The Patreon Letters - 29th September, 2017

Hello friends, M here today for your letter this week. I've been all in on Star Trek what with Discovery coming out and us prepping for the next Second Officer Slog, so I've been a little lacking in other things to talk about. I'm going to spare you all a Trek letter, at least this week, so let's talk about games instead. Specifically, cheating at them.

Ubisoft announced this week that the next Assassin's Creed would have a mode that let you turn off the combat and just explore the world, essentially turning the open world Batman/Witcher style game into a giant museum exhibit. That's the claim, anyway. There are a lot of articles about it, and about how it improves accessibility, though how accessible the 800th Assassin's Creed game in a decade could ever be is anybody's guess, even if they did saddle it with that exhausting subtitle of Origins. 

What's interesting to me is that this type of gaming experience already exists around the edges of games, and it's one I've been indulging in pretty regularly for the past two years. I play a lot of games, and I like to play them quickly, making me what is casually referred to as a 'content tourist'. I wanna get in, get a feel for the game, and get out with as little friction as possible. More games to see, too few hours in the day, that sort of thing. It is a function of getting older, but also of just having too many goddamn games and other stuff to do. 

Functionally what that means is cheating. In practice what that means is having to play games on PC, usually. It's fine, I prefer that anyway just out of sheer cost of games, but if you want to be able to customize your experience, the PC is where it's at. I had a fantastic time with Alien Isolation and it's beautiful 70s science fiction world, after I took the Alien out and made the androids non-hostile. I play Castlevania games for the channel, but readily abuse the hell out of save states to get through tight spots. I tore through the Witcher games, going down every side quest in the game, but I absolutely used Cheat Engine to give myself money whenever I was out of it to keep the momentum up. Same for Pillars of Eternity—I put on god mode and just fought every battle on autopilot, only bothering with the story. I feel no shame in any of this, and I greatly encourage anyone who wants to play games to do these things or anything else that can expedite your experience. 

There's a long-standing culture in games that worships skill over most everything else, that says you should always play on normal (or greater!) and that rising to the challenge of a game is the point. I pretty soundly reject this. Not that you can't get a lot out of being good at a game and focusing down on its specifics. I play character action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta on hard just fine. I sail through the most difficult platformers. But I don't consider that the 'right' way to play, because I don't think games are meant to be digested in a single way. A person who is focused on skill will study a game, take it apart, become extremely talented at the very specific asks of the thing they're good at. At the extremes of this you have high score chasers and speed runners, experts at usually only one or two games. That's definitely one way to be and enjoy games.

But then there's the other side, where people like me live, where I'm into games for the artistic work and the themes and what I can wrest out of them as someone who mostly treats the average game as not much different than I do a book or a movie I'm taking in. In those instances, I want as frictionless an experience as possible, a way to absorb everything I can as cleanly as it's meant to (or faster, even!) and then move on when there's nothing else for me to experience. This isn't better, but it certainly isn't worse, and given games' propensity for inflation of time played to justify their incredible price tag, being able to sand off the edges often allows me to spend much less time and rarely do I get fully sick of a game before I've completed it under these conditions. 

This way of playing games is strangely anathema, in part because of that 'gamers skill' stuff, but also perhaps in part because our worth as players is defined socially by our dedication to putting up with a lot of bullshit and how much we let games take over our lives. I don't want to throw shade, but I know people are putting in 6 hours in a sitting to complete the first Destiny 2 raid. I would rather my entire time playing most games start to finish be 6 hours. The thought of spending that all on a single sitting with a much bigger game? It makes me feel queasy. 

Which is why I don't play games like Destiny. But it's also why, when I'm playing a game like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I use a mod to give myself all the ability points so I can just focus on going through the game invisible to skip all the fights. It's why the first thing I look at is How Long to Beat, but the second thing I look at is mods for most big games I play. Whether it's through cheat engine, mods, console commands, or this new wave of no-combat modes in games, I think it's worth allowing yourself to use whatever means necessary to have the experience you want. Don't suffer busy work if you don't enjoy it. Life's short, and there's always something else to do.