As a discussion of what is cheating begins to heat up on the moodle I took a deeper look at what I consider cheating. For the most part, I only play single player games, specifically puzzlers. In most of those games, paying to get a leg up feels to me like cheating. I have never spent a single penny paying in a free to play game – so maybe if I tried I would be completely cool with it. But even after discussing using cheats in the Sims to get unlimited cash or in simCity — built in cheat codes — how these are cheats built in by the developers and meant to be used, which i don’t consider cheating, I still feel against paying to win a game. That feels more to me like cheating, even in a game like PAD where you are paying for a game of change to attempt to roll a better pet. Which is completely backward because the game designers built the game so that people would pay to advance, it is a cheat code you have to buy, however, somehow the adding of money to the discussion makes it feel like cheating. Cheating myself out of earning the points on my own or cheating myself out of money.
On a slightly unrelated note, the idea of paying in a video game really pulls me out of the world, it reminds me that I’m wasting real time, time I could potentially be using for something else and that I’m getting dangerously close to wasting real money.