No Cheap concepts allowed!!

People talk a lot about cheapness and cheesing recently in regards to fighting games and Dark Souls, but it's been around since the dawn of videogames.

Basically this is when you exploit the game without cheating, which yes, can be vague and hard to discern.

An example could be running away from an enemy in a level until it gets stuck on geometry and then shooting it over and over again, or even spamming some kind of super weak attack that is very fast but not effective over and over again in a fighting game. I'm sure we've all cheesed a game at some point. You know it when it happens - you feel it. That's why I feel so sure it should be a concept.

Cheapness is often thrown around in multiplayer games, usually because a gun, character or move is OP as well too easy to find/use/do/etc but since Dark/Demon's Souls it's also now talked about as a tactic when dealing with enemies. Arguably, From Software developers design with cheesing in mind.

What do you think?

PS. Giant Bomb already has an SNK Boss Syndrome concept (an amazing page), which basically is about Cheap Bosses. That page is very specific to fighting games and SNK - the Cheapness/Cheese/Exploit page would be a general, all genre page.

NO CHEAPNESS ALLOWED

This concept seems almost entirely subjective. At least the SNK Boss Syndrome page has several criteria that can be objectively measured. For every person who calls out a tactic as being an exploit or cheap, there will be another who says it's legit

From the wiki faq:

• Subjective concepts: A concept should not be open to opinion. Truth, not thought.

Too subjective, while most things that are called out as cheap are in some way game-y or exploitative of the system there's a pretty wide variance here. If you narrow it down to straight up exploits that utilize obviously unintended flaws in the game it could work; so in the case of Dark Souls that would be the pre-patch Crystal Ring Shield.

The second half of the SNK boss syndrome page is a bit off depending on the game; the last boss in Maximum Impact 2 is ridiculously cheap and powerful on harder difficulties but you can still beat it just by putting enough pressure on the opponent (without repeating the same attack over and over) for example. With about half the characters in CVS2 you can just beat Ultimate Rugal and Shin Akuma in a straight up fight if played well enough; granted with the other half its a bit ridiculous.

Nope. Its less of a concept and more just opinions.

I think the specific example of so-called cheap tactics in fighting games generally more just boil down to the other player being ignorant enough about the game that they don't know how to deal with it. I certainly wouldn't include that in any concept.

SNK Bosses though? That's cold fact.

Maybe the staff or other mods will have a different opinion on this one, but in my opinion this one's too subjective for the wiki.

@demoskinos: @fredchuckdave: @mb: I know subjectivity is the main problem with this concept but please bear in mind:

This concept is not to list and name games/mechanics/moments where something is objectively Cheap/Cheesy. What is cheap is subjective. That there is such a thing as cheapness is inarguable.

So about the wiki FAQ: it says the concept should not be open to subjectivity, which means to deny this concept you would be saying there is literally no such thing as game design ever being cheap, imbalanced or exploitable.And like MB pointed out, the SNK page already has factual, "scientific" examples of cheapness.

That's a pretty big leap in logic. By that reasoning, VGCW doesn't exist simply because we don't have a concept page for it.

not really.

VGCW should be in the wiki, for the record. Weird it's not.

Anyways

The concept is literally : because games are imbalanced and exploitable, this leads to an effect called Cheapness or Cheesing.

If you are saying No, that is subjective, you are saying there is no such thing as exploits and cheapness in games.

Pretty straightforward logic VGK.

Edit: let me put it this way: if you think games are imbalanced, and can be exploited.... why wouldn't that be a concept in our wiki?

@geraltitude:

How do you determine that a game is unfair/imbalanced? That is where the subjectivity comes into play.

@geraltitude: Having a concept is one thing, but what is it used for? The concept of cheapness is a thing, but we wouldn't have anything to put into the page without being subjective. It would just be empty and pointless.

I struggle to follow your logic here, and you seem to be contradicting yourself. We aren't saying that games can't be cheap or poorly balanced, but rather that it isn't a discrete and objective property of a game. It's open to a ton of subjectivity, and there is far too much room to debate what games would be associated with this concept. As it states in the wiki rules, that means it isn't appropriate for a concept page.

No, it really shouldn't be. If we added something like VGCW to the wiki, we'd essentially be opening it up to anything loosely associated with one or more games (Salty Bet, Starcraft Leagues, Youtube machinima channels, etc.)

@video_game_king said:

@tobbrobb said:

You two are both totally right - it's very hard to say what makes a game fair/unfair like VGK said and thus hard to link the concept to actual things, like tobbrobb said.

