Is it wrong to cheese a video game?

Cheesing, or covertly using system glitches and design oversights to beat your opponents, is considered a shameful gaming strategy - or is it just smart?

Barely an hour into Elden Ring, the latest furiously difficult fantasy adventure by the Japanese studio From Software, I made a vital discovery: enemy warriors can be tricked into falling down lift shafts. Or off cliffs. I even managed to tempt one skilled and deadly knight to walk out of his castle and into the path of a giant boulder - a trap that had been meant for me. It killed him instantly, saving me an intense battle that would have probably involved multiple deaths and restarts. I knew that I had crossed an important, almost forbidden Rubicon - I was now cheesing one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year.

Cheesing is video-game slang for beating tasks or enemies through tactics that while not exactly cheating, are certainly not following Queensbury rules. When you cheese a game, you're exploiting systemic quirks or apparent design oversights to gain maximum advantage for minimum skill or effort. Players have always cheesed. It's something I discovered via the 1985 fighting game Way of the Exploding Fist, in which every single one of the enemy fighters could be beaten by continuously using the leg sweep move. Later, Street Fighter II became notorious for its vulnerability to cheese aficionados. These ignoble warriors would invariably play as Blanka, whose electrification move afforded vital seconds of invulnerability.