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03/29/2003 Archived Entry: "Cheating, or Advantage Playing"

gamegirl advance links to two great articles on cheating, or 'advantage playing', which is funny, because I was really just thinking about this this past week. Games are one of the few cases (in a society that arguably respects and promotes independence) that we, for fun, let someone else dictate constraints to our behaviour. So, given this contract between game and player, 'playing the game play' is an interesting phenomenon that shows playing the game as meta-game, rather than the game itself. I think part of this emerges from the strong role of meta-gaming in game culture, but the bulk of it is that the challenge of deconstructing or subverting the game is often far more challenging than any predefined game task. Although there is creativity to be found in pushing in-game boundaries as well.

Anyway, Talmadge Wright (et al.) have a great quote in Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games - Playing Counter-Strike:

Playing with a game's technical features also marks the development of creative responses to the rules created by the developer. There are many examples of players and server administrators altering the features of the game to change the way the game is played (for example, altering gravity). Playing is not simply mindless movement through a virtual landscape, but rather movement with a reflexive awareness of the game's features and their possible modifications.

Consider you can get so immersed in a game at some points, and be so entirely cognizant of its constructs the next.