So keeping that in mind the Cheapness Concept I think would be best attached to the many pages which actually talk about specific cheapness. Some examples would be SNK Boss Syndrome and Auto-Scrolling Levels.

With most everybody disagreeing clearly I'm alone so far, but I'd like to see more non-tangible concepts in our wiki. Fun/Frustration loops and Depth for example. I think it's very limiting to have a wiki that isn't about some social or design aspects. The fact that it's hard to say what Depth is doesn't matter. It's a debate that goes on in games all the times so it'd be neat to see a short text in the wiki that says Hey, there an idea that some games are deeper than others. This may have to do with the amount of mechanical variety or X, Y, Z.

Basically to me, I think of the GB wiki as: if the world exploded today and an alien race came and found the wiki on a hard-drive, would it tell them everything about games culture?

Wikipedia has many non-tangible concepts so it seems par for the course.

thanks for entertaining the debate, anways, duders

PS: very awesome StarCraft wiki entry on Cheese: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Cheese

@geraltitude: That specific article is also extremely subjective. Who is more cheesy, the player who follows a preset build doing exactly the same thing every match or the player that forces the opponent to adapt to his own dynamic strategy which could involve rushing or could involve proxy pylons or what have you. Similarly is it the first person who discovers an exploit that is being cheesy or is it the legions of people that follow his example (so, again in Dark Souls using the Crystal Ring Shield within a week or two of launch or using it a month after launch when almost every white phantom was). The term "Cheesy" has been around since before Starcraft existed and I'd wager for at least another few decades before that, most American slang (and it is most definitely American slang) originated in the trenches of World War I so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the origin.

Well, I disagree. I think it's a shame VGCW, Salty Bet and more aren't in the wiki. Those aren't really loose "things". But I also think that some total conversion mods deserve to be added to. I always thought the Wiki was for all things games, not some idea of the Objective List of True Video Game Information. Fair enough though. It's not my website. I guess I'm just fundamentally thinking of the wiki in an incorrect way. Which maybe explains why I constantly look at it wondering Why isn't X or Y concept here?

I still feel y'all aren't understanding me. Could be my fault though. Here, I will try again.

The concept of Cheapness and Cheese exists in videogame culture and has been used by gamers to describe many situations, abilities, game environments, etc. Specific examples that come up often include Cheese Tactics in StarCraft II (see above link), Auto-Scrolling Levels, and the SNK Boss Syndrome. While it's near impossible to factually point out what is and isn't cheap due to the subjective nature of games and competition, many gamers use this term to describe their feelings towards certain game mechanics. In games development, designers often work to patch out cheap solutions to enemies and situations. Examples of patches that significantly changed games to correct cheapness include: Star Command's removal of the Coin System, the debuffing of Sagat's uppercut in SFIV and examples, examples, examples.

Is it difficult to say which games are Cheap? Yes. And which elements of the game are cheap? Yes. Does the concept of Cheapnesss exist? Yes.

If you were going to explain everything about videogame culture, you would at one point need to stop to explain the idea of cheapness and cheesing. I can't see how you can argue that. And if you have to explain the idea of cheapness to talk about games... seems important enough to be a three sentence concept on Giant Bomb.

This reads to me as a reason to add Cheese to the DB. It's everything I'm trying to say!

Look at the extent to which they've gone to explain Cheese in this wiki. Is it subjective? Hell yes! But how many StarCraft players will tell you that there is such a thing as cheesing (whether or not it is the exact strategies in the text)? Not just many, but most. Same goes for fighting game fans. Ask any pro and they will tell you that Yes, some strategies are cheese. A good player can overcome them (and in fact much of being a pro fighter is knowing how to counter so called OP and cheese tactics) and a new player will get destroyed by them. People disagree as to which attacks are cheesy, but no one worth listening to will say No fighting game has ever had a cheap move/ability/character.

To your Dark Souls example: it doesn't really matter technically who is being cheesy. Do you agree that in the Dark Souls community there is an idea that is Cheesing Enemies? Cheesing the Game? How often do you hear people say "it's Ok to cheese dark souls because the game is a bastard"?

The fact that Cheesy predates and StarCraft, and I agree, will live forever, is another great reason to add it to the database.

@hailinel: did this notify you?

@geraltitude: Again, "cheapness" is not something easily quantified or qualified. It is far too subjective to be a wiki concept.