That’s wild, definitely did not experience that stigma growing up in the 90s. Cheats were just something fun to play around with, like the skins or big head mode that we used to unlock. Of course cheating in multiplayer, especially PvP has and should be considered taboo unless all parties are in agreement, but cheats in single player like a GTA or the Sims are just for fun.

In single player yes, because I play how I want to play.
In MP with friends, no I don't.

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In singleplayer only.

For me, a SP game is a toy to play with as I see fit. If I can’t play with it how I want to or make it so, what’s the point? Games are for fun.

Accessibility options in a lot of newer games have fortunately made cheats largely unnecessary, but it’s helpful to have them anyhow.

I mean what is cheating?

Is it cheating to play Minecraft in Creative mode? You are invincible, can fly/teleport anywhere and have access to every block and more.

Is it cheating to play Grand Theft Auto and spawn in a tank or guns?

Is it cheating to play Goldeneye 64 and turn on DK mode?

Is it cheating to play Halo on any difficulty other than Legendary?

If it's a single player game and you're fine with it, then it isn't cheating.

Single player, sure, especially grindy jrpgs just to cut down on time to complete time

Multiplayer. Absolutely not

Single player = absolutely

Multiplayer = absolutely not (unless we all unanimously agree to cheat, confirmation is required)

The older you get the less time you realize you have to do things like gaming. I don't even have kids, but my last 5 weekends have had events/meetups/items on them that 10 years ago I wouldn't have had. I'm more exhausted after work now too, and spinning up a game and getting into the mode is effort in itself now. So, when I do game, I find myself being annoyed at games that want me to sit for an hour whittling down a boss, or figuring out some inane puzzle. If I only have max 10 hours a week to game, then I want to spend them making progress in a game.

For example I'm playing FF7 remake (first playthrough, no spoilers please) and I was fighting in the arena, and it took me a couple tries and finally made it through after probably 2 hours of fighting. Then the surprise round with the house, and I failed 5 times, I'm simply not spec'd right, and wasted 3 hours trying to get past it. At that point I'm not even enjoying the game anymore, and the small amount of time I get to play games I didn't even get to see any new story or character development. Then I have to go do something else and it's been 2 weeks now since I have had time to game, but thinking about it I just get annoyed.

The point of games is to have fun, so you should play the game in the way that is most fun for you. Whether that involves cheating or modding the game is up to your own preferences.

Cheating only becomes a problem in competitive contexts because at that point you are being dishonest and ruining the fun for others.

There are some cases where cheating is not okay in singleplayer games and some cases where it is okay in multiplayer games. It all circles back to whether everyone is having a good time.

I don’t understand people who hate on people that cheat in singleplayer games. You are the only person affected by that and if it makes it more fun for you then why not?

For anything multiplayer related, and I don't play many of those anymore, it's a definite no.

For everything else I just do what I want :D

Never been very competitive in games, so cheating to win against other people was never something I've felt compelled to do.

But in single player games, all the time! XP earning multipliers in Pokémon, house ruling Arkham Horror so Investigators can interleave their Actions in any order, starting Sims with all the money! Editing a save file to resurrect that one NPC I might've killed for being too snarky in etc etc.

I wish I could cheat more in computer games, honestly!

Singleplayer? Who cares. Cheat mods can be fun. You’re not messing anyone else’s day up, and as long as you’re not making any claims about your skill based on cheating it’s not even worth discussing.

Competitive multiplayer cheaters can get fucked, though.

Yes. Mostly Money and Inventory Space. I'm already grinding and at full capacity in real life. Why should it follow me into my hobby space? Health, mana, legendary weapons/armor, levels/experience points, one hit kill... Almost never. Only if the game starts to become unfair. But I still like to have a challenge.

• Multiplayer (if I play it); No. Never.
• Single player; Yes. Trainers, mods and the like.

Having a full time job and only being able to game a few hours in the weekend. So I just want to enjoy and not being stuck and raging about one or two hard bosses. Unfortunately, I’m not a teenager anymore that can spend hours on a boss to beat.

Gaming is meant to be enjoyable and entertaining.

