Ode to a Cheat Code: A Video Essay on the decline of cheats, games jockification and self acceptence

in 2019 James Davenport wrote of his experience playing sekiro in the annals of PC Gamer he had this to say it's a four-phase boss fight and I hate it I know it was easy for you cool I spent hours on some of sakira's bosses just don't have the time or impetus to prove I can do the sword thing well again the blade and I get along just fine I'm looking for a different kind of path from sekiro at this point so after spending a few mornings trying to take the sword Saint ishinashina down I figure [ __ ] it let's give that slow down mod tool a try what a godson I can adjust the speed of the game as I play it the second I should have had this built in Celestial to learn a boss requires throwing yourself at it time and time again which works eventually I have patience I wouldn't have reached the end of the game without it but to stretch it out like this some might say I missed out on the intended catharsis sidestepping the artist's intent so what there's nothing to preserve for the greater good in sekiro's design I'll get what I can from it and I got a lot from Sakira you cheated not only the game but yourself you didn't grow you didn't improve you took a shortcut and gained nothing you experienced a hollow Victory nothing was risked and nothing was gained it's sad that you don't know the difference I I love cheating at video games there's really no underestimating the value of cheat codes and gaming I've entered Rosebud into the Sims for a thousand extra simoleons I remember the dopamine driven electricity rolling under my fingertips a sense of control in a world I had no say in this is what power feels like the power to buy an inflatable couch and chair I think it began with emulators I wasn't allowed to have any consoles growing up so I was a PC Gamer I think broderbun and The Learning Company LED my parents to assign PC games a higher intellectual status than their console counterparts it's 90s logic don't read too much into it it didn't stop me though I still remember a sleepover at my best friend's house we watched her brother play Crazy Taxi for a while and then retired to her room to play Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time on her n64. I was transfixed by the open World gameplay you could go into any biome in 3D with with a flute though instead of scaling the spirit Temple or descending into a volcano I chose to play the fishing game until my host politely requested that we maybe go do something else when I got home I couldn't stop thinking about it how could I get back there again how could I see my low poly girlfriends again how could I get that special lore in my desperation I pried an answer out of the internet emulators sure they're legally dubious but in the age of Napster using Yahoo to find emulators and ROMs belt As Natural as downloading Adam Sandler's they're all going to laugh at you track four the longest P posted by user Tyler's dong 69 and just like that I was back a boy in his fairy it felt good running around seeing my little friends again well for a good hour at least ready to move on I gathered up my sword and shield but Mido the tool stood firm despite me meeting all requirements I'd found a glitch in those days ROMs were lousy with bugs and the whole process of getting an N64 game to run onto PC next to Microsoft Word was basically black magic I did what I had to in order to see that beautiful fishing man once more I used a cheat code and suddenly the game got 10 times more fun Not only was I catching fish again I was Galloping through the fields leaping over Canyons running away from princesses it felt like freedom freedom and power cheat codes make games more fun for proof let's look at the reasons why people use cheat codes if we're going to be banding words like play and game around there's a strong implication that fun should also be part of the equation for me if I'll have more fun by skipping this puzzle I've been staring at for a while imma look up a guide real quick and then continue enjoying the game I remember getting so frustrated playing no one lives forever because you don't get any of the cool spy gadgets that the Box advertises until after you beat some really challenging stealth shooter levels I got so frustrated I just started jumping to later missions with every weapon and going ham now I realize I'm speaking from my own experience here but I know I'm not alone at this if I was game facts never would have existed historically developers have put loads of silliness in their cheat codes one of my favorite examples of these is Diddy Kong Racing if you run over this frog just right you can play as a big rooster named drumstick another classic example is big head mode where one or more of the characters get you guessed it big heads these are fun ways to inject a little humor and fun into the time we spend with the games and it's a chance for the developers to share their inside jokes with us it has all humor to the workouts sometimes you get an idea for something you want to try but get getting enough stuff to try it out this is gonna be kind of a grind so a quick cheat for more money or infinite ammo or whatever can let you just try the idea out right now no fuss no must Sims is the ideal playground for doing all kind of horrible experiments on your poor Sims and somebody's got to fund all the things that you're going to burn down in your house fire [Music] despite reasons both understandable and unhinged using a cheat code mod guide whatever it carries a stigma we saw that stigma in response to a games journalist writing about sekiro the entire article James seems to be arguing with this imagine straw man someone who judges him harshly for choosing to use the mod and criticizes him relentlessly for an uninitiated non-gamer it reads as needlessly insecure but it didn't take long after posting the article for the supposed straw man to make themselves a reality upgrading them for using a cheat casting moral judgment on the decision it's not surprising that the social media kerfuffle about game difficulty centers around sakuro a game made by a studio you might have heard of called from software from software is famous for difficult games every time they release a game a whole flood of discourse starts up again about whether the game is too difficult or how it's inaccessible to some players and how they should add an easy mode so it can reach a wider audience of folks it seems like a reasonable solution to me and nothing new easy Mode's been around forever so why are so many people opposed to the idea from software's difficulty Forward Design philosophy is often compared to how games used to be when they were for real Gamers and these arguments hold water despite their modern beautiful Graphics the games evoke an old-fashioned feeling when you play them for example from software games are very unforgiving when you die you'll probably lose a lot of progress that's just like the arcade era of games you see arcade games made money per attempt you lose you pop another quarter in and that's more money for the arcade so it was in the Studio's interest to get you to lose as many times as possible the dream design would frustrate you in just the right way so you got determined and then had to win at any cost however when home consoles came into play your attempts were suddenly unlimited