Up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-A-B-start. If you're a gamer of any kind, you've probably entered that or similar combinations of buttons into your controller, seeking to enable invincibility, infinite ammo or endless power-ups. In today's video games, cheat codes are everywhere -- originating as secret back doors for programmers to enable them to jump to specific points in the game to test for bugs, cheat codes are in the mainstream now, with the option to enter them usually front and center on most games' main menus. Some are pretty harmless, like sticking a mustache on your character or changing his outfit. But others turn you into an omnipotent juggernaut mowing down hapless bots as you stroll brazenly through bloody, bullet-strewn battlefield after bloody bullet-strewn battlefield, with no need to strategize, conserve your resources or, you know, duck. If you're an adult and that's the gaming experience you want, bully for you. But for kids, being able to quickly button-mash their way out of the effort required to finish a game legitimately with its puzzles and dangers intact is one of the worst life lessons they can learn in their formative years. Just a few short years ago I swore I'd never give a "kids these days" speech, but here I am, as inevitably as the tides.
I grew up in the era of the quarter-sucking arcade and the first home video game console systems, when the kid whose dad got him the Atari for Christmas was the epicenter of the neighborhood social scene. In those days, you started with three lives, and no matter how far you got in the game, the exhaustion of those lives meant starting again from the beginning. The game might be magnanimous enough to offer you an extra life or two when you reached a certain point threshold, but if you were an amateur gamer like myself, struggling to elude those infuriating multicolored ghosts as you wheeled Pac-Man wildly through his maze of blinking dots, that was a rare prize indeed. There was no such thing as "leveling up" -- the aliens descended progressively faster while your skill set remained constant, limited to the extent of your hand-eye coordination. No armor upgrades, invincibility potions or uber-mega-cannons to be found. Mario was forever a lone soldier with nothing more than his ability to jump to a finite height pitted against the merciless barrel throwing of Donkey Kong. And even though the frustration factor was enough to make us want to punch through the screen as we watched our Galaga fighter explode into pixel shards, the challenge, and the fun, kept us coming back. If we'd all hated the experience that much, the nostalgic Wreck-It Ralph never would have been made.
In today's games, along with increasingly sophisticated graphics and cinematic behind-the-scenes talent has come checkpoints, save points, official strategy guides and enough in-game cheats both hidden and obvious to let you plow through to the end in a few meager hours of play. You never die in a game anymore; it merely pauses for a few seconds before you respawn in the same place (maybe back a few hundred in-game meters) with little to no penalty. And almost every single in-game danger or problem can be mitigated by a cheat code. Running out of ammo? There's a cheat for that. Missing a crucial key to unlock the next door? There's a cheat for that too.
SimCity remains a magnificent recreation of the trials of urban planning and municipal management, where success depends on learning how to allocate scarce resources and resolve the political consequences of important decisions. Without a landfill, garbage will pile up on your streets, but residents will complain and move away if you put it too close to them, and so on. But even SimCity has a cheat that gifts you with infinite cash and reduces the cost of all city improvements to zero. (I'm sure plenty of mayors and planners would love access to that!)
Instead of putting in the mental exertion or the time commitment to try and solve the puzzle -- and develop their critical thinking at the same time -= a kid's first recourse is to beg Dad if he can go online for a code. Unfortunately, for most gaming kids, getting to the end as quickly as possible, enjoying the spoils without the effort, is their primary goal. But they're wrong -- the essence and purpose of the game is the journey.
Funnily enough, the reward for reaching the end absent any risk or need to think about what you're doing is usually just a brief cut-scene followed by developer credits. I don't know about you, but I'm not that interested in who the second graphics assistant coordinator is for Halo, and I don't suspect Junior cares or understands either. I also know that giving in to the temptation of cheat codes is the quickest way to lose interest in a game. I remember racing through the Facility level on GoldenEye 64 time and again, dodging bullet hits left and right from digital Soviet soldiers to complete the mission in under two minutes and five seconds and unlock the invincibility achievement. Sure, there were times I wanted to chuck the controller against the wall, but I kept playing, kept trying to shave off crucial seconds. Then I discovered that you could actually achieve the same feat with a few button pushes instead. Once I did that, the challenge of beating the game was gone, and so was my joy in playing it. I played it perhaps a half-dozen times after that before it was consigned to a basement box.
In an era when everyone is a beautiful snowflake and no one is allowed to fail lest their precious feelings be hurt, cheat codes are another message to children that they don't really need to try, that they will be carried along to the next level regardless of how mediocre their performance is. There is no point in trying, because there's always a way to cheat yourself out of a tight spot. The nobility of effort is a lost concept, and the video games we give our kids to play are emblematic of this problem. Getting crushed by Donkey Kong's barrels or caught by Inky, Blinky, Pinky or Sue were, in own their strange way, important rites of passage. They taught us that we had to consider different approaches and to try harder if we wanted to get ahead and save the princess. One shudders at the thought of a generation of adults raised to believe that they need only to touch the right combination of buttons in order to be granted whatever they desire. (That worked really well the last time I wanted a new car, and infinite ammo for my bazooka.) Or worse -- rushing through life to get to the disappointing cut-scene at the end.
Life has no cheat codes. Video games shouldn't either.