that code. I know some 'purists' would look down and say that this is not the right way to play a game (as if such a thing exists), but for me, it allowed me to enjoy later levels that I'd just never witness or enjoy otherwise.

There's a fine line with regards to making a game have accessibility options that tweak difficulty and whether or not this constitutes cheating in the more traditional definition.
posted by Fizz at 7:28 AM on June 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'd love to know how things like Justin Bailey and the Konami code were just known in elementary school as soon as the NES and those games appeared

Nintendo Power and other video games magazines were primarily about offering Tips and Tricks (not just cheat codes but walk throughs and easter eggs) to get you to buy advertising for games that were coming out.

Writing about games critically and personally wasn't really a thing until the mid-2000s.
posted by Reyturner at 7:33 AM on June 18, 2019


idspispopd
posted by Chrysostom at 7:55 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


But for speedrunners operating on pretty much any system with no persistent on-system storage of a RNG seed (especially the NES, whose on-board RNG was infamously predictable), gaming the underlying randomness system is part of the process, especially for RPGs.

This is true, but usually manipulation of the RNG involves an easily observed process. (This may already be evident in the video you posted, but I didn't want to search through a 37-minute video to find it, apologies!) For anyone else who's interested, this explains how to manipulate RNG in Final Fantasy VI, for example. It involves a specific discovery process and a bunch of game resets that you would never perform by playing the game normally.

I don't know enough about speedrunning to know if luck manipulation always works this way, so it's possible the game in question has some kind of stealth RNG manipulation process. That said, I would assume that the speedrunning community for the game in question would either a) be aware of methods used to manipulate RNG, or b) would have asked Ryan about this directly and presumably have gotten an answer regarding the manipulation of RNG and how it was done. If there was indeed a new method of manipulating RNG that the community was not aware of, that would be a significant find.
posted by chrominance at 7:57 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


Oh man, memories of being scolded by Mr. Resetti ...
posted by tocts at 8:21 AM on June 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


Difficulty is just one of the layers of a game to me. Removing or altering it I imagine is a little bit like watching a film with no sound to be able to focus solely on the cinematography or reading a script to focus on the story structure without distraction.
posted by mit5urugi at 8:27 AM on June 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


Ha ha! The Final Pam laughs at your foolish hand-wringing. What you call cheating she calls unshackling herself from the limits of man.
posted by Emily's Fist at 8:31 AM on June 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


I've played Diablo for 20 years. The first cheat I ever used was maphack...which showed you huge mazelike dungeon layouts (remember the PIA finding Mephisto?) right at the start. There was a huge hue and cry when this became common: Cheaters!

I never looked at it like that--it was just a time saver for a long grinding boring run.

Nowadays, Blizzard has clamped down and regularly bans accounts for things like using auto keys and robo anything.

The game has turned in to an endless grind with 98% of people using the same cookie cutter builds. It was way more fun, methinks, with a lot of hacks, cheats, PKs, PvP, and various exploits to reduce grinding/time.
posted by CrowGoat at 9:59 AM on June 18, 2019


There are some games where outside reference (arguably cheating for the strict) is part of the game, eg. Minecraft didn't originally offer a way to discover recipes. (AFAIK most recipes still require you to go online to find them?)

Outside reference and discussion is often a rewarding part of a game in its own right, but also brings problems in a game like eg. Elite Dangerous where some outside reference is necessary, but often also comes mixed in with spoilers or prepares you for what should ideally be unexpected bumps and complications that you navigate yourself. I find myself trying to ride that line of learning enough while not learning things I can't yet know that I don't want to be learning yet... Maybe that's a game in its own right if you're aware enough to play it, but I see it bite a lot of players. I think setting up a game to work nicely with outside reference and discussion is an evolving area of game design.
posted by Cusp at 11:27 AM on June 18, 2019


Game modification (I refuse to call it cheating, at least for single-player games) is also a great thing for making a game that would be otherwise completely inaccessible to someone playable. Not everyone has the same physical and mental abilities, and mods are one way to address that.

(Also, anyone handwringing about not experiencing a game the way it was intended can play the game their way and can please jump into the sea whenever they decide they need to complain about it to someone else. You're part of the problem, dude. )
posted by Aleyn at 12:51 PM on June 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


One odd bit in the VICE story is the accusation that "Ryan" had suspiciously good "luck" with a game anonymized as simply a "Japanese RPG".

The game in question (I went digging and de-anonymized it) is the original Phantasy Star, which I understand to have a punishing amount of RNG in it, plus a community of speedrunners too small to truly plumb the depths of manipulating the game.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:58 PM on June 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


I also 'cheat' at videogames and feel no remorse! I just want to see more of the game and some aspect of video games are straight up boring. Cheating makes them more playable.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:12 PM on June 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Game modification (I refuse to call it cheating, at least for single-player games)

There definitely needs to be a community-wide push toward having two different terms for “cheating in your single player game where no one else is affected” and “cheating to gain an advantage over other players in a multiplayer game.” Using the same word for both makes the former seem heinous while normalizing the latter.
posted by ejs at 2:33 PM on June 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


I had a dorm roommate who made aimbots and other scripts for Unreal Tournament back in college. Like y'all said, single player games are one thing, make your own fun, but I never really understood the psychology of a person who cheats at competitive games. It just seems like acknowledging that you're too bad at the game to compete but have your head too far up your ass to enjoy it if you're not winning effortlessly. Like, what do you even get out of that?

To be clear, Roommate did not convince me otherwise. Roommate was an asshole.

HOWEVER he was a part of a fascinating community of assholes whose personal hobby was subverting the security features of UT and breaking the systems to their advantage. They did things like give opponents' heads "gravity" so that your cursor never jumped to them, but was guided there in a way that looked natural to spectators. They had this really interesting kind of frenemy relationship with the game's developers, who would log into their IRC chat to spy/verbally spar with them. They'd get caught botting and be banned and have to re-buy the game and update their scripts to compensate for the monitoring. It was a weird, highly creative, UBER-dramatic, deeply unlikable group of people, passionately committed to directing their considerable talents in the least productive way possible. I can see how that was fun for them - technically crunchy and oppositional. Sorta punk rock. Maybe a bit of a power trip to beat developers at their own "game," so to speak.

But Christ, what a bunch of assholes.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 2:53 PM on June 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


I know some 'purists' would look down and say that this is not the right way to play a game (as if such a thing exists), but for me, it allowed me to enjoy later levels that I'd just never witness or enjoy otherwise.

Nobody thinks this about Contra or the Konami code. It is the epitome of Nintendo Hard. The game itself was originally a coin-op, and using the code is no different functionally from putting a 20 dollar bill in the coin machine. The game was designed to eat quarters, and the code just rectifies the fact that you put in way more than 20 bucks into Konami's coffers already. You have paid, and should be allowed to win against the stacked deck that is Contra.
posted by pwnguin at 4:32 PM on June 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


I remember literally buying a physical cheat book for The Secret of Monkey Island. That was a great game.
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:46 PM on June 18, 2019


Speedrunning is fun. There's some Xbox 360 era RPG where you can just hop over a fence and go find the end boss hanging out in a field, kite him into a nearby town and the guards kill him. Boom, game over.

*chefs kiss*
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:28 AM on June 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


It makes me sad that whenever I see the Konami code posted online, the poster inevitably forgets to put in "select" before "start". Did none of these staff writers have siblings/friends growing up??
posted by Grither at 12:48 PM on June 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


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