Communities, "Group Mind", and Video Games

There's a lot of stigma about people who cheat in video games, whether using in-game cheats (the most common ones being the "button cheats", where the player presses the buttons of the controller/keyboard in a certain manner), or external devices such as the Gameshark or the Action Replay Max.  In multiple-player games where players work against each other, I can understand this.  After all, when you're working hard, you'd rather lose to someone who was genuinely more skilled than you.  Being beaten by someone who is cheating is not only extremely rude, but obnoxious to boot.

What I don't understand is why people care if other players cheat in solo games.  I admit to cheating; typically I'll beat a game first without cheats, then come back and wail on enemies or what-have-you while, say, being invincible.  Also, however, cheating can aid game-play.  A personal example is The Punisher for the P.S.2.  There is one level near the end of the game that I just could not figure out how to beat, not at all, and it was becoming frustrating because I kept dying before getting anywhere near where I thought I was supposed to go.  So, I popped in an infinite health cheat and replayed that level.  After keeping track of how often I was hit and roaming around to figure out where I was supposed to go, I came up with a strategy.  I replayed the level without cheating, and the strategy worked.

What I don't understand is why people seem to feel personally affronted when I say that.  What's wrong with cheating to develop a strategy when a game is becoming frustrating?  For that matter, what is wrong with beating a game without cheating, then coming back and cheating to one's heart's content?  What I think it is, really, is that people think their version of "fun" is/should be the same for everyone else.  What is not fun for them should not be fun for anyone else.  I don't think it's always out of intentional malice, I really don't.  I think it comes down to, mainly, not accepting that different people have different paradigms, and thus have different forms of "fun".

It's a lot like differing senses of humor, really.  What one person finds downright hilarious, another person will find unworthy of even a chuckle.  The interesting thing is that I don't think such attempts to make others believe in the same things are always intentionally rude or condescending.  I think a good portion of it is, simply, not wanting to be "alone" in something, wanting to be part of a "group".  In some cases, this "group" is of a perceived moral superiority--you have things like <this> organized religion saying they're the "right" one and everyone else is going to whatever "bad" after-life or another, or you have things like people believing that cheating in video games, in ways that affect no one else at all, are inherently "wrong".

I honestly think, on some level, it boils down to that group mentality.  I also don't think that that is inherently a bad thing; after all, as human beings, we are social creatures.  We were designed to be, whether you believe this came about via a certain deity, evolution, or chaos expressing itself in random ways.  We, as a species, were meant to live with others.  This means getting along with others, which in turn means sharing at least a decent portion of one's paradigm with said others.  Before the introduction of communications and modes of travel which allowed us to visit places which were once deemed "far away", this wasn't a huge problem.  People in this-or-that town, for example, shared enough views with each other that over all, life in the town was fair.

Then we entered the era of cheap mass communications, the most prevalent example being the internet.  We can, now, speak with literally anyone in the entire world who has an internet connection, whether through forums, instant messaging programs, or whatever else.  This has brought people of drastically differing paradigms together, without an easy way to tell who was "right".  Before, whoever was "right" had the backing of most of the community, and to an extent this is true of on-line communities as well.  Before, however, if one disagreed strongly enough and had the means/desire, they left the town and went to another one (yes, I'm simplifying things; allow me some hyperbole for the sake of making a point).  Now, few people see the point of leaving their on-line community, and in truth many are large enough to house various "factions", or differing beliefs, all in the same community.  This, perhaps counter-intuitively, leads one to not necessarily work to "get along" with the community at large.

There is, still, a desire to be part of the "group mind", but there are varying limits on how many people agreeing is "enough".  For some, a small percentage of the community is "enough", as it allows them to seem "better" than others while still having people who agree and to agree with, while others require a larger percentage.  This goes even for those who claim--not necessarily falsely--to "not care" what others think.  One can genuinely not necessarily be trying to find a "group" to "belong" to yet still desire that "group mind".  This isn't inherently a bad thing; for instance, on a forum devoted to video games, one might not necessarily care if someone thinks they're a jerk.  However, they go to that forum to discuss video games, and they can't very well do that if most of the other users think they're nothing but a jerk.

I'm not talking about those deemed "trolls", people who seem to have nothing better to do but genuinely attempt to annoy others.  I'm talking about people who have opinions that vary--perhaps wildly--from the majority of the on-line community and who do not attempt to hide those opinions (yet don't try and shove them down anyone's virtual throat, either).  These people typically don't care if people think they're a jerk, but still desire a form of "group mind", to discuss whatever the group's "theme" is (video games, books, philosophy, or whatever else).  These people still would like some percentage of the community to agree with them in some form or another, even if it's just something like, "I understand what you're saying, but I respectfully disagree".  In a way, that's enough of an agreement for a "group mind", because it allows open communication.

I think that more people should think about things in that fashion.  If they saw that so many things boiled down to attempts at being a part of some sense of "community", and allowing others to have their different paradigms while still being a part of the community (within reason, of course), I believe that that would lead to a deeper understanding of oneself.  That, in turn, just might lead to a deeper understanding of the very communities to which we belong.