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.
Changing stuff on a single player video game is not cheating.
Cheating can only exist on a competition, like on multiplayer, because you are expected to fair play with another human being.
To think that playing on your own and changing the parameters of play is cheating is a limiting and constrained, and honestly sad, point of view. It’s like punishing a kid for imagining that a toy has super powers. Extremely soul crushing and anti-creativity. If you are playing on your own, then there’s no cheat. Your play, your rules, no punishment for changing your mind. The play field exist to play, not to impose arbitrary and oppressing notions of real life judgement. You can’t cheat, when you are just playing for fun.
That said, if you cheat to make the game easier and access content that you can’t access by skill. It is not cheating, it is a failure of accessibility features. There’s nothing more stupid that the sense of gamer honor.