I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games (Nate Drake, Retro Game Books, 2026)

    It can be helpful to explore the difference between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge of different daily activities. Doing so can help us understand what knowledge and skill are, which can lead to deeper discussions of what we mean when we use intelligence as a descriptor. For many of us, the knowledge of a best friend’s phone number from childhood might be committed to memory, even if we have not called it in decades. Reaching that same friend (or even a newer, but just as dear one) today might not even involve knowledge of area codes or local exchanges. Once a number is in your phone, you add a name and / or a face to it, and you know to press it if you want to speak to that person. Past you had declarative knowledge of a friend’s phone number; you had it memorized. Current you has procedural knowledge of a friend’s phone number; you may not have it memorized, but you know the sequence of steps that will result in a phone call to that person. Neither of these methods is any “better” than the other. They are simply different ways of achieving the same goal.

    Alternate routes to the same ending come to mind when reading Nate Drake’s I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games because he explores the uses and purposes of cheat codes, easter eggs, and glitches in a variety of video games. He opens by explaining the book’s title. It is actually a passcode for Lemmings that allows a player to select levels and thus see more of the game than they could if they were limited to their own insights and coordination (p. 14). The code itself seems to be written with the intent of shaming the player, but Drake had and has no qualms about using it. Lemmings is a single-player game and he is not competing for prestige or money, so there’s no larger moral issue at play. He just wants to experience as much of the game as possible. He knows a procedure that will allow him that access, even if his declarative skills (i.e., gameplay prowess) have limited it.

    This framing of the use of cheats is instructive because it does not position them as having a negative connotation. The word itself, even outside of video games, is often associated with bad behavior. Framing it as a means of opening access and ability to games helped me to see cheating (if there’s no better word for it) as having a positive connotation. It’s not like I’ve never cheated in a video game before! These things cost a lot of money and it’s only reasonable to want to get plenty of satisfaction from them. If that means using a procedure that is written into the game’s code to do so, then so be it. I will take my 30 lives, my invincibility, my unlimited continues, and my infinite power-ups over dissatisfied frustration any day.

    With that orienting framework in mind, Drake then sets out to explain what might be considered some of the first cheats or easter eggs in video games. Some of them are notorious enough to have had full articles written and investigations done about them. From those stories, we learn that the Konami Code originally existed to help programmers debug the game they were coding (p. 22). Meaning, even the people who wrote the game had to make shortcuts for themselves so they could more easily experience specific parts of their games before releasing them to the world. No big deal to make use of something that’s already in the game if it can help you increase your enjoyment of it.

    Readers of a certain age will be familiar with devices such as the Game Genie, Pro Action Replay, or GameShark that allowed players to use predetermined codes to enable in-game behaviors that even the programmers may not have intended. In his explanation of these devices, Drake cites a court case that Nintendo lost against Galoob (the manufacturer of the Game Genie). In judge Fern M. Smith’s 1991 ruling, these kinds of temporary modifications to game code were allowable because actions like modifying board game rules or fast-forwarding movies are the same kind of temporary change that does not involve altering copyrighted material (p. 57). In that light, cheating is a series of mutually agreed-upon and temporary modifications that increase participation and joy.

    Drake spends some time discussing how codes come to public knowledge, from the way Nintendo Power used its “agents” to share “Classified Information,” such as the Konami Code itself, with players. Previous to that, early internet users could swap codes or passwords via Bulletin Board Systems (p. 75). Failing that, there would always be school or other social places where children gather. The rumor mill is not a reliable source for accurate video game information, but it can be a fun source of speculation. I’m remembering a time when I called a friend on the phone because I’d heard he had an issue of GamePro with a code that would unlock Goro as a playable character in Mortal Kombat for the SNES. He convincingly rustled some paper and did his best to recite what sounded like a legitimate sequence of button presses for me to execute. Needless to say, it didn’t work. It felt good to believe for a little while.

    During my time with the text, I thought about the ways that cheating in video games is about not just access or ease, but control. This thought came to mind at first during the explanation of Doom’s “God Mode,” where the player is invulnerable and does not consume ammunition as normal. It’s right there in the name of the cheat—you are playing God with the game. You are in full control. I thought again about the power of control in Drake’s section on Tomb Raider (p. 88). The desire for many horny players to see protagonist Lara Croft in the nude made for rampant rumor-mongering about a code that could supposedly make this possible. There was no such code, but that didn’t stop losers from making a website that depicted such nudity, against the wishes of the developers. The idea that the game does not allow players to have control over a woman’s appearance means that some of them had to create a website where they could is disgusting for many reasons. It also reveals the seedier side of cheating, which is the mentality behind making things work for you, no matter what. Compare that kind of participation in a game’s world with the narratively creative, social (and occasionally horny) practice of writing fanfiction.

