I like knowing secrets, but I am not good at keeping them. Well, I am good at keeping them, but I can’t guarantee that about the people I tell.
This affects how I play games. If I am enjoying a game, I want to know all its secrets. Which means that playing and enjoying the game take a back seat to finding out all about it. Usually this comes in the form of maps. I will chronically map anything I can. (But I don’t like cheatbooks. I want to discover the secrets, not have them handed to me.)
The best example of this is when I spent an entire summer mapping the old computer game Ultima IV. I never got close to finishing it, but I made a large poster out of pencil crayon showing every square of the surface. (I really should get around to finishing that game someday.)
This has spoiled some other games. I remember playing Ultima VII and going off into the wilderness just to map a mountain range and ended up discovering a major artifact, a flying carpet, that I wasn’t supposed to find until later. Although the carpet would allow me to move around the world quickly, I found it detrimental to mapping because you moved too quickly. I promptly ignored it.
This also affects non-computer games. With the old Fighting Fantasy book series, I would go through and map the world. With the Choose Your Own Adventure books I would go through until I had read every page in the book, in the correct order. (I had to stick my fingers in a lot of pages to keep track of where I had been and what choices I had previously made.)
I recently discovered the online game Choice of the Dragon. This is similar to a “Choose Your Own Adventure” and I have found it strangely addictive. Of course, I’ve started keeping track of all the choices and what they lead to. But your choices affect your stats. Some of the time the game will tell you how your choice affects them, and I tracked that. At any time you can bring up a window to see our stats in bar-graph form. Then I noticed that your stats can be affected, and the game will not tell you. And the bar-graph will not tell you exact values.
Well, thankfully I’ve been learning about security of web applications to prevent hacking attempts. This gives me a good basis to know how to hack things. Last night I created a program that will let you know your exact stats in the game, and how the last choice changed them. Happy that I had a tool to let me more accurately map the game, I went to bed.
It was a few minutes later that I realized that this same tool could be used to change your stats. It hadn’t really occurred to me earlier because I had no intention of cheating in the game. Cheating spoils the fun of mapping.
Oh, in my defence, my hacking attempt does not affect any servers and only allows me to affect my game and nothing else. I suppose if I was better at it, I could get files that would tell me the effects of all the choices in one go, but I don’t have any interest in that. That would spoil the fun.