Players naturally distinguish “legitimate” actions (swinging sword, drinking potion) from “illegitimate” ones (using console commands to spawn items). This isn’t in the game’s code—the engine doesn’t care. It’s a social distinction we impose based on our intuitions about fair play and authentic experience. We’ve collectively decided that some causal interventions are kosher and others are “cheating,” even though they’re all just bits flipping in RAM.
It’s worth mentioning speedrunning here. When players decide to optimize some aspects of gameplay (e.g. getting to the victory screen as fast as possible), this leads to weird interactions with the apparent ontology of the game.
From one point of view, it doesn’t matter what developers intended (and we can’t be completely certain anyway, cf. the “death of the author”), so any legitimate inputs (that you can make while actually playing, so console commands excluded) are treated as fair play, up to arbitrary code execution (ACE) - essentially exploiting bugs to reprogram the game on the fly to make it load desired events. This often requires high skill to competently execute, offering opportunities for dedicated competition. While such “gameplay” usually results in confusing on-screen mess for the uninitiated, many consider “glitched” speedruns legitimate, and hundreds of thousands of people regularly watch them during Games Done Quick charity marathons on Twitch, marveling at what hides “behind the curtain” of beloved games.
However, another approach to speedrunning is to exclude some types of especially game-breaking bugs, in order to approximate the intended playing experience for the competition. Both kinds are popular, as are discussions about which is more legitimate—another way that gaming makes people engage in amateur philosophy, usually without realizing it, producing much confused nonsense in the process. Kind of like actual philosophy, except more amusing and less obscurantist.
It’s worth mentioning speedrunning here. When players decide to optimize some aspects of gameplay (e.g. getting to the victory screen as fast as possible), this leads to weird interactions with the apparent ontology of the game.
From one point of view, it doesn’t matter what developers intended (and we can’t be completely certain anyway, cf. the “death of the author”), so any legitimate inputs (that you can make while actually playing, so console commands excluded) are treated as fair play, up to arbitrary code execution (ACE) - essentially exploiting bugs to reprogram the game on the fly to make it load desired events. This often requires high skill to competently execute, offering opportunities for dedicated competition. While such “gameplay” usually results in confusing on-screen mess for the uninitiated, many consider “glitched” speedruns legitimate, and hundreds of thousands of people regularly watch them during Games Done Quick charity marathons on Twitch, marveling at what hides “behind the curtain” of beloved games.
However, another approach to speedrunning is to exclude some types of especially game-breaking bugs, in order to approximate the intended playing experience for the competition. Both kinds are popular, as are discussions about which is more legitimate—another way that gaming makes people engage in amateur philosophy, usually without realizing it, producing much confused nonsense in the process. Kind of like actual philosophy, except more amusing and less obscurantist.