Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

If you ever played any game for an extended amount of time, you would find a great number of times where you are frustrated with your progress; like a monster that you couldn’t kill, or a limitation that you couldn’t overcome. At times like these, the creative juices in humans start to flow, and we begin to wonder: is there an easy way out of the stalemate.

Some turn to their multiple-tetrahertz computers lying stagnant in their heads, churning the problem around, hoping they could wring a solution out of a brain tired from a marathon gaming session, some believe in their determination and hard work, while a minority of gamers resort to actual shortcuts to the answer.

Cheaters are demonised and despised by much of the gaming world: they are able to breeze past those who invest their time and brain power into breaking a deadlock in the game easily. Whatever their tactics, be it as simple as getting the answers from a website, or as complicated as hacking the game: cheaters save much time by skipping levels they can’t get through or solve.

Does this make it right to cheat? It is controversial. Firstly, cheating enables a person to gain an advantage in the game over the orthodox routes of progress in the game, something which might not impact as much on the gaming community for simpler games, but is disastrous for games that place emphasis upon player rankings. Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMPORPGs) are extremely sensitive to cheaters.

In fact, where cheating affects the game play for others (like in the case of player rankings), the effects can get disastrous for both the players, and the publisher of the game. Legitimate players get unfairly disadvantaged in the game when a cheater manages to by-pass a limitation in an extremely short time through means unavailable to the ordinary player, and the managing company is frustrated by the endless task of closing loopholes in order to keep the game a level playing field for all players.

Then again, there are games that for which cheating in no way disadvantage other users of the game. General puzzles and games without a ranking ladder are usually prime examples of benign cheating: getting around a puzzle that you have been stuck at for 4 days surely qualifies you for at least a little bit of a hint? For such cases, cheating is alright. That is, if you can live with cheating yourself out of that Eureka moment.

I have to admit, so far, I have not been exactly honest in playing the games that I have currently; Diablo II, WarCraft III, and Red Alert II are just some examples of games which I have hacked to physically get an advantage over the pre-set missions in the game. Since it was for fun, I was able to over-power my characters and units to god-like status (in the game). However, when I took to online playing, where there are plenty of other people around, there was no good way to gain an unfair advantage without physically compromising the host server for the game.

However, even with the basic deterrance in place, there still remain hackers whom are determined to spoil the experience for other players. Companies create new software to limit hacking activity; however, hackers see it as a challenge, and turn the game into a rat race: on the company’s part to thwart hackers, and on the hacker’s part to crack any protection scheme that comes along.

Such activity is the sad case of life online, and games look set to live with this problem, for as long as humans continue to seek unfair advantages.

Filed under: General