so a good fiscal quarter was no longer dependent on player loss counts another characteristic that older games share with these new from software games is the minimalist stories and tutorials compared to their contemporaries early console games were like this not as a creative Choice like from software is doing but more because of technical constraint cartridges and consoles didn't have that much memory and there was a concern that players wouldn't be getting their money's worth if they spent too long on the tutorial or explaining a story also shorter tutorials had the bonus effect of making you figure stuff out by yourself trial and error the more different approaches you try the longer your gameplay experience making it feel like you got more bang for your buck once consoles became sophisticated enough there was suddenly enough room to explain the game to the player which made games easier to get into widening the audience to more people and adding more wallets to the market the unforgiving minimalist trial and error mindset that's characteristic of from software games Echoes a rich history of game design it gives New Life to Old ideas presenting them with beautiful modern graphics and aesthetic sensibilities these games speak deeply to Their audience who's pleased to see the continuation and growth of a game design philosophy that seemed forgotten there are the those out there who feel that these kinds of game mechanics have fallen out of favor because our attention spans are much shorter than they used to be in we expect more rewards for Less work I could understand the frustration with the way technology is changing our neurology but in my opinion it's a slippery slope argument for yelling at kids for being on the dang phones too much and that's not new back in the 80s and 90s adults were fretting over decaying cognitive capacity caused by the exact same video games that from software has its roots in but many people are worried Will Young video addicts be more violent adults so I find the moral arguments about the importance of beating difficult games as intended in order to build character to be a little bit old-fashioned and the reality is back when games were that difficult cheat codes were an essential part of developing and Publishing video games the first cheat codes were development tools if one level had a weird bug you needed to be able to jump to that spot quickly in order to figure out how to fix it these very early cheat codes were called Peak and poke statements Peak at a variable and poke at it to change it this whole process was pretty technical because you're altering specific memory addresses for example if in night lore if you wanted player immunity for 1982's ZX Spectrum you'd have to poke four seven one nine six two zero one easy to remember right curious players would experiment with these Peak and poke statements making them the first video game cheaters even devs must have decided that these tools were too cumbersome so they switched to a more familiar series of inputs instead because when you're in beta and you're troubleshooting you'll probably need to use these tools all the time and you want something easier to remember than a long string of numbers once development was done and the game was ready to ship it often wasn't worth taking these Dev tool cheat codes out you don't want to take them out during the might need them and once you think you have a final gold Master of the game you don't want to open up the code and remove them because that could break the game in some unexpected way and then it was up to players to find them sometimes someone would have a friend or a friend of a friend who worked on the game and they'd post codes on the early internet for people to try on bulletin board services or instant relay chat as cheat codes became more commonplace devs might share cheat codes with reviewers so that they could review the game in a timely manner and better promote the game in fact in the 90s Nintendo's publishing agreement required Studios to hand over cheat codes to Nintendo those codes would then be sold in a little publication you might have heard of called Nintendo Power Publishers handed secret server with review copies so editors could use them to get out of tough spots provided they followed one stipulation we'd always have an understanding that they not print the codes in the same issue as they reviewed the game but to wait one or two issues later to give the game another cycle in the Press Nintendo Power was an Institute solution for cheaters everywhere and the relationship between Studios Nintendo and cheaters was mutualistic a copy of Nintendo Power at recess made you royalty for a day as you'd be the source of Insider information for whatever kids were playing at the moment meanwhile Nintendo printed money with their magazine and that was on top of their already impressive game sales just five months after its first issue Nintendo Power had a paid subscriber base of about 1.5 million for reference PC Gamer home of sekiro has about 20 000 copies that it circulates every issue Studios also love Nintendo Power because it provided their games additional exposure both at release and a few months later when they published cheats for players to explore for non-nintendo games cheat codes were just as popular if not more so and iconic cheat codes became Staples bighead mode is a classic cosmetic cheat NBA Jam was the first popular instance of it and people loved watching these little bobble heads wobble around the court so much that they gave tons of other characters the bighead mode treatment Spyro Gears of War GoldenEye all had big head modes speaking of GoldenEye that game was loaded with cheats but there was a catch in order to access them you had to beat the vanilla game so if you think about it cheats inspired what we now call New Game Plus god mode is another widely used cheat for players struggling with difficulty because it gives players invincibility the first major instance of God mode was in Doom with its Infamous iddqd cheat and let's not forget wads either doomheads know that wods are custom level maps that fans could develop and distribute to each other but Watts could be more than just level Maps they could include all kinds of player created cheats and wads are widely considered to be essential to The Full Experience of Doom some of them are even famous beyond the Doom Community my house.wad is so much more than a custom map it's an immersive horror experience with a rich story players can uncover it as they go through the map many times and even read Associated files in a secret Google Drive it's kind of the closest thing we have to a video game adaptation of House of leaves which is wild to me more House of leaves games please another Infamous cheat even dare I say it but politics and video games in the 90s Joe Lieberman was a U.S senator best known for his Crusade against video games instead of enriching a child's mind these games teach a child to enjoy inflicting torture he thought they were exposing the American Youth to violence and depravity in his hearing on the topic he had a selection of games he deemed too violent for the youths and among them was Mortal Kombat for a lot of you to see but there's blood splattering every time [Music] let's be honest with ourselves it's pretty violent but the game didn't actually ship with its signature gory finishing moves