    Later in the text, Drake discusses online multiplayer games and esports, where cheating has a far different reputation than in the single-player, no financial stakes games he played in his youth. In these realms, cheating is just as awful as it would be in a competitive sport being contested for any kind of prize. If advantages are available only to certain players and they have concealed those advantages, then the play is not fair. (I’m reminded of Adrienne Massanari’s explanation of dark play in her book Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right, where bending the rules, or denying that a game is even being played, causes harmful outcomes.) So it seems a little unsurprising to learn that modern players, whose games are often multiplayer, online, or contested for prize money or status, are firmly against cheating. They’re not using the games as solely a means of recreation, so cheating in this kind of context breaks the social contract.

    As a result, many of the largest or most successful games do not feature or even allow cheating to occur, which means there is less of an incentive for programmers to include these features in their games. What has happened instead is much better. Drake explains in the book’s Epilogue that many games now come with accessibility options available from the start. These options can allow for modification of lives, chances, energy, and starting points, but they can also change the contrast of the display, the sound levels, the controller sensitivity, and the control scheme itself. These features would have been beyond the capabilities of programmers to include in the first decades of gaming due to storage issues on the games’ circuits. It’s a clever choice for Drake to have saved this discussion for the Epilogue because it seems like an area that would be interesting to continue learning about. Mia Consalvo’s Foreword also provides a possible place to start footnote chasing. Her book, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, seems a good a place as any to continue explorations of what cheating means in this context and how it can be distinguished from the accessibility features that make for considerate gameplay for all involved.

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From Pixels to Prose: What Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling (Nadia Oxford, Retro Game Books, 2026)

    Most of our lives involve reasoning from incomplete information. We’re rarely lucky enough to have all possible information at our disposal, so we need to make inferences. This is evident in reading, such as with the following sentences:

    John got a cup of coffee. It was very hot. Now there is a stain on the rug.

    Our brains connect the pronoun it at the start of the second sentence with the antecedent cup in the first sentence. We know it does not make sense for “John” to be an it and we know that the heat of the coffee will make its vessel increase in temperature, so it does not refer to “coffee.” We also know that gravity exists, that rugs are on the floor, and that coffee is dark in color, so John must have stained the rug by dropping his coffee.

    As skilled readers, we do not stop to take in all of this information as deliberately as I’ve laid it out above. This inferential processing happens in the blink of an eye. I chose a simple example to illustrate this point, but it holds for more complex texts as well. What’s interesting is that because each of us has different lived experiences and have read different texts (broadly defined), our inferences about a given text will vary widely. Our inferences also vary when the text we’re given is degraded or incomplete in some way.

    With all of that information in mind, imagine you are a young adolescent girl from Toronto in the early 1990s and you are playing a rented copy of the role-playing game (RPG) Dragon Warrior III on your NES. This is the kind of game that can take more than twenty or thirty hours to complete. You don’t have enough time to finish the game during the rental period and you will not be able to renew your rental because your family has set up a rule that says your pesky brothers get to have a turn at selecting rentals on alternating weeks. You cross your fingers each time you rent the game, hoping someone else hasn’t deleted your save so that you can continue the game’s story. But, even if your save has been deleted, there is also an unspoken trust that the first save slot on the cartridge is reserved for whoever it was who has been able to reach the end of the game with a fully powered up party. You can use this save to your advantage by learning how the game’s narrative concludes. Never mind that you don’t know the middle parts. You just know John once had a cup of coffee and that there is a stain on the rug. What happened in the time between is a complete mystery. That’s where our imaginations thrive by making inferences based on incomplete information and missing evidence. That’s how Nadia Oxford explains her interest in responding to video game narratives by writing fanfiction.

    Though she does not include her first story, inspired by the fragmented playthrough of Dragon Warrior III, in this book, she does assure us that she still has a copy of it. It was exciting to read through how she filled in the narrative blanks as a young player, but I will take her word for it that we do not need to see the entire story. See, now you can make up your own fanfiction about how her Dragon Warrior III fanfiction went because we don’t have access to all of the information in it… The cycle continues!

