One thing about video games is that it's somewhat difficult to break the rules. In real life, it's much easier to manipulate the way a game is played... all you need to do is open your eyes during "hide and seek" or take an extra twenty from the Monopoly bank while your brother is in the bathroom. The idea behind this is that because you know how the game is set up, you know the ways to break the rules that are given. In video games, not very many people know how the game is set up. To set up hacks or mods, you need to be able to change the way the game is coded; remember, cheat codes only work because they are programmed into the game, so they don't count. Even though they are called 'cheat codes', they are basically the way for the game designers to let you experiment with trying a new way of playing the game, such as invunerability or walking through walls. However, if someone does possess the necessary knowledge to hack a game, there is nothing preventing that person from passing it on to others. The cheating then becomes not that they are coming up with a way to break the rules, but they are using someone else's way to break the rules.

Of course, when talking about MMORPGs, there is an entirely new way to break the rules, insofar as the way you treat others who are playing. Since developers of games like WoW cannot constantly be policing everyone within the game, a player can take advantage of a fellow gamer with very little repricussions. In these instances, cheating is less obvious but more "wrong", since you are not taking advantage of the game but instead other gamers. Changing the looting setting halfway through a battle or waiting until the mobs kill everyone in your party so you don't have to share are not black and white instances of cheating, but they are still benefitting at the expense of someone else's misfortune, and it's a matter of ethics as to whether you think that should be allowed or not.

Even if we can't define cheating in games, is there any instance where it should be allowed? Yes, and no. One line that's sometimes confusing is comparing cheating versus game development. If someone programs a new interface to be used with a game, sometimes it is accepted and promoted by game designers, and sometimes it is banned. If everyone who had a good idea how to improve a game were to just sit on their hands for fear of having their account, then you would see a lot less progress in the games than there is now. This can be the case in the real-world too. Right now there is a lot of hubbub about steroids in baseball, but now that athletes are starting to undergo tests for steroids, they are finding that medication and dietary supplements that were considered ok are causing people to fail their tests. Sometimes what is cheating and what is just taking advantage of a situation can be unclear.

While it is easy and ethically in the right to say that all cheating in games should be strictly forbidden, my only concern is that discouraging people from finding ways to excel at the game could stagnate a game's growth. Consider baseball for a minute. It was originally not in the rules (and considered cheating) for a baserunner to steal a base, but now its an exciting part of the game (though perhaps less important than the brainwashed ESPN ex-players would have you believe). Ultimately, I think that it is up to the game designers to decide if what a player has done is cheating or not, but they need to be careful to acknowledge new developments in games. In the real world, that translates to people policing themselves as to whether or not something is cheating. When I play Cribbage (a popular two player card game) with friends of mine, some of them insist that if you miscount the points that you have in your hand and the other person correctly counts them, then that person gets any points that you might have missed added to their score. To some people, this is a fun and challenging way to play the game. To others, its unfair and cheating. It is up to the people playing the game to decide what is unfair and cheating, based on the rules that have been given to them by the people that made the game.

There is obviously breaking the rules, and then there's changing the game. Make sure you know which you are doing.