I love how when Runescape gets posted on here, there’s always a few proud stories of how people cheated. Today one is even admitting to RWT (real world trading) for tens of thousands of $, when elsewhere one shuts up about it because cheaters in multiplayer gaming are regarded as the antisocial scum that make the game worse for everybody else. It’s not really something to brag about.

I guess one thing antisocial people lack is self-awareness.

I was going to say a comment about “back in my day”; but your account is from 2011, so you should know what video gaming was like in ye olden era. Did you mod in a Mew, or 256 Masterballs in Pokemon Red with a Game Genie? Why not? How about doing some weird stuff with Missing No?

What about loading in some rare items in Diablo 1 on your local save and them importing them into Battlnet? especially before Diablo 2, 1.10?

How about Early Minecraft - we’re talking Beta days. Did you test out those X-Ray block packs that helped you see diamonds?

Cheating literally only matters when there’s a PvP or leaderboard or whatever glory-theft that comes from it. It’s only really shamed on when it hurts other people’s gameplay experience - like screwing with a leaderboard at the “low pain” end and ruining a multiplayer experience in the middle end. For everything else, it’s an experience modifier or a difficulty slider for your own private game experience. Lots of games nowadays add in those difficulty sliders directly or add sandbox modes where there used to be “cheating” that stuff in.

What I find interesting is the selectivity of the moral outrage.

On HN, people will casually discuss careers in defense, surveillance, ad-tech, exploitative finance, or fairly predatory forms of Silicon Valley capitalism without immediately being reduced to “antisocial scum.” The conversation is usually allowed to remain about incentives, systems, technical work, or professional history.

But game cheating seems to trigger a much more personal kind of condemnation.

My suspicion is that games occupy an unusually intimate place in people’s lives: they’re leisure, status, competition, nostalgia, and identity all at once. So violating the rules of a game feels less abstract than participating in an industry whose real-world externalities may be vastly larger.

That doesn’t make cheating harmless. It just makes the asymmetry interesting. Somehow writing a RuneScape cheat is treated as evidence of defective character, while doing technically impressive work for institutions or businesses with much more consequential externalities often gets discussed with detached professional curiosity.

Maybe the lack of self-awareness isn’t entirely on the side you think it is.

p.s. i've written a lot about my experiences in grey-market software on HN and I never once did so to brag : I did so because this is a place to share and develop technically interesting anecdotes.

p.s.s. I don't find your opinion on who scum is to be technically interesting.

I think this is both a fair cultural observation and one that's a bit excessive. I think people regard it as a point of pride because it didn't necessarily harm anyone, and because that experience was one of their pivotal early programming challenges that has a tangible return and that they had relatively high agency over. I look back on my time as a player of WoW during the Glider days as one where I was largely pissed that botters were ruining the economy for actual players, but I look back on my time in RuneScape as one where I was completely fixated on running my little factory and not wanting to actually play what was kind of a boring tedious game. I'm not proud today of having scammed people when I did, but I was proud of having a modicum of ingenuity and figured out how to exploit various things in the system. Real world trading, like many rules, isn't inherently immoral, but deliberately stealing money or items from people is.

I highly doubt I'd have ever given a damn about programming if I hadn't tried my hand at Scar scripting as a kid for both RuneScape and Neopets. Simultaneously, I also scammed people and ripped off friends in various games, but that the two activities were mutually exclusive and I was just an asshole. I'm glad I got to explore the worst part of myself in a sandboxed environment rather than taking it to any serious level.

Why would they care about maintaining a reputation on a pseudonymous Hacker News account? They have tens of thousands of $, that's way better than not being known as a RWTer.