I cheat on a lot of single player games and I'm happy to tell anyone. It makes gaming sooo much better. It's one of the main reasons I favor pc gaming and have moved away from console. Cheating in competitive multi is nasty and I would never do that but for single-player it helps me reclaim time and avoid frustration. Grinding is a thing of the past - good riddance. I used to love it as a kid and I cannot stomach it now. Heavy punishments for failure is some sort of trend now and I don't understand it and don't want any part of it. I don't want to replay 10 minutes to get back to where I was because it decided to send me back to the beginning of a level or a boss has 4 phases and I'm just stuck on the last one. I skip a lot of platforming in my action / adventure games - jumping around to climb a building is not why I'm playing. Rng for rewards - skip that too. Grinding and save scumming and guides were all strategies to work around annoyances but cheating is much faster and easier. I don't make the game trivial I just make it so that I'm enjoying the fun parts and avoiding the tedious parts that I no longer have the time and patience for.

I grew up typing IDDQD and never once felt bad about it. Single player is your sandbox. Online is the only place cheating actually costs someone else their fun.

I always cheated. It's no different than selecting easy mode nowadays. Back then the were no difficultly options, so yes I will take the infinite life cheat in Legend of Dragoon so I can enjoy the story since I have to return it to Blockbuster in a few days.

single player, absolutely. half the fun in the 90s was typing in a code from a magazine just to see what broke

I always felt like cheats were rewards for beating the game. Once I had accomplished a given thing in a game on my own, I never felt bad about giving it to myself again - especially in the days before saving in games was a standard thing. So even when schoolyard chatter taught me where the warp whistles were in Mario 3, I didn't use them to get to Boswer until I had got that far myself.

Single player games, it's to be expected. Some games even build it in. Multiplayer, you have a special circle of hell just for you.

As a child: yes As a teen: absolutely not As an adult: I cannot express how much I do not give a fuck about my ability to beat a game as intended. I only care about having fun.

There is fun to be had with a work/reward balance but sometimes there's just too much work/skill needed and it can kill the fun. Granted, cheats don't exist as much in primary titles as much as they used to. It's more like reducing difficulty for a sequence or chapter.

No cheating in PvP though. Just solo and coop.

I don't cheat on multiplayer but do modify games however I want if it is single player or in multiplayer games with friends who want the same kind of modifications.

I cheat or mod games to make them more fun.

Singleplayer? Sometimes. If you have game mechanics that annoy me too much, I'll find a way to skip them.

You rocked Contra without the Konami code?

Playthrough or it didn't happen.

Dude, the 90's was mostly couch co-op. I don't believe this post.

Even on my third play through of Fallout 1, my friends knew I was cheating, but I was doing so as I wanted to know every quest.

PVP cheating is shit, but there was barely PVP in the 90's.

Sorry, but as a 90's kid, nobody was talking any shit unless they were being a braggart about beating something like Contra or Gradius III using the Konami code.

And being cheap in Street Fighter II only led to combo systems that you see in every fighting game today.

So what examples are you actually giving with "cheating" in the 90's?

Cheating destroys the joy I get from games. I used to run cheatengine, but noticed I got bored of the game the instant I ran a cheat. So I stopped. Only time I will create a cheat now is if I get stuck in something time consuming and I don't really enjoy the game but want to see what's next.

Never cheated in multiplayer, people who do that should be put to death, fucking assholes.

People who "cheat" in single player games... I don't care. You do you.

People who use "hacks" in multiplayer games? Scum of the earth. Don't deserve internet access.

I only cheat by looking up on guides, because now as an adult, I don't have the time anymore to figure things out. Some games are badly designed so as not to allow you

I kinda like how gamers today only care about cheating if it was done in multiplayer

Well yeah, it ruins the fun for everyone. I even call out the cheating of my own teammates because it makes things too easy for me as an experienced player. But on occasions in which I want a quick win, I overlook the cheating in multiplayer games.

I used to gameshark on GB/GBA/DS, and that was fun to learn how poking bits changed how the game worked, but eventually I noticed that as soon as I started manipulating the game to my own interests, I lost interest. It became arbitrary, the game disappeared into a pointless matrix of numbers.

So now I mostly only play according to how the dev intended. Like watching a movie, I'm not going to change the dialogue, or who survives at the end, just because I'm experiencing negative emotions. Those emotions are intentional as part of the art. I want the experience the art intended to create, even if it's frustrating, or devastating, or hopeless, and to an extent, even if it's tedious and boring. The lows are there so the highs feel that much higher.