well the Japanese version was uncensored the US version tone the blood way down the developers decided to include a cheat code for older players who wanted the original developer intended experience entering abacab reverted the graphics from the censored version to the more gory original version fun fact the code itself was a reference to a song by Genesis and a nod how the band shared a name with the Sega Genesis players were entering the code into I guess Joe Lieberman wasn't a Phil Collins fan though because that didn't impress him his Crusade ended with establishing the ESRB the organization that provides censorship ratings like M for mature and it's all in part because of cheat codes however there was one code that was far more influential than a silly little U.S Senate hearing the Konami Code even if you don't know what it's called you might still have its inputs memorized up up down down left right left right b a start it all started in the 80s with a game called gradius the developer kazuhisa Hashimoto was porting the game to a new system and not used to its really high level of difficulty he was one of the first to translate a poke Peak style debugging into a Dev tool that was just a easy to remember series of inputs and it was very memorable so memorable its adoption quickly spread Beyond Konami and today it can be found in all kinds of places most famously Contra but also Castlevania Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kid Dracula gradius 2 Dave Mirra freestyle bmx2 Silent Hill 3. International track and field 2000 Sawtooth flesh and blood radius 3 death Junior 2 root of evil Dance Dance Revolution tokimeki Memorial Poppin twin B Code Lyoko Facebook Crash Bandicoot 3 warped Disney's Aladdin dig.com gradius 4 pukatsu dance sportinfo.net Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 WarioWare Inc mega micro games Bank of canada.ca radius five and more its ubiquity has made it kind of a gamer shibboleth a nod to all gamer kind to say hello fellow Gamers if a Cornerstone of referencing gaming culture is a cheat code trying to divorce cheat codes from video games is to deny the history of video games and honestly I don't think that's what the fetus berries of the world want though we can't deny that cheat codes in the traditional sense have fallen out of favor into the early 2000s more homes got faster internet connections that meant cheat codes became easier to find a short Yahoo or Alta Vista search would lead you to game facts where you'd find cheats walkthroughs and guides cheats were no longer only for those in the know every passing year sharing that power overwhelming would Grant you immunity in Starcraft when you fewer and fewer fruit gushers cheats were losing their Insider cachet and that was just the beginning of the decline of the cheat code before home internet was commonplace ancient Gamers had Lan parties in order to play together everyone would pack up their actual giant desktop computers drive it to a friend's house and hook up to a local network in person they could play together with minimal lag which was huge even if you did have internet it was probably too slow to keep up with Jeremy's horde of Spanish villagers in Age of Empires too but when internet connections got fast enough online play was no longer relegated to sleepover Lan parties you no longer needed to spend your night in a room with many heat generating computers and unwashed nerds to play a game with your friends however with more folks playing multiplayer cheating now had real world impact it would ruin other people's experiences like you wouldn't cheat at Monopoly would you okay maybe you would but you'd feel bad about it right right reliable internet connection meant that companies could communicate with players while they were playing the game and since you'd already bought a game from them what else would you buy microtransactions have been a highly controversial addition to games no one wants to get an ad while playing and almost everyone hates the idea of somebody getting an advantage because they're willing to Shell out more dough games with microtransactions that have made games easier have been accused of being paid a win and those games often end up feeling kind of soulless nowadays it seems that players and companies have come to a kind of detaunt on microtransactions players won't Riot as long as microtransactions are cosmetic think fortnite skins Goku has a gun now why does Goku have a gun now I'm personally conflicted on their rolling games turning a profit in this industry is challenging to say the least and I'm supportive of artists exploring new Revenue sources on the other hand it seems like a lot of Revenue seems to just be going to corpo bigwigs instead of oh say hiring enough people to work on your game so your employees aren't expected to work 100 plus hour weeks for months at a time racking their lives mental health tirades about work practices and Game Dev aside microtransactions are an important piece of the puzzle when understanding the decline of cheat codes why hide content behind a cheat code when you can convince someone to buy it big head mode is no longer unlocked by entering a code into a console it's available for purchase or even worse they don't include it at all I want big head Kratos give me big head Kratos the most interesting factor in the decline of cheat codes is the rise of achievements achievements are a list of developer defined goals when meeting the criteria a little flag comes up and all your friends can see what you actually accomplished on your profile achievements first debuted with the release of Xbox 360 and the gamer score as a PC Gamer I don't really have the perspective to say how meaningful gamer score was but I will say that I genuinely laughed out loud when I heard the word for the first time gamer score those in the nose say that Xbox 360 was Peak gamer culture back in 2005. I can feel the energy flowing through the high-speed ethernet cables dude who are you talking to are we gonna play or what Steve followed sweet soon after adding achievements to PC games in 2007. only two years later in 2009 from software released Demon Souls I can't help but wonder what role achievements might have played in making a really difficult game like Demon Souls super popular achievement served as useful Road markers on your way to completing a game as disc space became more available games got bigger and things like side quests became more commonplace that meant that beating a game is no longer the same as experiencing all the content in the game and seeing on your profile that you still had achievements to unlock let you know there was still more to experience sometimes games had secret achievements that only made themselves known once you unlock them by finding a secret room or getting an NPC to do something unexpected finding these hidden Easter eggs made you feel like you were in a secret Club not unlike learning a new secret cheat code to try then there's stuff plant-based achievements these might be based on completing some difficult skill challenge or playing the game for a certain length or a number of times these vaunted achievements were a source of Pride for many gamers demonstrating your skill at various games showed your dedication and talent and for some even indicated your ability to contribute to a team in a multiplayer setting achievements became status symbols