    We are much better served by her discussion of how she kept thinking about the implied narrative of the games she played through the intervening years. Even a game series such as Mega Man or Mega Man X that does not have a story as robust as a thirty-hour RPG can provide enough of a narrative for a player and writer like Oxford to create one of her own. For most of the book, she takes us through her evolution as a writer and how it relates to the games she played over the years. In many cases, she doesn’t have access to enough of the game to know how the full narrative resolves. That doesn’t matter! Make up plausible scenarios in your head! Share them with like-minded people on the nascent internet! Meet your spouse! Go nuts!

    In a chapter dedicated to her experiences with Secret of Mana, Oxford explores how the game taught her that an author doesn’t owe their readers a neat and tidy ending; it can be satisfying and meaningful even if it is not happy. Even in a fairly traditional action RPG like Secret of Mana, there is room for the author to mess with the player’s expectations of how the narrative will turn out. I, too, remember feeling a mix of emotions upon seeing the sprite child sitting in a tree looking pensive at the end of the game. With the additional knowledge that this particular game bore the scars of corporate fallout during its development process, it’s no wonder that its disjointed and rough second half leads the player to wonder what is happening in the characters’ minds and worlds. Again, with more narrative information left unknown, the player has to do more work to discern what might be significant to the plot. If that is not possible within a high degree of certainty, then imaginations run wild and fanfiction can take root.

    In cases where the author of a text or the scenario designers of a game have made events unequivocally clear, it still pays to be a close reader to get a fuller interpretation of the text. Oxford demonstrates the truth of this claim in her discussion of “Aria de Mezzo Carattere,” part of the famous opera scene in the RPG Final Fantasy VI. At this point in the game, you, the player, are aware that Celes Chere and Locke Cole might eventually become more than friends. You are also aware that each character has a masterful leitmotif that plays when they formally join your party. Oxford points out that a few measures of “Aria de Mezzo Carattere,” which Celes “sings” in the game’s opera scene are inserted into Locke’s theme at the end of the game during the credits. As she writes, “Locke and Celes never say ‘I love you’ to one another, but the marriage of RPG characters’ personal themes feels much more intimate” (p. 91). This statement is part of her larger argument that Final Fantasy VI successfully addresses topics such as love, the apocalypse, duty, and friendship in a mature manner. I’m biased because it is literally my favorite game of all time, but I also have a hard time disputing her case.

    It’s also hard to take issue with the larger point that Oxford makes in her book. She invites you to participate in your favorite media by creating your own. I learned about the beauty and power of the do-it-yourself ethic from another subculture, but the lesson still holds true with video games. Do your part by making art in response to the conditions in the world that have moved your emotions. It feels good to build something from nothing, even if you never share it with anyone else. You may also use your artifact to create a physical or virtual space for an affinity group that can continue to create and socialize and turn ideas into physical matter. What are you waiting for? Do it!

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Lord of the Flies (Jack Thorne, BBC One / Netflix, 2026)

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that watching a movie is no substitute for reading its source novel. Having survived high school and college without being asked to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I have no grounds to compare this adaptation to the novel itself. I’ll just be discussing it on its own terms. Even though it’s not in the genre of films about school that I’ve been writing about recently, there is still a strong connection in this short series to how school systems socialize their students.

    A common complaint about schooling is that teachers ask questions and students answer them, which seems counterintuitive. Students need to learn, so they should be the ones asking the questions. In the absence of a school setting, what kinds of questions do children have about their world? For the characters in Jack Thorne’s Lord of the Flies, important questions to consider seem to be “What does your daddy do?” “Can my dad beat up your dad?” “You’re British, aren’t you?” and “What do the social ties bound at school mean for friendships and factions outside of the school day?” Only one of these questions is posed in the duration of the series, but the answers to all of them are contested verbally and physically by the children on the island.

    For background purposes, it will be helpful to know that this story is set on a unsettled island in the tropics. The characters are a couple two three dozen school-aged boys. None seems to be over the age of 12, and all are from a public school whose plane has crashed, leaving no adult survivors. 