I do a lil' savescumming from time to.time, but no cheating unless I'm trying to explore a feature without risk, to understand the game better.

Single player, if I feel like it, yes. Why the fuck no, its my game, If i feel like cheating makes the game more fun for me why shouldnt I.

Games nowdays have a fuckton of griding and content that is "Collect this" so the cheats help with a lot of that.

Single-player-only games? Sometimes (slightly more if you include something like no-clipping myself after getting stuck in the terrain or an object). Never in anything multiplayer.

I usually play with zero cheats on the easiest difficulty of something, at least for the first play-through. I'm generally more there for the story and some light involvement in things rather than being there for combat or something (even as someone who was in a few FPS tournaments back in the early 2000s).

No, I would rather actually play the game then to research how to cheat in them.

If we're talking single player games I do use cheats on games I want to play but dont want to grind for it. No man's sky or space engineers for instance. I just wanna build shit man.

I wrote a crappy Skyrim fanfic about a character with a unique power she called Solace Controls. Then I played her. I used a lot of console commands (aka cheats).

Depends on the game and what you define as "cheating"

For me, if I'm trying to play a game and a glitch happens where it makes me lose progress, I'll "cheat" to get back that progress. Like in Minecraft, I usually play nodded Minecraft. That has more glitches in it and you can easily lose hours of progress from things like that.

I'm not made of time. If I lose or get fucked over by glitches, I don't consider getting back to where I was cheating. Maybe it is but I don't care. I play games to have fun, not to do a second job.

And to that point, I really like it when games give you an accessibility setting of some kind where it makes it harder to die or makes the game easier outside of an easy mode. I sometimes use those too. In Hades, I've been struggling a ton and turning on god mode has made it more fun for me.

Not really cheating but my point is if you make the game easier to have fun or make it more accessible, I don't really think it matters.

singleplayer doesnt matter in any way.

for multiplayer, if you can buy a ressource/item/perk for real money ingame, i am totally fine with it being cheated in as well

I don't. I noticed that when I do I completely lose interest in playing. And I really enjoy starting a game over to do things better the second (or third) time around

all the time but just to the level that I want to. I learned way back when with wiz maker that to much cheating ruins the game. in doom I would get to the end and then do the map cheat and get everything I missed. i play no mans sky in creative mode.

How do you define cheating?

I usually go with the experience recommended by the developer (no mods, normal difficulty). Sometimes, though, I get to a point where I realize the developer and I don’t see eye to eye on what the word “fun” means, and I’ll remove all obstacles between me and my ideal experience.

Usually no, I like taking the challange as intended by the devs especially if it's hard. However, if it reaches a point where I would cheat to skip something tedious I've already stopped.

I don't play games to beat records. I play them to relax after work.

If I die a hundred times, its a lot easier to switch to a game that's at the difficulty I'm willing to engage with. Sure, I can manually tweak the difficulty to make it easier, that can help, but when I do that it's too easy to score an own goal. Once you start cheating, you fall into the trap of making the game too easy or boring. Nine times out of 10, it's so much easier to just switch to a different game. And the fact that my backlog is astronomical in size doesn't help.

I do use save states out of convenience, though. Sometimes the save point is too far away and life just gets in the way.

Oh yes, I did a lot of rosebud cheats in The Sims back in the day. But it's not like you're taking anyone else's money, so who cares? Then, after building homes got boring, I challenged myself to try the game without money cheats and it was like a whole new game.

Right now I'm playing Ori and I wouldn't even know how to begin to find cheats in that game.

I've "cheated" in Minecraft I guess :3 like playing with keep inventory or peaceful mode, when I just wanna hang out :3. Or turning on creative mode to quickly fly out of caves instead of walking back, or spawning in more torches cause I forgot mine at the base

Other than that the only time I cheated in an online game was for a knock-off halo game. That game was shutting down, and basically the only way you could play it was if you had the files as it was not available for download anymore by that point.. and as the userbase dwindled most players left seemed to be cheaters, so then it was just leveling the playing field :p

Yes in single player games if something starts to bore/bother me. I don't play games for the challenge.

The only games I ever used cheats on were games where I wanted to experience the story of the game but found it to be prohibitively difficult to get through (Silver Surfer for NES and Einhänder for PlayStation are two that come to mind—I used a Game Genie and Game Shark respectively). One game where it was the opposite was Grand Theft Auto 3 (and Vice City). I have never actually played the storylines of those games. I just really enjoyed pulling rampages and wandering around. So I’d employ cheats to do that.

