 |
You are all cheaters!December 28th, 2007 |
So, there’s an interesting side note to the post I made a while back on cheating, and the discussion surrounding RMT. A whole lot of people seem to think that the sort of info in Internet strategy guides isn’t cheating.
As someone who has been gaming for thirty years, I want to pat these people condescendingly on the head, and tell them to stop trying to make themselves feel better. But they happen to be highly influential bloggers, so I had better refrain from sarcasm (man, am I turning tetchy in my old age or what?). 
Here’s how Ten Ton Hammer puts it:
There is a very significant difference between reading a strategy guide and buying money or characters. The former educates you on how to be a better player, sending you out into the virtual wilds to do the work yourself. The latter takes the game out of your hands and supplies you with the end result of the labours. Real money trading (RMT) bypasses the game mechanics taking the player to the reward without experiencing the journey.
In a single player game nobody cares. Your actions don’t affect anyone else. In a MMOG the person who uses RMT services is cheating by giving themselves an unfair advantage over those that are playing by the rules. There is no grey area. It is cheating. Players have a right to be upset about it.
And a similar set of comments from The Common Sense Gamer:
Are game guides like Prima, Thottbot, Allakhazam cheating? No…no they are no because you are not sidestepping a mechanic of a game. Just because you read four or five strategies on how to take down Onyxia does not help you in the act of taking her down. You still have to deal with the mechanic that the game presents to you in order to succeed. Getting information is not introducing an artificial mechanic to the game. It does not give one player an advantage over the other because all players have access to this information from various free and paid sources. The same can be said about RMT…different players can afford differing amounts of gold, and some can’t afford any at all. Having that information available to all players is key to this, because that may not have been the case back in the days of the MUD.
OK, let’s look at the arguments in their proper order.
- Information is not a mechanic.
What, did you never play Battleship or Stratego? Or Poker?? Or any adventure game?
Information is absolutely a mechanic. Look, I knock game theory often enough, but this is one case where those guys have the terminology and the logic to back it up, too.
The key thing to realize here is that games provide information to you, the player, about the game state. What’s more, they provide it under defined circumstances. Once you have that knowledge, it’s certainly “in the wild” and you can do with it whatever you want, but the game releases it on a schedule and in specific places, by choice.
For example, in variants of Poker, we see differences in how much information is given to other players. In Texas Hold ‘Em, each player sees their hand, each player sees the face-up cards, each player cannot see the other hands. There could easily be a poker variant where players do not see their own hands, but do see everyone else’s. Poker is a game driven heavily by lack of information.
So are role-playing games. RPGs do not give you the location of every spawn in advance, the stats on every weapon in advance, the solution to every quest in advance, and so on. For a reason. Finding the spawn, discovering the stats, solving the quest is part of the game.
Now,we may argue that this part of the game is tedious (”why should I have to click all over the screen to find the hotspot??” is exactly like “why should I have to traipse all over this dungeon to find the specific kobold!”). We may say that the game would be “better” if it provided you a waypoint directly to that location. But that is beside the point — the game chose to hide this info from you, therefore you are not supposed to have it, and having it is cheating.
Any info you get that isn’t presented to you by the game in normal gameplay sequence is not supposed to be available to you.
- But everyone has access to the info, which makes it OK. This may not have been the case back in the mud days.
So if everyone cheats, it’s OK. 
Look, just because the info is widely available does not mean that it stops being info presented outside the game context. Let me repeat that:
Any info you get that isn’t presented to you by the game in normal gameplay sequence is not supposed to be available to you.
What’s ambiguous there? It does not include the “but everyone else cheated already” clause.
The reason why Common Sense Gamer and Ten Ton Hammer do not feel the sense of outrage here is essentially generational. In today’s world, the notion of “hidden information” seems more and more ludicrous. In particular, the notion of keeping static data hidden for the purpose of forcing players to discover it seems antique.
Because of this, designers have increasingly simply designed around the assumption that the info will be shared — that players will cheat.
In the case of something like WoW’s Armory, they simply threw up their hands, and instead said “this isn’t cheating anymore” by providing it themselves.
And yet — pushing people through the process of finding items and quests by hand, figuring out things like what a binary search is, and so on, is a valid thing for a game to want to teach a player. We’re losing the ability to teach them those lessons that come from hidden info.
PS, info flow was easier on muds. They were smaller in every sense. Less data to convey, less people to convey it to. Plus, we did have the ability to set up steam-powered “strategy websites” back then.
- A strategy guide teaches you how to be a better player, but you still have to do the work.
The “work” is figuring out how to be a better player by yourself. The actual killing of the raid mob is, as our programmers like to say, “just typing.”
The vast majority of the content on “strategy” sites consists of:
- Item locations and means to obtain.
- Solved “builds” of character and gear.
- Raid “strategies” which are actually “solutions.”
I’ve talked about the first one already.
A build is not a strategy, it’s a solution.
