Cheats

[vernon]

Gaming makes more than films now. I have work mates that are hooked, every night to the small hours. A couple are so wrecked every morning they are in danger of losing their jobs.

Back in the eighties, a BBC game called Elite used to rob lots of adults of their sleep. It was a space trading/fighting game with rudimentary graphics but the game play was such that you could be a trader, pirate, renegade or anything inbetween. Not only did you have to master the dexterity to manoeuvre your spaceship but you had to arm it and equip it with better engines, more capacious cargo bays and armaments. It was intellectually stimulating as you had to mentally map the galaxy that you were in, interpret radar blips and choose between fight or flight in the quest to transition from being 'mostly harmless' to 'Elite'.

It changed the word of gaming with its wireframe graphics, innovative 'radar' display, and reactive gameplay - all done with around 20k of 6502 8 bit coding.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuvbZpH1QuE


The maths, physics and IT teachers in the school where I worked at the time would spend most of the their time during breaks and lunchtimes discussing progress and strategies once they'd overcome their fatigue from playing the game until the early hours of the morning.

There is nothing ignoble in playing computer games. It's akin to being immersed in an action thriller novel but with the bonus that you can change the storyline on the fly - a bit like turbocharged chess and Go.

As far as cheating goes it's the cyberspace equivalent of performance enhancing drugs. It confers an advantage over the 'clean' players but doesn't do anything for the innate skills of the abuser.

 

[swee'pea99]

Obsessional/addictive behaviour is nothing new. It's almost a job requirement for teenagers. The thing I find depressing about it is not the obsessional behaviour but comments like "my son would get a startling amount of headshots". The way it's entirely subsumed an entire generation into a culture of extreme violence. Give 'em notebooks and pencils and get them back out on the platforms, that's what I say.

 

[ufkacbln]

Skip to the end of a book and you'll be left wondering how it all started.

... and the plot point in the middle

Bernard Cornwell wrote about "cheating" in novels

We all know that at some point Sharpe will end up in a situation where he is outnumbered, disarmed and will need to make a miraculous escape

Sharpe opens a door in the wall, walks through and locks it behind him... too easy, too simple and the reader feels cheated

However if earlier in the novel Sharpe uses a similar door in a normal way then the reader knows that these doors exist and the escape now becomes logical

 

[vernon]

Give 'em notebooks and pencils and get them back out on the platforms, that's what I say.

They'd poke their own eyes out with the pencils to avoid the boredom of having to look at near identical metal boxes with few distinguishing features.