In my (emerging) encyclopedia of game concepts I describe “cheese” as
“a tactic that is considered unfair, improper, and ‘not in the spirit of the game’. Since the rules of the game still allow such a tactic to be used, it is not cheating in the proper sense, but is viewed as an abuse of the rules; loopholes in the game mechanics will also fall into this category.”
Cheese is a sneaky exploit of game mechanics; it involves playing the game not as it was envisioned to be played.
“a tactic that is considered unfair, improper, and ‘not in the spirit of the game’. Since the rules of the game still allow such a tactic to be used, it is not cheating in the proper sense, but is viewed as an abuse of the rules; loopholes in the game mechanics will also fall into this category.”
Cheese is a sneaky exploit of game mechanics; it involves playing the game not as it was envisioned to be played.
This poses a problem for developers; they spend so much time trying to craft a specific experience, a particular challenge, but if the player learns of some unforeseen cheese strategy, all of this planning will be undone. Remember the old maxim: “Players do what works, not what is fun”. It might take a little time, and an ounce of lateral thinking to uncover such a strategy, but once the player finds something that works, they will use it and abuse it, and the developers just have to hope that it turns out to be what they intended. It then becomes up to the developers to find potential cheese tactics, and revise the rules of the game to make them ineffective. Sometimes this can be done in patching the game.
The most salient aspect of cheese, though, is in competitive play. Nobody wants to suddenly find themselves victim to one of these strategies. It’s one thing if the developers find an aspect of the game that did not foresee, but if the player community starts calling something cheese, they will get angry. In this case it is not completely clear what cheese is. What if they player community stumbles upon a cheese strategy and instead of being enraged by it, embrace it, such that it blossoms into the new heart of online competitive play for that game? Should developers really put so much effort into dismantling such strategies? Typically, from my own observation, when a player community sets up such a peculiar factor of the game dynamics as a core element of the gameplay, it puts the little details of the game before the grand vision. This is an attribute more apt of niche games. I was once playing a popular Warcraft 3 mod (Footmen Frenzy, to be exact) when my teammate became enraged at me for not killing my army, since my troops were just “feeding the enemy hero”, while my teammate proceeded to kill of his own army. I simply couldn’t stomach it: even in a computer game, killing my own troops goes against my nature. This game, Footmen Frenzy, was designed around the core mechanic of managing a giant army, but the player community found this ineffective against other strategies that dispensed with armies. Suddenly the dynamics undo the core mechanics. And so we end up with a game that has a few, die-hard fans, but nothing for the more typical player.
The term cheese originates from the Starcraft 2 community. Many strategies have been devised by the players in order to get an edge in the very competitive landscape of Starcraft 2 online play. Blizzard has been good at fixing these problems, as well as correcting general issues of balancing gameplay. Nevertheless cheese is everywhere in the lower tiers of the Starcraft 2 ladder, and players all have to learn how to build some safeguard against it in order to advance in the ranks. It has almost become a rite of passage for those who want to get higher in the ladder to learn how to handle getting cheesed. In the past, though, cheese was used even by the very best Starcraft 2 players, and Blizzard had a lot of work to make sure those strategies were no longer viable. It takes a lot of work for developers to be able to accomplish this and still maintain the other elements of gameplay.
As it turns out, cheese it not just a problem for video games. Cheese involves any exploit of the game rules that goes against the rules of proper play, and this can be applied to anything with a system to game; just because something is allowed in the current system does not mean it should be allowed. In evaluating such systems, I play a game I call “Is it cheese?” It plays exactly as it sounds: take any tactic and ask whether it is within the proper bounds of activity. Is constantly inflating your currency cheese? Are corn subsidies in the age of NAFTA cheese? Is it cheese if you have a play where all of your players wear the same jersey? Identifying cheese can be an important skill for anyone making decisions.
Developers can play “Is it cheese?” with their games. Of course, the first step is to find any potential cheese tactics, and this requires deep inspection of the gameplay elements, and how they can be combined. In Spryo: Enter the Dragonfly, I found that you could jump higher by immediately hovering as a jumped, allowing me to reach places early on that I was not supposed it; Spyro: Ripto’s Rage, on the other hand, did not allow for this exploit. Another consideration is the save system employed: for example, easy saving/loading in a minigame where successive coinflips double the size of a monetary prize, with an ounce of patience a player could easily use it to gain extraordinary amounts of money. It will be up to the developer to decide whether such a tactic is an exploit or a feature, but it will be the gaming community that ultimately judges.