The last one is important — a raid is a puzzle game. Raids are carefully constructed encounters, where you can think of the enemy as having a rhythmic pattern of attacks. The pattern shifts in response to certain stimuli — certain attacks, stage of the mob’s lifecycle, etc. But it’s a pattern, just like the patterns in a shooter. It is designed to be figured out, mastered, and then made trivial.
Oh, you can mess it up even when you know the solution. And this is why raids are so compelling. The second challenge they offer, besides figuring out the pattern, is coordinating the actions of a team. And doing this in what is essentially a large-scale rhythm game is hard.
In fact, if I had to draw the most extreme analogy, I would say that all raids are just highly elaborate versions of Lunar Lander. You only have so much gas, you can thrust, and you have to try to land there. It is a game of resource management, and of timing. In a raid, you have 20-50 people all able to hit the thrust button, all coming out of a common pool of fuel. And the ground is shaking in a predictable pattern.
A strategy guide that gives you the pattern may not teach you the timing, but it’s giving you info you are supposed to learn the hard way.
- In a single player game, nobody cares.
Well, you should. You should feel furtive and somewhat shamefaced as you reach for the walkthrough. Now only are you breaking a societal norm, but you are cheating yourself of the education that the game is trying to give you. You are bypassing its carefully constructed lesson plan. You are saying “I’ll take the fish, instead of the fishing lessons, please.”
(But since there increasingly aren’t any single-player games anymore, of course it impacts me. I like Crystal Quest, for example. But the top scores in Crystal Quest on XBLA show me a whole bunch of exploiters. A flaw in the game? Arguably — no, definitely. So what? I still cannot measure myself against other people thanks to the cheaters. The massively parallel game of climbing the ladder is ruined.)
This, of course, is the same thing that pisses people off in MMORPGs where people use RMT to “skip ahead.” Consider this quote from Ten Ton Hammer again:
In a MMOG the person who uses RMT services is cheating by giving themselves an unfair advantage over those that are playing by the rules.
Unfair advantage in what? You sound like there’s some competition going on. But the RPG isn’t actually ranking you in terms of a competition (except in the narrow cases of PvP, and honestly, this exact same reaction has been there in the PvE games — that quote could have come from Everquest; and ranking ladders).
In strict game terms, you shouldn’t get mad because of keeping up with the Joneses — it’s literally “not in the game,” but rather an importation of human psychology. Some level 25 buying a magic breastplate off eBay has no “unfair advantage” over your level 65 in anything at all.
In general, the only “competition” in a PvE MMORPG is self-invented. You’re not competing over getting to a level faster. You’re not competing for spawn points (there are supposed to be enough for everyone). Alas, because this aspect of psychology is also so prevalent, gamemakers have started to put ranking ladders and stuff in, which is kind of a bad idea because we know from the get-go that it’s all exploitable. But the core of an RPG is a non-competitive game.
You shouldn’t be pissed because the RMTer “beat you” to something, you should be saddened that they cheated themselves of an experience.
All of this is just to reinforce my point from earlier. The actual mechanics of all of this stuff — RMT, strategy guides, twinking, etc — it’s all cheating. What has changed around it is primarily cultural.
Now, I am not going to act all moralistic on you. My first significant cheating was when I hacked Colossal Cave, aka the original Adventure, so I could see the storage room where the game spawned all the game objects from. I did it with a steam-powered chainsaw, back in the day when we had to walk uphill in the digital snow, both ways. But I have two points to make there:
- I actually learned something in the process.
- I knew it was cheating.
Never did beat that game.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. [?]Type in a relevant tag, and click the button, and help organize this blog's information.
[More Help]
[...] Here, here and here. [...]
[...] Raph Koster posted today that we are all cheater because we uses Internet strategy guides to help us. A few [...]
[...] I’ve just read Raph’s post on his blog about people cheating in MMOGs, which I couldn’t agree with more, and is [...]
Cheating: The Never Ending Debate…
Greetings all! I trust that the holidays have treated you all well. Sorry for my absence, but it was Christmas after all. As another four day weekend is upon us and I have no plans at all (yes, I am not a new years party goer) I have just settled…
[...] week, Raph Koster laid down an analysis of why strategy guides are cheating. He contends that playing the game is what you are supposed to do, and anything outside of playing [...]
[...] of the interesting questions that came up in the discussions on cheating is basically the issue of whether you can have a game design that limits information flow, in [...]
[...] But don’t take my vague summary, read Raph’s full post + discussion. [...]
OGRank - Raph Koster: You are all cheaters!…
With a recent blog post , Raph Koster, founder of the company now developing Metaplace , and formerly game designer for Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, suggests that the majority of MMORPG players are cheater….
[...] studies , game philosopy , social I wrote this as my way to try to summarize how I say the debate on cheating that Raph started on his blog and that got me to actually participate in the discussion quite more than I should ever have time [...]
[...] Cheating - What was it, what is it, what will it be - we scratch the surface and reference Raph, Michael, Tachevert, and Darren in a topic so vast, you need an IMAX theater to appreciate just the [...]
[...] displayed by the interface in order to give to the player the information he needs and too much. Ralph Koster also talks about information and how getting information is part of playing a game. He considers [...]