For most players, cheating is one of the top actions that should be frowned upon. Many believe that cheating breaks the power balance in multiplayer games, turning the player away from a full game experience. However, after playing Stardew Valley, I started to have a different view toward cheating – For some players, this “repulsive” choice may not result from their selfish greed but problems in the game mechanism. In fact, I reformed my opinion because I became one of the “cheaters” myself.
How can Stardew “force” me to cheat, for its open-ended nature is so friendly and pressure-free? It does so, depressingly, by rigidly pushing me toward pre-determined directions. During my gameplay experience, the upgrade and purchase systems constantly guide me to spend various resources to attain new items and upgrade them, with each upgrade requiring distinct types of resources. If I want to build a stable to hold a horse, I need 100 hardwood; To get them, I need a steel axe to chop down large logs in the Secret Woods, the most efficient source of hardwood; in order to acquire the steel axe, I need to go down deep into the mines to obtain iron, which means I also need a better pick and better weapons… In every step I was obeying the game’s designed procedural rule, as I couldn’t substitute one steel axe with even ten copper axes. Hence, to proceed along whichever goal I set for myself, whether to find gifts to increase friendships, earn more money, or expand and decorate my farm, I am pushed by the “prices” I have to pay to permeate deeper into the game’s myriad of mechanisms, some of which I originally had no intention of touching. Thus, Stardew is designed to orient me procedurally to explore the various aspects of the gameplay step by step.
A scene from Skull Cavern, where powerful monsters incessantly attacked the player.
However, As a player with personal preferences and limited abilities, I simply do not enjoy some of Stardew’s compulsory game procedures. The combat mechanism is too intense and even scary for me, and the Skull Cavern is especially horrifying. However, I have to find iridium ores from the Skull Cavern to craft an iridium sprinkler to farm efficiently, and thus am half-forced to face these horrors. After six times of feeling my hands literally shaking at the monsters’ noises in Skull Cavern and seeing the lame steel sprinklers taking too much space in the Green House, I was deeply frustrated by the game mechanism. How can I mitigate between my urgent need for iridium and the impossibility for me to obtain them? I felt Stardew’s mechanism was so incredibly unfair to me and that ConcernedApe was so inconsiderate to underestimate the fear I have towards the monster system. Thus, I allowed myself to be morally exempt from making use of the bomb glitch to obtain iridium ores, which frees me from fighting against the monsters (In v.1.3, when I open my inventory, the bomb I put down neither stops blowing up nor takes off my health. The cave-bombing allows the player to find ladders and break stones in an game-breakingly fast way, enabling me to get down as far as the 300th floor within one in-game day).
After I bombarded the cavern twice, I obtained as much as 226 iridium ores. Instead of the guilty excitement many expect from cheating, I only felt morally justified and relieved that my unfair shortage of iridium was significantly alleviated. The bomb-glitch brought me no more than what compensated for my personal fear towards monsters, for I went back to earning money and crafting products at the usual pace, without cheating, as soon as the iridium ores met my instant need. Contrary to the general view of cheating in games that it breaks the game balance and leads players away from genuinely enjoying the game, my cheating in Stardew Valley added to my game experience by filling up the “vacant bricks” on the pyramid of Stardew’s game procedure.
Stardew’s underlying game procedure has brought me problems with its inflexibility, and so must it have caused troubles to many other players who find obstacles in the game here and there (fishing is a mechanism that comes up a lot with regards to this issue). Every step of Stardew’s half-fixed procedure more or less creates the incentive for some groups of players to cheat to maintain their balance in gaming, for Stardew does not take care of every single player’s preferences in playing the game. Not every player cheats out of greed and instant gratification. Some may be urged by inconsiderate game procedures that make players’ personal inclinations detrimental to a complete gaming experience. Don’t vilify the players for cheating – maybe ConcernedApe needs to take responsibility, too? (No offense!)