in these communities altogether this led to a phenomenon I'm calling the jockification of video games your status in a Gaming Community was no longer about knowledge you could contribute it wasn't about giving advice to others to beat the game or discussing weird secrets you found knowledge is easy to come by on the internet your status as a gamer now was based around your skills your reflex your ability to contribute to a team jocks had found video games and skill coordination and practice became more popular than gaining hidden knowledge between the rise of multiplayer gameplay achievements as signifiers of prowess difficulty focused games like Demon Souls and the decline of fun secret cosmetic cheat codes in favor of microtransactions games belong to a new kind of gamer the attitude towards cheat codes was bound to change the final nail in the cheat code coffin was a practicality as video game development became more sophisticated debug tools and game engines became more commonplace and devs didn't need to add in cheat codes for debugging purposes as often there are some notable exceptions here of course for example Bethesda games which have a console that allow players to actually have fun with their games ah cheat codes are so great I think when you love a game it's really fun to know as much about it as possible to have a fun game and then find a secret inside of the product is always like opening a small door in the developer's mind and finding out more about how the developers think in their process the language of cheat codes is the language of in-jokes a way to feel closer to a piece of media that means something to you sometimes they're little inside jokes for example in the first Sims release Rosebud was the code to get a thousand extra simoleons in Citizen Kane Rosebud is the final whisper uttered by a powerful and Wealthy media magnate on his deathbed we spent the whole movie with the mystery of what that last word meant a confession a failed Endeavor a woman none of the above it was the name of a sled he had when he was a boy the only time when he was truly happy money will only buy the facsimile of Happiness it's kind of like if Jeff bezos's last word were Atari anyway I gotta afford that inflatable couch somehow realizing these connections either in the moment you learn them or like me many years later is exciting and fun whether it's the Konami Code and Wreck-It Ralph or manipulating memory with poke and Peak statements cheat codes carry with them the excitement of being in on something stepping into a speakeasy a little ah I see what you did there Cinema people haven't stopped needing a little boost to beat an especially hard boss or just wanting to see something weird or push the boundaries of what their games can do today cheating has moved almost entirely to mods extra pieces of software developed by fans and intended to augment the experience for example you might want to slow down Sakura so you can finish the dang game and send in your article to PC Magazine in order to move on with your dang life or turn every tree into a giant hand a mod can be anything however because mods are developed by fans they haven't been blessed as part of the Gospel of authorial intent the developers didn't ship these mods with the game so using them must be compromising the experience the developers intended us to have right sometimes there are cases where Studios have either expressed discomfort with mods or tried to protect their game from mods especially in multiplayer games where cheating affects everybody else's experience however some studios celebrate the mods their Community makes sometimes design the game with infrastructure to support them or less admirably straight up steal the mods and start selling them as downloadable content regardless of what the studio thinks about you using a mod there is a vocal contingent of players who feel that using mods that affect the game difficulty devalues or even invalidates not only your gameplay experience but theirs as well poor fetus Berry your Tweet became Infamous didn't it a beloved copy pasta and meme pasted again and again just to demonstrate how silly your take is by juxtaposing it against screenshots of silly exploits quality of life features game difficulty selections even necessary medical AIDS got the fetus Berry treatment one iteration that stuck out to me was attached to this classic realist painting titled what else the irritating gentleman it captures the emotional experience of encountering this tweet for the first time and it makes clear why this post made it to so many eyeballs we all know a fetus Berry and if we're being honest with ourselves we've probably been a bit of a fetus Berry once or twice before it's nothing to be ashamed of this core concept runs deep in our lived experiences you either do hard work and win or you don't and you lose we even believe this ethos can be scientifically proven the marshmallow test was a study of self-control and delayed gratification conducted at Stanford in the 1970s it goes like this I put a marshmallow in front of you and I tell you okay I'm Gonna Leave the Room and you're welcome to eat the marshmallow don't eat it yet I'm coming back in 15 minutes with another marshmallow if this first marshmallow is still here you're getting two marshmallows but if it's not that's all the marshmallows you get did I mention in this scenario that you're four years old and you love marshmallows more than anything in the world the results group subjects into two categories the self-control Zen Masters who got two marshmallows and the self-gratifying little gremlins who only got one the researchers then preferred follow-up studies on these subjects throughout their young adult lives they found that our Zen Masters got better SAT scores had lower bmis had more successful careers and on and on when compared to our little gremlins this led researchers to conclude our relationship to self-control is defined early and is transferable between skills waiting for a marshmallow is not so different from a night spent studying instead of watching TV since I'm just a humble YouTuber I thought it'd be good to get some professional perspectives on this classic study so I'm Douglas with Plummer I am a licensed clinical psychologist and I also am a college researcher with take this my opinions today do not represent take this but that is a place that you can find me and I'm Dr Jared Comer I'm also a licensed psychologist I kind of split my time between running therapeutic role-playing game groups currently with the neurodivergent adolescence and young adults but previously with veterans experiencing like substance use or sulfillment severe mental illness and when I'm not doing that I am engaged as the Director of counseling services at a clinic at game to grow and just seeing like a wide variety of clients some just young Gamers some in the game industry some completely unassociated I asked Jared and Elizabeth what they thought of the marshmallow test here in the go go 2020s the marshmallow test is a really great example of how important it is to understand context and to understand individual and societal variables that may be really really important to an an individual when we think about some of these social psychology studies it's really important to do stuff like this and to understand it but also to report on it responsibly and to do some of the