I don’t find shame in cheating in video games. It was a stigma to hear about growing up, that cheating in video games meant you prefer the shortcuts in life or that you didn’t know what earning anything was. When, that was all just bullshit talk.
I cheat in video games, when available to on some games, to give me a little kick of fun. Sometimes I don’t have the patience to tediously go through the standard way. Other times, I feel I’ve earned it anyways, because of having undergone the stresses and frustrations or the time I’ve played of certain games to go through the normal way.
Like in Terraria, it’s a game I’ve clocked in upwards of 900 hours. I felt like I had done everything in the game prior to the content that added the Moon Lord and many other things. At that time, it was 850 hours.
So the point of the matter is, yeah I don’t find it that big of a deal to cheat in video games. If I cared to and want to, I’m decent enough to handle games without cheats, given enough time.
Multiplayer of course I never cheat in those.
I would consider dev mode in rimworld to be cheating in a “technically it is” sort of way… spawning infant thralls that are then adopted by my colony, or spawning whatever activity site I choose are definitely not how the game is supposed to work. The mods are sort of also cheating I guess, tho most of them are content heavy… there are definitely several hacky mods in my list, like minify everything.
But while it’s cheating in a technical sense, it doesn’t impact anyone and it’s teaching me a lot about how video games function, which I find more entertaining than completing hard-coded objectives. It’s the first game I ever put a lot of mods on, and between troubleshooting and testing stuff, it’s been nearly as illuminating as rendering lag that adds each texture layer individually starting from low poly (my ps4 is having some major lag issues I’m trying to sort out, and horizon zero dawn is fascinating for this rendering issue, so so many layers! And then to realize it usually gets processed in real time! 🤯)
As for cheating in multiplayer, it hasn’t come up in decades. WoW was the last multiplayer game I played, and I stopped that when whatever the third expansion was came out. So like 2010 or so?