Do you feel like it is cheating in video games if....

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You sometimes look up hints or playthroughs of how to get through a part of a game on the internet. It occurs to me even before the internet there were like magazines or printed guides on games people could get to help them through games...and nowdays if you are struggling in a game you can just google how to get through that part.

But do people view that as cheating? Like are there people who think you should figure out everything yourself....though I suppose people putting videos online of how to beat difficult parts don't think that, since they are trying to help show people how to get through.

But yeah I am a millennial video game player, but my mom was always against video games so I didn't get to play them that much growing up. Now as an adult in my 30's I can play whatever video game I want for as long as I want so long as it doesn't interfere with my responsibilities too much. But with the lack of being able to play them more as a kid I am not like great at them I missed out on gaining the experience some people have from playing video games since they were like 6. So a lot of times I find myself having to look up how to beat parts of games or find items and such. And part of me feels like it is cheating, but the other part is like 'well crap I give up, I need at least a hint' so yeah usually when I look up game guides it is to just see the next step but I will stop it before it spoils the next part of the game....like just to get an idea of where to go from where I am at and then see if I can work it out from there without more hints.

Also not that anyone cares, but I had my first actual pvp battle in elden ring. What I mean by that is there was a quest requiring invading, but you didn't have to win the fight just had to invade 3 times for a quest. So for all those I just got destroyed immediately. But today I did a few invasions on my own and almost beat an opponent, I would have but they drank a health potion right before I could last hit them and then were able to out manuver me and kill me first. But yeah it was fun cause I was getting close to winning, but yeah probably need more pvp practice to get better at it.

I've been held in contempt by trolls just for asking for advice on getting an achievement. I've also been berated at by my drunken father for using a guide for achievements on my phone while playing a game.

HMMMM i think it depends
Back in my day...the games were made very hard in order to make them last longer.
The games had to fit into 48 thousand bytes

(yorkshire accent):in mah day we 'ad 48k a ram and we were 'appy!!

So the games would be simple or very short. I think if you're frustrated it's fine to look up the solution. Back in those days we would be walking around an adventure game for hours not knowing how to proceed.

Horrible palette and color attribute clash. ZX Spectrum, the one and only.

I mostly play single-player RPG games and I really don't like playing them through more than once. I don't like when I can miss some item that I can no longer get or have to reload and replay long parts of a game that I've already progressed through all over again. I try to search for guides that clearly spell out "missables", and just focus on that. I also don't have a lot of patience for busy work collectibles(particularly ones that affect gameplay), so I will use a map for that. Since they are single-player games, I don't see how the way I enjoy playing video games affects anyone else, so I don't care if it's considered cheating or not.

Same here. I try to do as much as I can, and it always feels better to figure something out on your own, but sometimes there's just a puzzle that's so obtuse, or a part of the game that is literally broken, or I've just completely overlooked something that's obvious...

...or there's Metroid Prime 2, where I got tired of the game, and tired of having to die to each boss, trek ALL THE WAY back to that boss again, and THEN maybe be able to do the scan to find out what the first set of weak points are...so I just gave up about halfway through, and every time I came to a boss, I pulled up the walkthrough to find out how to fight it

Anyway, Idunno if it's still around, but they used to have a website/program, I forget what it was called, but it was literally hints instead of FAQ/walkthrough. Like you would find and click on your problem, and then a set of hints would pop up, and you'd click to uncover them, one at a time, and it would start with small hints, and they got bigger as you clicked more of them.

I don't mind in a game if something is hard but I get annoyed if I simply don't know what I'm supposed to be doing to complete a task or something. At that point I'll look up a walk through and I don't feel like it's cheating because it's just bad game design in my opinion of the player is completely at a loss.

No? It's no more cheating than looking up the rules of chess before playing a game.

There are players out there who have enormous experience in a game and know all kinds of things. Are they 'cheating' because of their experience? What about if they take someone under their wing and teach them? Is that person 'cheating'?

The only people who consider any of this 'cheating' are people who are trying to enforce their own personal ideas of how YOU should be playing a game they didn't even make. It's like someone seeing you have a pack of cards and telling you that you personally can't play poker or Hold'Em because that would be 'cheating'. What?!

Sure, it means that maybe you don't get the experience of playing something for the first time while being ignorant of everything in the game and discovering it for yourself. But that is 100% your choice to make. It's not mandatory.

Games are about having fun as long as you don’t troll players or cheat against players etc it’s totally fine

I only really enjoy skill-based games (if any at all - I hardly ever play these days), so most of the time looking something up on the internet is only a small part of the battle anyway.

Also, I've always found it to be way more fun to fail over and over again rather than googling the answer in other types of games; for me, it would take away from the experience and remove the delayed gratification aspect and actually ruin the whole dopamine drip if I just used a shortcut and never reached the answer on my own. That's pretty much the quickest way to kill my own drive, shelve the game and never want to play it again.

With that said, everyone should be allowed to play however they want. Even if that means punching in cheats or using mods to make the game more playable for them. Mostly that's not my style at all, and I'd argue that they're probably making the game a lot less fun for themselves, but to each their own.

I used to use cheats constantly as a kid, and it was so incredibly unfulfilling

Video games are there for your entertainment. You should play them the way you are having the most fun.

Cheating is of no concern unless you're playing competitively against someone.

Dunno about you, but my set of chess instructions doesn't have step-by-step details on how to win the game o_O

no.

I use guides all the time. even if a guide is telling you what to do, you still have to do it yourself. you still have to overcome the challenges and play the game yourself.
especially as someone with ADHD, guides are great references.
even if it were cheating, who cares? but no, I do not think it is.