follow-up research to understand like when we are following someone over a lifespan are we also looking at some of the other variables like socioeconomic status how much education their parents had uh any kind of chronic illness or large stressors in the family anything related to like the aces study are we paying attention to those pieces as well would you believe modern research has cast out on the findings of the marshmallow study like I don't want to complain too much about the original marshmallow test study because like we had less insight as like community and is in like a group of scientists around the importance and impact of all of these extra variables Elizabeth has mentioned but I do want to praise the follow-ups for gaining that insight and looking again factors like culture ethnicity race parental educational household income have all been found to bias results I do think that the marshmallow test is part of this larger societal and cultural piece especially in the US that basically says that if you have willpower you can do anything and I think that that is a problematic and false narrative but it is a narrative that really supports the systems of Oppression that we have in the United States right now and so um it's a convenient narrative it's a narrative that is really straightforward right if you just try harder you two can succeed if you have enough grit if you have enough willpower nothing can stop you that is a great tagline that sells tons of books it also allows us to gloss over um a history of and a current reality of systemic oppression that means that that is not true for a large proportion of people if this is just my opinion but it oils a slippery slope of self-judgment and catastrophizing if you don't have the discipline and to learn the blade you probably don't have the discipline to study for that tests you've cheated not only the game but yourself the concepts of grit and willpower the original marshmallow study focuses on can be seen in parenting advice and educational policy not only us but internationally I can work so hard and get so good at basketball and I am still going to be 5'5 and there is no way that I am ever going to play professional basketball so there still are going to be these kind of ranges and sometimes those ranges are determined by like biological factors like I'm not going to get taller but sometimes those ranges are also determined determined by more societal factors for example the likelihood that I will be in a leadership position in a um National psychology organization is lower than Jared's even though we might be just as competent we both have the same degree from the same school but he's male the idea that there's two types of people in the world those with work ethic and self-control and those without goes back way further than the 60s and 70s it's not so different than Aesop's Fable of The Ant and the grasshopper that's the one about the diligent ant that prepares for winter while his lazy grasshopper friend plays with the fiddle all day once winter comes the grasshopper has nothing and has to ask his aunt friend for help the aunt says no and that seems pretty harsh to me because it seems like you could get some pretty cool fiddle performances out of this whole deal but okay sorry I got sidetracked there the point is the marshmallow test provided a patina of scientific legitimacy to judgments we already had about people who struggle with impulse control that makes a lot of sense to me because you know what I think of myself as a successful and hard-working person but what I look into my own heart and I ask myself the tough question posed by the marshmallow study the truth is I'd eat that marshmallow I'd eat it so fast it'd make a head spin I've only recently gotten to a place in my life where I can admit in public that I'd eat the marshmallow and similarly I've spent most of my life a little ashamed of cheating at video games especially when I cheated because the game was too hard for me I've held back from talking about my cheating ways I hold it inside myself like an old fish praying No One's Gonna smell my rotting core at least until recently maybe it's getting old enough that cheating at video games seems like a distant memory another Katie or maybe it's having enough real quote-unquote accomplishments that equating my gamer skills to my capacities in the Real Worlds doesn't feel real holistic anymore or maybe I just have a really good therapist no matter the reason it's been a long road of Shame and denial and it feels great to be on the other side of all that it feels great to Proclaim loudly on my YouTube channel I love cheating at video games the shame was coming from this fear I had about myself a fear that I'm lazy or undisciplined and a fear that any success I found is just dumb luck and I don't work hard enough to deserve it so in a way the fetus Berry was inside me all along in inner fetus Berry no I don't like how it sounds either but an ugly idea does need an ugly metaphor maybe you two have an inner fetus Berry Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran in 2016 found that young people today feel more pressure than ever to be perfect and this pressure is associated with increased rates of anxiety and depression so that's the moral right we all just need to kick our inner fetus Berry to the curb and start living our best lives it's not like one day I realized gosh I'm big really hard on myself and now I'm self-possessed and confident 100 of the time I mean if that were true I'm not sure I need to pretend to be an anime girl on the internet I still have bad days I mean heck I had bad days writing this essay and not even for a good reason you see I got one of those stupid phones that doesn't have a headphone jack so I invested in a pair of really nice Bluetooth headphones and that was a big deal because I have a terrible history losing headphones and having two separate earbuds detached from anything was like obviously tempting fate so one day while I was getting ready to go to the gym I of course couldn't find them and I looked everywhere and I mean faced with this one barrier I just kind of broke down in the gym parking lot because I was so mad at myself I couldn't stop thinking what's the point of taking care of my body at the gym when I can't keep track of a single pair of earphones what I was feeling was shame not unlike the shame I felt using cheat codes that same catastrophizing spiral if I can't do this one thing how can I do this slightly more important thing let alone all the very important things I need to do like remember to pay my rent the really frustrating thing is I know why I lose headphones all the time I've actually always lost things keys my phone shout out to the guy who found my wallet in the Copenhagen airport and then mailed it back to me in the states there's some good souls in the world back then almost every time I lost something I'd Panic or break down or whatever without fail until add an extra cookie for you if you know where this is going I got diagnosed with ADHD suddenly it all made sense every single thought that pops into my brain is screaming for immediate attention my brain is always telling me there's something more important to do than put my keys down in a sensible spot the diagnosis was such a relief it wasn't a character flaw it's just a quirk of my neurology it enabled me to accept myself for who I am