2026-08-15 · essay
Who Does Cheating in a Single-Player Game Betray? — The Philosophy of Promises and Self-Deception
Late at night, XCOM 2 showed me a 95% shot. I missed it, my squad was wiped, and — alone in the room, with nobody watching — I reloaded the save. No victim. And yet that night’s win tasted thin. When you cheat in a game you play by yourself, if a promise was broken, whose promise was it? In this Nature of Play — Fragments piece I sit two philosophers face to face: Kant, who wrote that the gravest lie is the one told to oneself, and Bernard Suits, who would say it is not a betrayal at all but simply leaving the game. They end up meeting at a single point: the one betrayed is the slightly earlier self who deliberately chose the long way round.
