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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