and to start thinking constructively about how to handle losing something and start to create systems that worked for me instead of failing to use other people's systems and then beating my myself up over it because I think I'm broken which it turns out I'm not well most days I can do that I forget sometimes and then when I lose something I'm back to catastrophizing self-acceptance is a practice it's not something you figure out once and you're done it's like a garden you have to keep tending and even then despite your best efforts a hurricane comes through and the whole thing's a big soggy mess you know how that night in the gym parking lot ended we ordered pizza and you know what I did the next day I went back to the gym it's such a small thing but I'm so proud I didn't let that one bad day break my habit the hurricane came and the next day I got out there and I went back to gardening when we ordered pizza it felt like I was downloading the sakiro mod and it felt pretty bad at the time I think when I was a kid my impulse to cheat was coming from a similar place of Despair and anxiety my childhood wasn't dickensian but I definitely put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect and it wasn't healthy I would study so hard for a test get a B feel useless and then open up a video game to blow off steam then I'd end up failing up Mission too many times and feel more useless and then I'd end up entering a cheat code and have a fine night but in the back of my mind there would be this inner fetus Berry telling me that I was an even bigger failure now nothing was ventured nothing was gained if it's not obvious this is absolutely not an invitation to go bother fetus Berry he's just a guy I live in his life and honestly I really empathize with him I'm so angry that Society perpetuates this idea of constant hard work being some sort of moral imperative and I'm frustrated to see it in response to a dude just trying to finish a game but I'm also mad at myself for internalizing these same ideas so I bring this 2019 meme up not to point and laugh at how wrong it is but to recognize it exists where it comes from and hold it with compassion because there is no self-acceptance without admitting who I am a little cheater the cheats meant that there was an official game which was hard and punishing but there was one that we could also choose to engage with a much more playful version of the game with unlimited weapon walking through walls and so on it made the game more like a playground earlier I talked about the jockification of video games how skill and reflexes in an arena became more valuable than knowledge and secret finding in a dungeon jogification has at times made Gamers more judgmental and frankly toxic however if I Proclaim this phenomena to be all bad I'd be misrepresenting the truth jocks after all have some good qualities like determination and hard work and hard games like from software's Elden ring can be designed to encourage these traits doctors Elizabeth and Jared Kilmer have been researching how hard games can foster a growth mindset growth mindset is this idea that our abilities and skills are not fixed it's not that I am just inherently good at math or I am inherently good at sports or I'm inherently good at first person shooters uh it's that I know that if I try and I get feedback and I continue to practice over time I have the capacity to grow and get better at something we're supposed to fixed mindset is I'm good at math I'm bad at math I'm good at first person shooters I'm bad at first person shooters and that can really prevent us from taking intentional steps to improve our abilities because there's this idea that we're kind of stuck in this box caves are a rich area of potential for developing a growth mindset because they're incentivized to show us how to grow the core of most games designers really want us to start with some limited skills in the game and grow over time and so they're going to intentionally put stuff in the game that they think are going to help people kind of learn and grow over time so having opportunities where it is safe to fail having opportunities where you can get support as needed to help you grow having opportunities to hear direct messaging about the power of growth through failure all of these things exist in a lot of our favorite games especially with some educational focused games they've intentionally manipulated elements that they think will support growth mindset and they found that when you include things that likely to support growth mindset we can't actually see that that change in clients the ways that games engage with the concept of difficulty can affect the players thinking about what a difficult scenario means for them one of my favorites is actually a lot of the Pokemon games so if you notice if you beat another trainer like an NPC in the game oftentimes sometimes that trainer is just like oh shucks this is the worst but sometimes they'll say something along the lines of oh man I learned so much I'm gonna or I'm gonna go off and I'm gonna get stronger and I'm gonna come back and beat you or oh man I know so much more about how to beat rock type Pokemon or whatever it is and so you're getting this very direct messaging in the game that a loss right is something that other people are actually conceptualizing as something that is a valuable part of their growth this shows up a ton in um sword and shield with like any interaction you have with hop he's trying so hard and he's not very good but he's gonna keep learning and he's consistently working on learning and you also get to see him get better um throughout the game often not as better as us but better not not as better and multiplayer team-based play communication channels can become a double-edged sword even if a game has low consequences for failure you can get dumped back into a waiting room after you lose or whatever if the people I'm playing with are telling me that I uh suck and I shouldn't get to play anymore that's that's a higher consequence for failure for sure if I get booted from a team because I'm not performing at a high enough level um then that's also going to be a higher consequence and so there are many games especially multiplayer games that the community can play a really big role in how much someone feels like they have the ability to grow and change a game that's designed with good support systems can lead to a positive growth mindset building experience I will say just from personal experience when I started playing Destiny 2 I had not played a lot of first-person shooters and I was really bad it was really really awful and I was lucky enough to have some friends who were were very happy to drag me through stuff that was a little bit that was a little bit beyond my level so that I was able to kind of get the experience and see how cool it could be but I could hide in the corner and shoot ads while they were doing some of the heavy lifting and so just having that experience helped me both see what was ahead and I could ask questions about hey um what should I do here what should I do there I also had them pushing me very kindly to for example uh not only use auto rifles for everything all the time so having that kind of support allows us to hit on several of those different pieces right so that modeling of growth mindset it can adjust how much failure seems like a big or small consequence we're