Game Mastery: Breaking the Game, Defined

In my last post, I mentioned that I played video games for two reasons, one to destroy and cause havoc, and one to break the system which the game is founded on.

This is not to say I cheat to break the game in my favor - rather, I use the system inherent in the game itself against the purpose it was designed for, and in turn become more powerful using the game's own system than that very system should allow.

It is similar to cheating in that it requires one to do what the creators of the game never intended for the player to do (though most "cheats" in games were put there by the programmers), but it is different in the fact that I primarily use the normal, unaltered system that has been built into the game against the game itself.

This is much easier to do in video game RPGs, where characters and enemies are given quantified statistics. Being raised by a mathematician, this becomes, to me, a simple manipulation of algebraic variables, in which I come out the victor.

In more complex or realistic (or Nintendo Hard) games, this becomes a less quantifiable manipulation, though many games can still be broken in the right hands.

Breaking games is a hobby of mine, though some might call it a perversion. I sit down with a game and make it do what I want when I want it, rather than adhering to the the developers' wishes. In other words, I make the game my bitch.

Often as not, I find myself giving strange advice to my friends. If you do it this way, I say, you'll be golden for the rest of the game. They often look at me funny, but they do what I say, with promising results.

Anyways, this is the first of many posts about Breaking the Game, and in the proceeding posts, I will define explicit examples of how I Break the Game, starting with when I first ever broke a game on the SNES playing Super Mario World.

See you there.