When I was a teenager, the video game of the moment was the legendary First Person Shooter, Doom, which was soon followed by its sequel, Doom 2: Hell on Earth. If you were not playing those games you were not cool.
One of the things I remember clearly about Doom is it had this cheat code to make yourself invincible, or as it was called, “God Mode”.
I sometimes played using “God Mode”, and it was badass. But in hindsight, I’m not sure it was really that much fun.
I discovered this just recently. During New Year holidays I revisited one of my favorite video games ever, Persona 5. I got to this part in the game I didn’t get to the first time I played it, and I was ambushed by this big, mean, unbeatable motherfucker called “The Reaper.” Of course, he kicked my ass.
After that quick ass whipping experience, I promptly googled, “how the beat the Reaper in Persona 5”, and discovered to my surprise there’s this exploit in the game to beat him like if he was a little wuss. And that’s not all. Upon beating him, he gives your characters a lot of experience points, resulting in them leveling up a ridiculous amount.
Oh, and one more thing, you can use this exploit to defeat this Reaper guy as many times in a row as you like, making your characters get massive experience points over and over, becoming potentially unbeatable.
I ended up doing the Reaper exploit just 4 times, but man, the result was almost getting “God Mode” again. Upon entering the next regular area in the game my characters were fucking invincible. Normal enemies didn’t even bother to attack me anymore. I guess they probably figured, “Hey, what’s the point? I’ll just be getting my ass handed back to me.”
And it was fun… for a while. To be honest I grew kind of tired of being unbeatable pretty quickly. I was not having any fun anymore, almost as if having enough challenge was a core mechanic of the game in the first place. No need for strategy anymore, no on-the-edge-of-my-seat emotions, just numb button mashing. I ended up reloading a previous save point, back from before my characters became unbeatable. Suddenly I was enjoying the game again.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ll cheat on a video game again. I don’t see the point anymore if it means I’ll stop having fun.
This has got me thinking. I generally play video games on the “normal” difficulty setting, but maybe I should try setting them on a harder difficulty. Who knows, I might end up enjoying those games even more. (Or not.)
One more random thought: maybe to some extent this applies to life too. Maybe challenge in our lives is important to having a satisfying life experience. Well, at least if we are actually able to overcome those challenges, if not I guess it would just plain suck.
