I don’t find shame in cheating in video games. It was a stigma to hear about growing up, that cheating in video games meant you prefer the shortcuts in life or that you didn’t know what earning anything was. When, that was all just bullshit talk.
I cheat in video games, when available to on some games, to give me a little kick of fun. Sometimes I don’t have the patience to tediously go through the standard way. Other times, I feel I’ve earned it anyways, because of having undergone the stresses and frustrations or the time I’ve played of certain games to go through the normal way.
Like in Terraria, it’s a game I’ve clocked in upwards of 900 hours. I felt like I had done everything in the game prior to the content that added the Moon Lord and many other things. At that time, it was 850 hours.
So the point of the matter is, yeah I don’t find it that big of a deal to cheat in video games. If I cared to and want to, I’m decent enough to handle games without cheats, given enough time.
Multiplayer of course I never cheat in those.
I used to be like you. Way back when, I would love to cheat currency into single player games with a little help from cheat engine. The biggest culprits were BTD5 and PvZ1/2, and it’d give me a kick just being able to go through and buy everything before using it all while feeling unstoppable
Since then, I’ve gone back and replayed the games without cheating, and I honestly regret using cheat engine. It felt way more rewarding getting everything at a more sustainable rate, like I really earned the item
You also talk about feeling like you earn the ability to cheat, but, looking back on my own experience, I can safely say that I was terrible at gauging whether or not I should use a hack. Turns out, when you have a shiny item in a shop that you could come back in a few hours for or get instantly now for free, more often than not we’ll choose the latter