also getting direct instruction and so all of those pieces can really help to support or inhibit the development of a growth mindset but those same communication channels can get twisted I got really into Pokemon unite which is uh kind of a MOBA and um there is a just a communication wheel where you can be like I'm going to this path or like thank you for this or like watch out for that in the community largely kind of developed a thanks is highly sarcastic it's like you don't really want to hear it it feels really rude when it happens and it's like like disproportionately use and inappropriate times or in Marvel snap it's kind of universally understood that like a fist bumping in the game is pretty kind but there's another remote that's kind of on the fence there it's it's Ms Marvel giving a thumbs up and winking and it seems to be used in like a variety of ways that feels like more harassment than good job and so even when we have limited tools that have a veneer of positivity people can take those and spin them in a way that creates the opposite impact mindful game design however can encourage a community away from toxic Tendencies and into providing encouragement and feedback in a supportive way you can really only from my perspective look at a product from the outside and speculate did this happen on purpose or was this like a beautiful happenstance and it's really hard to know the difference but you can see the absence of something and there is like a theoretical assumption that intentionality leads to a higher occurrence of these design choices so thinking about the honor System and League or the Commendation system in Destiny 2 where the developers are explicitly kind of putting stuff into the game to help support that Community um having the opportunity to give people feedback and that feedback you'll notice is very intentionally um not just you were the best player sometimes it's like the one of the options for league is like they stayed like stayed cool um or good shot calling those staying cool is not necessarily something that I would say the best player on the team is the one who's always going to be the one who's the most cool it could be someone who's not very good but didn't blow up in Rage Quit when they were struggling they could still get that that combination it subtly creates new kpis for players to get better at very intentional But ultimately the community surrounding a game has the biggest say in the factors contributing to either a growth or fixed mindset and the community is never a monolith like if you are like arguably getting carried by some of your peers as you are learning how to engage in a game and like in one instance the feedback is stay quiet stay back let us handle this versus keep trying and keep failing until you figure it out it's okay those are very different messages about how you're impacting the people around you and when we talk about Community it's really important to note that we we can't mean one thing there is no the community surrounding something um in the example of Destiny 2 that Elizabeth just gave go on Reddit there was destined to the game and there is low sodium Destiny and they are very different communities with a different vibe about what it feels like to support other people and playing the game and going through lfgs I've been on circumstances where like a sherpa will lead me through it and they are excited about watching somebody learn and get better and there are other teams that won't talk to you and if you make a single mistake they will boot you because they don't have the time or the patience for that and I'm not even really here to judge them for that it's just it's a very different experience multiplayer games difficult games these games require us to make many attempts to strive to improve to measure and care about our own progress gameplay that makes us focus on teamwork or study tactics can be a huge positive force in somebody's life assuming the community is when you feel safe in so the jockification of video games isn't necessarily a bad thing it's just a thing that has good and bad aspects like anything else so if that's true of the games that rely on difficulty to generate fun what can we say about more creative free-form gameplay like Minecraft we do know that just like I mean Minecraft is basically in a lot of ways not only but in a lot of ways it's digital Legos and know that kind of having those opportunities for building and creating can be a really great way to help support creativity and you've got really low consequences for failure you've got lots and lots of things to explore you have some some kind of options of things that you can take advantage of and try to create for example like if you get Legos they'll be like here's what you could build if you want to build something on Minecraft you can see tons of examples online but you aren't expected to do something in a certain way the exploratory nature of gameplay in Minecraft can be likened to the what if cheat codes I mentioned earlier both modes of play allow players to explore what's possible so when we're talking about whether or not using a cheat code is more related to growth mindset or fixed mindset especially if we're thinking about an area where I don't know I just I want to see if something will happen and so using a cheat code can help me explore and find that out that's more likely to be related to more of that growth mindset because you're you're trying stuff out your experience you're trying to figure out what's going on difficulty adjusting cheat codes also have a place in the pantheon of modes of play as well they have the capacity to make gameplay more accessible single player cheating is in my mind strongly linked to accessibility issues if it is going to change the way a person engages with an experience and they have the opportunity to opt in or out and they're opting in because it's enhancing their experience it it sounds like a net positive when I think of cheat codes I think all the way back to my game genie on the NES and how that was a very personal experience and it helped it helped me engage at a deeper level than I could have otherwise at that time in my life and so like defining what a cheat code is um and is it like intentional by the developers or did a third party come in and do this is it something that is adjusting solo play to change probably in a positive manner a gameplay experience or is this done in a multiplayer competitive experience where it it destroys equality between like experiences whereas when you're talking about how um like especially for individual games like known Dev codes or cheeses um feels like it is it's not the same as but it feels like it's a little bit more like accessibility features that can where you as a player get to choose at what level um what kinds of supports you'd like or getting to choose the difficulty of the game yeah yeah is God mode and Hades cheating it's a it's a real question like and don't don't start that in the comments but the reality is in single player games the experience we need to get the most out of our play is deeply personal by using a cheat or Honestly by playing on easy mode I'm not challenging myself at all um if that's not challenging for me I'm probably not growing that much right and so in that way it could absolutely not necessarily support a growth mindset in the way that um I it could be if I