I think this goes a bit further than cheating oneself, well if not further a little more insidious.
When talking about playing a game entirely in singleplayer, you play by the rules set by everyone playing. Which in singleplayer… whatever you decide gets 100% approval by default.
When you play a game like Super Mario Bros. 3, you have several options to go through it. You can do the warp whistles, you can do no whistles but the shortest path, or you can do the whole game, every stage. You can also use Game Genie to get an edge (or insert more difficulty) and play through that way.
Are any of those ways the right way? Are any of them wrong?
Well the question is flawed. There is no wrong or right being performed, just a player playing a game by themselves in any way they wish. You could argue that there is a developer intent. And there is means expressed that the developer did not intend. But I guarantee if you spoke to Miyomoto himself about using a Game Genie, he’s not going to say you were wrong.
In your example of Duke Nukem (or Doom), where cheats were available. One could suggest the developer left those options in for the player to enjoy. So in your own example, the developer intent isn’t being crossed here. The rhetorical question is, were those cheat codes the shooter’s version of SMB3’s warp whistles?
Again the question is flawed, there is no right or wrong being done.
In all of the exampled explored thusfar, we have a player playing a game in a manner they wish to play. Their enjoyment is based on what they like to do and their enjoyment is all that matters. In these examples at least.
Let’s use another analogy, lets say you have a person jogging down the street in their local suburb. They are timing themselves in their head running from telephone pole to telephone pole. Their timing is internal, no clock or watch. Its entirely arbitrary, inaccurate, but something someone is doing on their own because its a silly little fun while jogging.
But let’s say they want to race their friend the next day. Friend is going to ask, where’s the starting point? Where’s the end? Is it when we pass the pole, is it when we touch the pole? Are we doing it at the same time? If not, how are we timing it?
The moment you add another person to the contest, it becomes almost exponentially more complex. And the reason being is the enjoyment is now competition. Where before, it was just a silly little self indulgence.
Competition requires a set of standards and rules. Competition means that there is a winner and a loser. To gauge a competition it requires a level of trust, and cooperation. And gauging one’s ability is important especially to those who wish to self improve. It can be quite hard to measure one’s potential in a vacuum. You can have a friendly competition where its not so serious. To where it is mostly like a self indulgence shared with another person.
But the latter of course is not what we speak about when engaging with unknown persons over the internet. Not suggesting it couldn’t be, but when talking about the activities and mindsets that lead to cheating in the context of this thread… its not silly little indulgences.
So why is cheating wrong when engaging outside of singleplayer only scenarios or those involving only a single person?
There’s two main points.
One is actually breaking an agreement you have with another. When you login to a PVP server on Conan Exiles, there is game mechanics you agree to (server settings), there’s developer intent (aka not using glitches), server rules (attributes that are not handled by game mechanics or servers, and game integrity (not using tools or hacks) that everyone agrees to before the contest (acts of PVP and general gameplay) begin. What is wrong here is you are breaking agreements and trust between players. Introducing distrust and paranoia.
The other point is one of malicious nature. You are taking the achievements of others and cheapening them. If they know cheating is going on, then they lose the drive and competitive nature they had prior. And if they don’t know that it is happening, then they are not able to accurately measure their own ability to those who are artificially inflated.
To put it simply a cheater is wasting people’s time, energy, and effort. They are destroying people’s enjoyment of an activity. All for a cheap thrill.
Why do people do this? Well this is where their own abilities and enjoyment have been already cheapened. It is ego and envy that causes them to want to ‘beat’ another player by any means. It is malice that they wish to see the anguish of defeat in the eyes of their victims. And yes it is quite evil by its very definition. The reason they are cheating isn’t to have fun alongside other players. It is to make them miserable.
Its not fun to cheat other players. Its not fun to steal from people. Its not fun to hurt others. Its not fun to nastily assault them in unspeakable ways. Its not fun to murder. People do it because they have an empty void that they can never fill. They do so out of jealousy because they wish to see those who have improved themselves through effort and experience be taken down to a level they feel is deserving, even though they have not themselves made the effort for such improvement.
Why do I not consider these people as having fun. Surely the depraved take pleasure in the anguish of others. While they do feel some semblance of instant gratification. Having fun instead requires a feeling of satisfaction instead. Which you cannot obtain from cheap petty indulgences that require very little effort in personal improvement and the willful harming of others.
But it is pretty self-evident that someone using cheat codes in a singleplayer game is not causing any harm to others or even to themselves. While it would be nice that they could enjoy the full game in its normal intended routes. It isn’t a requirement, and isn’t an indicator of behaviors that would be destructive in a competitive environment.
Earlier in the thread I answered the question of “What stops me from cheating.” I said this:
I’m going to elaborate on that more. While yes the primary reason is because I wish to avoid harming the enjoyment of others. I also wish to avoid harming myself. Cheating does not allow me to measure my own ability accurately. By simply winning without self improvement also means that I cannot self improve.
Self improvement is why I enjoy video games. Its the primary reason why most people play video games. Getting better at stage one so that you can see and play stage 2 is the most primary reason for fun in a video game. Its been that way since the 1970s and hasn’t changed very much in the last half century. There’s been stuff tacked on, but at the very basics, that’s what it is.
And of course there is a philosophy that one can hold that if you cannot love oneself, how do you love others? Easy and pointless self-gratification does very nasty things to one’s self. It doesn’t take much for self harm to harm others.
So while one can cheat themselves by cheating in a game like Conan Exiles. The implications are far more dire.