    Well, the classification of their school is never stated, and the meaning of public school in England is the opposite of what a U.S. resident might have in mind; across the pond, a public school is one open to anyone in the public who can afford its tuition. It’s not a school that is open to all members of the public in a given area. Over time, what England calls public school is more like what the U.S. calls private or prep school. But I digress. 

    A key factor in the socialization of these children is that a few of them are in their school’s choir. The choristers band together immediately upon survival of the crash. Their faction wields enormous power over the others due to its domineering and manipulative leader, Jack. Simon is part of the choir, but is much less respected than Jack because he faints occasionally and is not as ruthlessly interested in pursuing power. The principal quartet of boys is rounded out by Piggy (aka Nicky) and Ralph. Piggy is a chubby orphan who has asthma and wears glasses. Ralph is kind and easygoing and so has the quality of being silently respected as a leader by the entire group. With that kind of dramatis personae, you can see where things will be going from a mile away. Still, how we get there is the enjoyable part of participating in the unfolding of a narrative.

    Maybe enjoyable is the wrong word here. This short series is such a downer. Just because you know where things will end up, it doesn’t take the impact out of seeing the ways they get there. The producers and cinematographers must have known the spiral into violence would be too much to take in scene after scene, so they make use of beautiful shots of the island in between the action. Some of the shots have a deep red tint to them that seems otherworldly. It could just be the hues cast by the sunset and sunrise (or even the many fires the boys light on the island) that give off these colors that seem to be blood-soaked. God, even when we are supposed to feel a reprieve from the tension and violence, we are still seeing red. The shots that are less affected by color filters are breathtaking. I could watch hours of the long overhead shots of the island or even the dolly-tracked, eye-level shots of the island’s trees.

    The conflicts that erupt between those beautiful moments are where the boys attempt to address the questions they won’t learn the answers to in school. Or at least, not directly as part of the curriculum. Aside from their names, one of the first things we learn about the characters is what their dads do for a living. Piggy’s dad is dead, Jack’s does a secretive job he can’t even talk about, and Simon’s and Ralph’s fathers are in the armed services. The mystery of what Jack’s dad actually does (is he a spy?) helps him assume the mantle of leader of the pack. In the absence of finding some other kind of pecking order, the boys are comfortable with the implicit suggestion that what each of their dads does reflects on their own status in the group. Which dad is the toughest or most respected or most qualified is a proxy for their status as boys.

    This message of top-down designation of status is reinforced in the final episode when naval officers rescue the boys. Ralph identifies himself as the group’s chief. The lead officer asks him how the boys are doing and how many of them remain. He’s shocked when Ralph tells him he’s not sure how many boys were originally on the island. “You’re British aren’t you?” is his cutting retort. The idea that the nationality of the boys would engender some kind of order or structure is an unquestioned assumption. It’s simply unacceptable to not have instilled a hierarchy. Through tears, Ralph tells the officer that they’d tried to create a social structure, but it fell apart quickly. There is only the smallest hint of sympathy in the naval staffer’s eyes upon learning this information.

    For Jack and for Simon, whose dads are not present in their lives, even on school breaks, the absence of a loving parent seems to have manifested in different ways. Jack tries his best to “man up” as far as he’s concerned. Simon is less sure that might makes right but also can’t seem to find the courage to challenge Jack. We learn via flashback that Ralph’s dad has tried to share his own love of the hunt with him, but it went sideways. Piggy’s parents are deceased, so he’s raised by his aunt Jeanie and the many other adults that come into her candy shop. 

    What Thorne’s interpretation of Golding’s text may be saying is that young male adolescents’ responses to authoritarian or neglectful parenting will vary. We are meant to sympathize with Piggy, not just because of his derogatory nickname but because of his disabling conditions and his status as an orphan. He is also the most reasonable of the four main boys of the group. Jack’s attitude and actions are repulsive, as is his inability to appear weak in front of others. He forces Simon, Ralph, and Piggy to each “take back” truthful things they’ve said to challenge him in private. He and his crew of choristers survive their time on the island, but at the cost of losing their humanity. Jack may be able to imagine that his father will be impressed with his son’s killer instinct, but the lessons of Simon, Ralph, and Piggy will give him plenty of reason to doubt his received wisdom in the years ahead.