was playing in a more challenging mode but that's something where we really start getting into um it would be hard to for like a Dev to make that choice on behalf of their players because no player is going to be in exactly the same place and even for me right like one day I might be really ready for a challenge and the next day I need things to be a little bit easier because when we think about growth it's not the straight line we're going to have like gross and plateaus and sometimes things are going to go back down and back up maybe I didn't get any sleep and so allowing me to engage with the game a little bit easier actually maybe more likely to support my growth and I remember the first time I played a game that warmed me at the beginning you can change the difficulty at any time what a cool feature and like that is a design Choice as opposed to just a given that you can set it at the beginning and it's locked in that way and like Elizabeth said from day to day are like our ability to tolerate Challenge and engage with challenge might shift over time and we need to let that difficulty ebb and flow or if I really love a video game and I want to keep playing it but I seen the whole story and I've mastered this difficulty if there is not a way for me to make the game easier or harder I'm going to lose interest faster the clamps there's the vanilla experience there's a more creative experience and Jared even brought up another really important application of cheat codes I hadn't even considered and because cheats don't always make things easier and I think so far that's been the given in this conversation but they can also make things more challenging and that's going to increase engagement for some players my favorite example of cheating to make a game harder is speedrunning a lot of ways speedrunning represents the marriage of these two play Styles both kinds of play are required for a community that is committed to finishing any given game as quickly as possible there are folks who do the actual speed running sit down and finish the game as quickly as possible using their skill and there are folks who endlessly explore the edges of the game with mods and cheats to find new glitches skips and exploits that speedrunners can use to finish the game even faster Beyond which Heats give us I believe they also give the developer a voice that they might not otherwise have in the game the cheats they choose to include give us a window into their personality their sense of humor well the ID was just like company identifier so the dqd that was that was a Dave Taylor um that was a personal cheat code that he just made up and it stands for Delta Q Delta and the Q stands for quit and what what that meant was when he was in college uh if he if him and his frat buddies were getting too low on their grades they would just quit the class yeah and so they did this many times and just created this you know imaginary fraternity called you know Delta Q Delta cheating helps us interact more intimately with a piece of media that we already love it allows us a small Peak into the heads of the artists and the developers who created it and for me that's kind of magic cheaters never win not like you win a competitive first person shooter but they never lose either because in the right single player circumstances they're probably getting exactly what they need from the game games are special as an art because they engage in human practicality with our ability to decide and to do in ordinary life we have to struggle to deal with whatever the world throws at us with whatever means we happen to have lying around the form of our struggle is usually forced on us by an indifferent and arbitrary World in games on the other hand the form of our practical engagement is intentionally and creatively configured by The Game's designers in ordinary life we have to desperately fit ourselves to the Practical demands of the world in games we can engineer the world of the game and the agency we will occupy to fit us and our desires games allow us to slip on different modes of thinking as easily as a new pair of shoes and that's powerful we might seek out being challenged so that we may develop a growth mindset that can serve us elsewhere in Life or we might seek out a Sandbox to work out new ideas and allow ourselves to be inspired or it might just desire a sense of infinite power as a respite from the challenges of ordinary life 2. deny the value of diverse modes of play that cheat codes allow us is to deny games their greatest tool to impact us like the art that they are in the era of games jockification sekiro and Dark Souls were praised for returning to a traditional minimalist unforgiving game design of years gone past and now games like tunic are being praised for returning to the secret finding cheat code entering Nintendo Power era of games what's old is new the pendulum swings back I predict a Resurgence of cheat codes in indie games at first and then eventually inevitably as explicitly branded cheat code loot boxes in Assassin's Creed and I welcome it let one game become two a difficult climb up Everest and a ridiculous sleigh ride into chaos let games reach their full potential as art by embodying as many modes of thinking and agencies as exist in the universe let them help us explore the depths of The Human Condition in this way that no other art form offers the tricky thing about being human is finding balance there's no one-size-fits-all answer here but I can share my strategy with you I have this motto five percent better than yesterday to me that means set goals but if I fall short I have to acknowledge the progress I made just by trying it also means that some days I'm gonna be 50 worse than I was yesterday but that has nothing to do with tomorrow's goal be five percent better than today most importantly it means achievement requires more than just grind it demands time spent exploring ideating and just being silly that for me is what balance means that doesn't resonate with you that's completely valid we're all on our own Journey to Find balance and it looks different for everyone Thanks for hearing me out I hope that part about the history of cheat codes was interesting and for everyone I wish you luck on your own Journey because it's hard out there and please consider subscribing thank you thank you so much to the wonderful humans who contributed their voices to the quotes in this piece they're all extremely talented content creators in their own right and make a wide variety of types of content for you to check out and a huge thank you to doctors Elizabeth and Jared Kilmer if you're interested in hearing more for them I posted the full version of our interview which covers a lot more stuff and we recently published a book with Rutledge called therapeutically applied role-playing games where we talk a fair amount about growth mindset in that as well if you want to hear me talk about extremism and building Brazilian communities and doing a talk at games for change in July oh and I have just one extra note for the folks at Nintendo that whole story about emulators and ROMs and stuff it's a total fabrication [Music] keep up the good work [Music] that's it thank you for your time

Channel: Katie and Catburger

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Id: qiu9VANVH6s

Length: 57min 48sec (3468 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023