I usually play games on “normal” difficulty these days, for a balanced challenge. However, I don’t particularly enjoy boss fights, or at least I don’t enjoy the extra challenge associated with them. Was thinking it would be nice if games had a separate setting so I could just set boss fights to “easy”, while not making the rest of the game less challenging as well.
Anything that circumvents the design of the game to gain an advantage is technically cheating. I wasn’t necessarily saying it shouldn’t be there. Just pointing out, there is usually a wat to do it in most games. The devs have to have a way to test things and move the stories forward without playing hundreds of hours of game.
Is it cheating to skip a paragraph in a book?
Why read it in the first place if you’re going to skip paragraphs?
Maybe you’ve read it before and you want to skip to the good parts. Maybe it’s non-fiction and you’re only interested in something specific. Maybe there are parts of the story that make you uncomfortable, but you’re enjoying it overall. Maybe a page is missing. Maybe it’s an abridged version and it’s not up to you, that’s just what was available.
And to the original point, what of translations? Maybe the original author is dead, and somebody translated their book. Are you ‘circumventing’ the author’s original intent to ‘gain an advantage’? I mean, yes. Does that mean you’re ‘cheating’?
What about audio books? Was the book intended to be read on a page? Are you cheating by having the book read to you?
Calling these things ‘cheating’ is silly and unnecessarily loaded, and they assume that the goal of a work is completion. That the only reason you would start a thing is to finish it. I don’t believe that’s the case for any art. One might say that the challenge in a game is the point, but that’s only sometimes true, and challenge is relative. If something comes naturally easier to you, is it ‘cheating’ to use mods to make the game more difficult, because you’re gaining the advantage of improving your experience, against the original intent of the game? I don’t think so, so I don’t see why it is any different the other way around.
To think about it another way: if you subtract that paragraph from that book, does it cease to be a book? No, it’s just a different book, and that can still have value to people. You’re not ‘cheating’, you are making a new experience for yourself.
I could go on and on so I’m gonna stop myself here.