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The Perfect Score (Brian Robbins, MTV Films, 2004)

    Here’s a movie I’m glad I don’t have to watch twice. It’s hardly a movie about school at all. It’s not even a movie mostly about testing. No, the score in the title isn’t just the 1600 on the SAT but the hoped-for result of the heist that takes up most of the plot. The six New Jersey high schoolers are motivated to break into the headquarters of ETS so they can get a copy of the SAT before they need to retake it again. Each has their own reason for wanting to do well on the test. More accurately, each of them needs to do well to get into the college of their choice: Cornell, Maryland, St. John’s, and Brown. Yes, that means two of the characters have no post-secondary ambitions. Scarlett Johannson’s Francesca and Leonardo Nam’s Roy are just along for the ride. The latter because he accidentally overheard friends Kyle and Matty detailing their plan in what they thought was an empty school bathroom. The former is involved because her dad owns the building where ETS has its offices, so she can help the crew get into the facility itself.

    The details of the plot are less germane to my discussion of what this film has to say about teaching and learning. From the start, Roy’s obnoxious voiceover tells us that SAT may stand for “suck ass test” because it’s a source of stress for so many students. It’s the task that stands between hundreds of thousands of high schoolers and their futures and it reduces them to numbers. OK, nothing revolutionary in this commentary. Nothing wrong either. We soon see Kyle and Matty together at work in a package-sorting facility where Kyle explains to Matty (and us) the history of the meaning of the letters in SAT. It was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, and now the three letters mean nothing. Again, correct, but not very insightful.

    It’s at this point that the other movie I watched last week provided a helpful context for these teenage testing frustrations. In Valerie Veatch’s recent documentary Ghost in the Machine, the history of measuring intelligence and its close relationship to eugenics are explored in the context of programming generative artificial intelligence systems. When advocates for these systems refer to metrics such as “Ph.D. level intelligence” or even intelligence as a quantity, they are taking for faith the idea that tests such as the SAT are valid measurements. If your only idea of what makes someone intelligent is how well they can do on a multiple-choice test, you are going to have a skewed idea of what it means to learn, let alone to live. I know I’m asking too much for a 2004 movie by MTV Films to go into an exegesis of the eugenicist underpinnings of so much of schooling in the United States. What would be cool is an update of The Perfect Score that explores these ideas and the purpose of education itself.

    But I digress.

    Kyle proves to be fairly critical of the political economy of the SAT when he says “the College Board made millions last year” in fees from students taking the test. He seems to be angry that someone is making money from the process and that he didn’t think of that idea first. He appears less annoyed about what that means for access to post-secondary education for families that are facing financial hardship. He’s also frustrated that his mom, a first-grade teacher, tells him that the kids in her class have to learn to “bubble in” on worksheets rather than spend time reading. Again, there’s the beginning of what could be a fruitful critique of what counts as literacy learning in the early elementary years. I doubt anyone involved in this film is familiar with Bond and Dykstra’s First-Grade Studies.

    Additional critiques of the test appear courtesy of Erika Christensen’s Emma and then-NBA player Darius Miles’ Desmond. When we first see these two interact, he asks her for help studying. She mentions to him the concept of stereotype vulnerability as a possible explanation for why he may be underperforming on the test. This comment makes her reconsider her initial doubts about helping him. Shortly after, there is a scene where each conspirer explains their motivation for taking part in the heist, Desmond says “I’m here because the SAT is racist.” He elaborates, “Who made the test? Rich white guys. Who scored the highest on the test?” Roy’s witty reply is about another stereotype about who is successful on the test. Deflating Desmond’s criticism with a joke prevents this line of inquiry from going further. Look, I know it wouldn’t be an interesting movie if they sat and had a discussion about why standardized tests exist, but I also don’t think making a heist movie about stealing test answers was super interesting to begin with!

    At least they all seem to learn that cheating is not going to get them what they want. Not because of some kind of moral awakening but because they realize they can get a decent score instead of a perfect score on their SAT and still go on living. The “right school” is the one you get into, even if it’s not your top choice. Quite a wholesome message from a movie with crude sexual stereotypes and trite stoner jokes. I see no reason to watch this again, but I’m glad I saw it at least once. If nothing else, the real-life circumstances of Darius Miles (prep-to-pro basketball star who signed a letter of intent with St. John's) and Mike Jarvis (the actual St. John’s coach who makes a cameo and was fired from that job a month before the movie came out) give the events of the movie weightier implications. There is too much riding on the results of this test, especially for those whose futures or careers depend on teenagers being successful at bubbling in.

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