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 play games to have fun, which is the reason I don’t play multiplayer games (unless local). I also have a very limited amount of time to play games after work.
I cheat with WeMod on openSUSE Tumbleweed for every game I can. I’ve just recently beaten Resident Evil 2+3 and am currently on 4 right now, and am having a blast getting to play these games!
The number one reason I am having a blast is BECAUSE of the cheats. Every game is different for me, so I only use the cheats that will minimize the amount of time I have to do silly shit like collect X amount of this material or whatever other stupid grindy stuff they come up with that doesn’t respect my time as a player. Using the RE games as an example, I don’t turn on every single cheat. I don’t want to worry about inventory management (not fun to me, personally), so I turn on No Reload. This means my weapons will never need to be reloaded, which means more space in the inventory for the story important items. Win/Win for me. What I don’t do, for these games in particular, is use the infinite/god mode cheats. I still want to get damaged and try to recover if it happens, so I leave that one off.
People get… really fuckin’ weird when you talk about how much fun you have using cheats in a video game. “You can’t be having that much fun, or else you wouldn’t cheat!”, “You shouldn’t cheat on video games because it takes the fun away!”, “WOW, YOU NEED TO GET GUD SCRUB. ONLY LITTLE BABIES CHEAT IN VIDEO GAMES!!!111!!”. And here I am just having fun and completing game after game after game to get through my monumental Steam library. :P
Cheating to get around parts that aren’t fun for you is just valuing your time. I’ll cheat any way that improves the fun of the game. Sometimes, that’s extra ammo or money or materials I don’t want to grind for.
That said, my favorite games are still Souls games and the only “cheats” I like there are ones that make the game harder.