After doing some research into the matter, it has come to my attention that there is a slew of cheat codes out there that can be used in Civilization IV (as is the case for pretty much all PC games, it seems).

With the stroke of a few keys, these cheat codes allow the player to do almost anything you could think of. You can place a city automatically wherever you want to, you can manipulate population, culture and production, you can weaken enemy units, and you can change the era instantaneously – all actions that effectively bypass the challenges that make victory something that must be achieved through hard work and critical thinking. You can even change desert into grassland and promote your own military units to the point where they are virtually unbeatable.

First of all, I think it would be helpful to define what cheating really is, for the sake of argument: to cheat is, according to the dictionary, to “act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.” With this in mind, it is pretty much indisputable that using these cheat codes in a multiplayer context would indeed be straight-up cheating. The cheat-code phenomenon is, understandably, universally banned in the online gaming community.

Fair enough. But, what if the player is only playing against AI? What if the player has no interest in competing against other people, and instead prefers to use the game in his or her own, personal way? Or, at a the most basic level, can you really cheat yourself in a video game? I think these sorts of questions are important to raise in the context of the video gaming world, and they are where the black-and-white nature of the debate on cheating sort of falls apart.

Thinking about these issues reminds me in particular of the many childhood years I spent playing The Sims. I never really was interested in playing out my Sims’ lives and making families. I was always most interested in endlessly designing and constructing things, because I chose to make it a building game rather than a dollhouse game. I learned the cheat codes for getting instant and infinite money very early in my Sims gaming days – so early that I didn’t even understand that they were “cheat codes,” but just considered them to be as much a part of the game as anything else. I don’t think I was cheating by using these codes, and I won’t ever budge on that, because The Sims was a really important part of my childhood and was simply too fun to have been played the ‘wrong’ way.

I think Civilization is inherently more structured than The Sims has ever been, in the sense that score and competition are much more important in the former than they are in the latter. But still, if the player is not playing directly against other real people, I have trouble considering these cheat codes to really be “cheating.” I don’t think I would use them, because most of the ones I have seen for Civilization IV are ways to get around the gameplay mechanics that make the game fun for me. But, I don’t think there would be anything immoral about using them. I could even envision a situation where using cheat codes as a form of “training wheels” would be appropriate for someone who is just trying to learn how to play. After all, the game is so really complicated, and it was a lot to take in the first few times I played. By using automatic city placement or infinite money, it could definitely be helpful to a novice player if they’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.

So, yes, you can obviously cheat in video games, and Civilization is no exception, but I think cheating in the traditional sense of the word can only really manifest itself when competing against other players – either directly or for high scores. But when the player is alone or playing against AI rivals, I see no reason to consider things like cheat codes to truly be cheating. I think one of the absolute best things about video games is how unlimited they are, and I’m not convinced that cheat codes can bring down something so wonderful.