If you think cheating in a single player game is fun. Go ahead, who cares. If you cheat in an online game, you are total scum. Not fit to exist in society tbh

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I still remember that game shark code years later. I still remember which digits to change to screw with the game in fun ways. I learned hexidecimal because of cheating.

In online games cheating is a dick move but in single player it’s just another way to enjoy the game.

I actually learned programming to cheat in games. Back then (45 years ago), you got software by typing in a BASIC program from a magazine. Pages after pages of "gibberish" that somehow made something move on the screen. And somewhere in there was the counter that gave you three lives in the game. Challenge accepted!

When I want to, yes. I play for fun, not for some arbitrary badge of merit that the game authors decided I ought to live up to. Just because the game's authors had their own ideas about what they think is fair and fun, doesn't mean that they're right. It's my spare time, and I'll use it the way I want.

Valheim, I'm looking at you.

I only play single player games though. I would never cheat in a multiplayer game. If I felt like I wanted/needed to cheat in a multiplayer game, I wouldn't play it to begin with.

Not unless I'm wanting to test something specific in a single player game. Beyond that, it seems really pointless.

On my first playthrough of a game, I almost never cheat. Get the intended experience etc.

If I play it again, I almost always look for mods, maps and cheats to add or remove features and allow me to set my own difficulty. Often I want to do a hard mode but without one or two particularly tedious features.

Sometimes I will make a game super easy because I like its core loop but I am not in the mood for a challenge. Or if there's a achievement that will take ages to get and I am sure I could do it in time but am not willing to expend the effort.

If the game is a grindfest and I dont have the time, I will do whatever it takes to just see the ending.

It is meant to be fun after all.

Depends. For games where i feel like a god, no. Hard games like recently mortal shell 2, i wish. Sometimes I just need extra help to get my build quicker. For valheim, it's so relaxing turning fighting off and just mine, grow food and build things.

Depends how.

Using Rimworld as an example because I'm playing it now, I'll occasionally create a separate save file in the same seed at the same location and turn on god mode to see if certain defensive strategies will work before I implement them in the actual game.

Additionally I'll sometimes save scum, but only if I think the consequence I'm trying to avoid would ruin the fun for me, I remind myself that sometimes bad things happening can be interesting, but I work a lot and don't want to have to start from scratch because a mechanoid colony landed in the perfect place to wipe my tribe.

But I don't give myself infinite food or the best weapons because that just wouldn't be fun. I need challenge, I need to overcome hardship and come out ahead. I don't want to cheat myself out of my victory.

That being said people still shouldn't cheat in multi-player games.

Does the game cheat me?

Working on an SL1 run of Elden Ring, but I won't cheese a fight unless it's unrewarding. FromSoft usually gives you enough to make due in any situation. I'll absolutely cheese something if I'm frustrated and only invested in the game for the plot.

For a first playthrough, no.

For a game I know and love and have come back to, yeah totally, sometimes. I have fully embraced CHIM and just get born with 500k septims in my pocket now whenever I play Morrowind. I save edit my inventory all the time in Terraria, especially looking for that one specific crafting recipe accessory that just hasn't spawned. I mostly do it to eliminate grind on games where I've already served my time properly.

Only if I run into a bug or blocker that would basically mean all the time I spent playing was useless.

Sometimes. Fun is fun. If it makes you happy and have fun doing it, do it. Who cares what anyone else thinks.

Only in online multiplayer games. /s

I grew up with 8 and 16-bit games as well. When playing single player games seriously to have fun or beat, or complete them, then cheats aren't allowed. But just like Romhacks and Mods, cheats are another way to add replayability or more fun to the games I already know.

We also have to make the distinction what type of cheat it is. In example cheats to make the game easier, or to jump to different levels to train specific parts, or is it to change graphical appearance or add variety to gameplay with new weapons. Some games even expose additional features and options in "cheat" menus, such as Goldeneye and Perfect Dark as examples. Or allow to play with boss characters in fighting games, or add blood code in Mortal Kombat. Other games would have these options in a normal menu or in today's day and age, these are DLCs! So "cheats" are not always "cheating" to me.

Do I cheat? Sometimes in old retro games.