Who Does Cheating in a Single-Player Game Betray? — The Philosophy of Promises and Self-Deception

The Night I Missed a 95% Shot and Reloaded

Late at night, whisky in hand, I was playing XCOM 2 (developed by Firaxis Games, published by 2K, 2016). I missed a shot the interface had labelled 95%, everything fell apart from there, and four soldiers I had raised for hours vanished in a single turn. I stared at the screen for a while. Then I loaded the save. I made it never have happened, took the same shot from the same corner of the same room, and this time it hit. There was no victim. No opponent. No leaderboard soiled. And yet that night's victory had a thin, papery texture. In the margin of my drafting notebook I summoned two people I wanted to ask about that aftertaste and sat them down facing each other: Immanuel Kant, who wrote that the gravest liar's target is not another person but oneself, and Bernard Suits, who would probably say this is not a story about betrayal at all. These are not real statements, of course. It is an imagined dialogue in my head, inferred from what each of them actually wrote.

XCOM 2 (from the official Steam screenshots)

In the Margin of My Drafting Notebook, Two Philosophers Judge a Private Cheat

Kant. Let us settle one thing first. You said there was no victim, but that is an accounting that counts only other people. In the Doctrine of Virtue of my Metaphysics of Morals I wrote that the greatest violation of the duty a human being owes to himself, regarded merely as a moral being, is the lie. And there are two kinds of lie: the outer lie, addressed to others, and the inner lie, addressed to oneself. It is the latter that is troublesome. By a lie a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being. There was indeed someone else in your room.

Suits. Your premise is wrong, Kant. You slapped the label "lie" on it at once, but was anything actually falsified in that room? In The Grasshopper I wrote that to play a game is to attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles voluntarily. One could step over the wall, yet one deliberately takes the long way round — and what fixes that long way round are the constitutive rules. What happens the moment the rules are broken is not betrayal. It is leaving. He is simply no longer playing that game. It is not that there is nobody to betray; it is that the event called betrayal never took place.

Kant. Leaving, you say. A remarkably quiet way to dispose of it. But there is that thing you yourself named the lusory attitude: accepting the rules for no other reason than that they make this activity possible. Is that not a declaration addressed to oneself? "I shall go the long way round," he announced to no one in particular. To break what one announced, and yet keep acting as though one had never announced anything — that is what I call an inner lie.

Suits. A declaration can be withdrawn at any moment. That is precisely where it differs from a promise. Breaking a promise requires a penalty; play, being voluntary through and through, has the freedom to stop woven into it from the start. That is exactly why I am reluctant to bring the vocabulary of morality into play. The instant you manufacture a duty to play, it stops being play. He loaded the save. Which is to say: he stopped playing. That is all that happened.

Kant. On that I yield. There is no duty to play. As you say, the freedom to stop is part of play. But "I stopped" and "pretending I did not stop" are different things. Did he leave — did he tell himself that he had left? His hands have stopped. His mouth is still saying "I cleared it." The fact that those two can stay out of joint is what distinguishes this from lying to another. Others can be kept in the dark. But in an inner lie, the one who conceals and the one concealed from are the same person. He comes to hold himself cheap in his own eyes.

Suits. …There I will concede something. In my own taxonomy, it is the cheat alone who refuses to let go of the goal. The trifler keeps the rules and abandons the goal; the spoilsport abandons both. But the cheat drops the rules and carries home the word "victory" instead. The word only. If the substance of play is having taken on unnecessary obstacles oneself, then what he carried home is a vessel with the contents removed. I do not blame him. I merely cannot call what he obtained a victory.

Kant. Then perhaps we are pointing at the same place in different words. I say dignity; you say activity. But the one betrayed was neither another person nor an abstract rule. It was he himself, from a little while earlier — the man who deliberately chose the long way round. The man who looked at 95% and decided he would accept a miss. He was the only other person in that room.

At this point I remembered something inconvenient. XCOM's hit chances are not necessarily the raw numbers you see. The developers have said they tuned the underlying calculation to match how the displayed number feels to players. Which means that next to my 95% there was also a small, quiet indulgence coming from the game's side. There was more than one liar in that room. …And yet that does not cancel my reload. The game's tuning was part of "this long way round" from the beginning; my reload was outside the long way round. I picked up my pen and added a line to the drafting notebook: "Cheating is not evil — it is leaving. But the resignation letter has to be handed to yourself."

Takeaway — A Promise Can Be Built After the Fact

Here is the one thing I noticed. Until now I had only ever thought about designing cheats out. But sealing every back road is close to impossible in a game played alone, and it probably was never the real subject. XCOM 2 offers an option called Ironman. Switch it on and the save file is overwritten every time you act, so you cannot go back to an earlier save after a poor decision. That is less a feature for sealing back roads than an apparatus that holds a declaration you can no longer withdraw. The promise a player makes to themselves is officially received by the game. A promise only becomes a promise once it has been placed somewhere it can be broken.

My takeaway as a maker fits in one line: before you seal the back roads, build one place where the player can declare "this is how I am going." A difficulty setting, a restriction mode, a single checkbox before the run — any of them will do. And keep what was declared in a form the player can look back on later, the way an Ironman badge does. A road sealed by someone else breeds resentment; a narrow road you chose yourself becomes pride.

I stand half a step towards Suits. I do not think cheating in a solo game is evil. It is less a foul than a quiet exit. Still, Kant's blow — "the one who conceals and the one concealed from are the same person" — stays in my drafting notebook. So what I want to guard against is not the back road itself but a design that lets you hide from yourself the fact that you left. If assists are used, leave a quiet line about it on the record too. Not to accuse anyone, but so that later the player can read it back.

I want to ask you. Is cheating in a game you play alone a betrayal of someone, or simply "leaving"? And — is a clear achieved with assist mode and a clear achieved by reloading a save the same thing in your book, or two different things? Tell me in the comments. The next Fragments piece will be "Why Does a Spoiler Feel Like Theft? — On Owning an Experience": why do people say a story that belongs to no one was "stolen" from them? I will sit two more philosophers down facing each other.

References: Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Part Two: Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue (Japanese ed., trans. Yusuke Miyamura, Iwanami Bunko — on the lie as the greatest violation of the duty one owes to oneself as a moral being, the distinction between outer and inner lies, and the claim that a lie amounts to throwing away one's dignity as a human being) / Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Japanese ed., trans. Shigeki Kawatani and Takahiro Yamada, Nakanishiya — game-playing as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, constitutive rules and the lusory attitude, and the distinction between players, triflers, cheats and spoilsports). The game examined here is XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, 2K, 2016).

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Part Two: Doctrine of Virtue (Japanese ed., trans. Yusuke Miyamura, Iwanami Bunko)Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Japanese ed., trans. Kawatani and Yamada, Nakanishiya)The cover images are Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate, Puzzlebyrinth earns from qualifying purchases.