This is "A Cheating Mood:
The Emotional and Psychological Benefits of Cheating in Single-Player Games."
Work that was conducted at the University of Saskatchewan.
Cheating has a long history in digital games.
Secrets inserted by developers, developer consoles, cheat codes, third-party strategy
guides, mods, walkthroughs, and game exploits are all part of the rich history of cheating in digital games.
As games moved from what was primarily one player versus the system
into current multiplayer scenarios like 1 v. 1 and team v. team,
cheating plays a negative role by promoting inequitable play, toxicity, griefing, and
overall poor player experiences.
Yet despite these social and experiential repercussions, along with cheating’s negative stigma,
the majority of players still regularly cheat.
I mean, even I, an upstanding games researcher, have been known to seduce and marry a SIM
only to let them drown and inherit their money, moving on with my virtual life.
In looking into why players cheat, Consolvo identified four major reasons: one is to gain
an unfair advantage over others in social play.
But the other three are: to make progress when feeling "stuck", due to a desire to "play god",
and to "fast-forward" parts of the game that are considered too tedious or repetitive.
These last three motivations to cheat are not really hurting anyone by resulting in
an unfair advantage, but can instead be described as an exercise of player agency over games
that may promote longer play, result in more enjoyable play,
and facilitate more control over play.
We know that we play single-player games for a variety of reasons: to escape through fantasy,
to relax and relieve stress, to improve bad moods, and to recover from life's demands
or challenging circumstances.
So, if using in-game cheats results in a better player experiences, greater autonomy, and
more enjoyment, then cheating in single player games could facilitate gaming's role in
player recovery, relaxation, and mood repair.
To reconsider cheating's negative stigma and better understand the role of cheating
in single-player gaming, we conducted a mixed-methods analysis on descriptive experiential self-reports
from 188 U.S. players.
By limiting our exploration to single-player experiences, avoiding the use of ideologically-loaded
terms like "cheating" or "fairness", and sampling a diverse range of participants, our goal
was to clearly hear from players on how they articulate the perceived benefits of cheating
in single player games.
We never used the term "cheating" in our study materials, but instead primed participants
to consider their use of "extraneous game advantages" played within the game mechanics
but in ways unintended by the game designer, using, for example, cheat codes, walkthroughs,
game mods, loopholes, and exploits, and we referred to these as extraneous game advantages thereafter.
For brevity in this presentation though, we just call it cheating.
We refer to the paper for the detailed methods and results, but here are some key findings:
First, we found that over 94% of gamers occasionally cheat in some form or another, 82.4% participants
described cheating when situationally relevant, and 84.6% of participants described cheating
to increase games' enjoyment.
Based on participant responses, we constructed 9 themes that describe why players were tempted
to cheat, but by far the most prevalent was Mood.
To determine how players feel about cheating,
we asked if it was related to any strong emotions or feelings.
We coded the responses and present them here in a two-dimensional space
defined by increasing arousal and valence.
As expected, there was a lot of experience of frustration, and also some guilt or shame.
But there were even more descriptions of feeling positive emotions like enjoyment, relief,
and enervation through challenge.
To understand the experiential effects of cheating, we used guided recall and
qualitatively coded the responses.
This figure shows the dominant emotion before and after cheating.
What's interesting is that the before emotions are primarily driven by frustration, boredom,
and annoyance, with influences of deviance and curiosity.
But after cheating, the dominant emotions were relief, joy, and feelings of power and
agency, alongside a solid dose of guilt or shame.
When we considered these emotional journeys by individual players, we see that cheating
does result in negative and restful emotions like guilt and shame, regardless of how players
felt before cheating.
But we also see that cheating due to frustration most commonly results in feeling
powerful and excited, or relieved and hopeful.
Our key takeaways are that everyone cheats.
But cheating in single-player games is an intentional approach of problem solving
to help players achieve their personal goals.
Players view cheating as a micro-intervention for improving their play experiences by tailoring
them to shifts in their day-to-day needs.
We suggest that researchers, developers, and players need to reframe how cheating is understood
in single-player contexts.
Rather than "unfair" manipulations of game spaces, our results support that single-player
cheating can be a form of play that facilitates player control over games and has a uniquely
positive role in aiding mood repair and stress relief through play.
Thank you.