I admit that watching this video at this moment, about to embark on the creation of a tiny haiku game for Zeigfreid, I rushed through it.

Haha, I guess in a way I "cheated" my way through the video? Is skimming a book cheating? Anyway, thanks to those little section titles, I skipped past What is cheating, anyway? and Cheating at pinball and Cheating for credit and Cheating for POWER and The golden age of cheats and Cheat hardware for bad boyz and The ethics of cheating online and Prevention and punishment so that I could finally arrive at Modern cheat culture where I supposed I would find the message I was looking for -- the point of the video, not the fifteen minutes of history and buildup. I'm sure those were a well-crafted fifteen minutes, but they were not what I came here to consume. I knew what I wanted and I found it there at the 15:44 mark.

QuoteWhat's changed is that so much of our media consumption is now public.

QuotePeople really identify with not only what they consume but how they consume it. For some people in the gaming community, it's really important to say that they've beaten a game according to a certain set of standards, especially a difficult one like Sekiro. So they see cheating as devaluing their own achievement, as stolen valor, as a personal failing.

I don't think this is new, but it is an interesting point. Jenna continues:

QuoteAnd that's fine, as long as they don't have the power to enforce those values on other people.

I feel this loops around to what she said at the 15:44 mark.

QuoteWhat's changed is that so much of our media consumption is now public.

Existing in public.

What stopped cheating in video games from being fun?

Sharing with too many strangers all at once and caring what they think. In particular, caring what the noisiest, most willing to engage strangers think.

I know this is the bizarre post-but-not-post-internet hermit in me speaking: I'm writing to myself on a forum with exactly one user, but which is visible to all! Of course I realize it doesn't get much more asymmetrically publicly solipsistic than this. But, it satisfies my need to broadcast in public without any of the negatives (to me) of doing so. The only voices I hear are my own and those of the interesting people I know who already know how to contact me.