A month ago while playing Final Fantasy XII, I fought my way to Tiamat, a vicious, huge-clawed dragon – and couldn't get past her. No matter how many ways I threw my team at the beast, she ripped us to ribbons. Screw it. I decided to check an online FAQ for some hints defeating this thing.

"That's cheating," a friend of mine scoffed. "Really?" I wondered. Personally, I've always figured that using a FAQ might be lame – like reading the Cliff's Notes version of War and Peace – but it isn't cheating. It's not like I'm hacking the game with a Game Genie to illicitly acquire extra lives, right?

We never agreed on it. But our argument reminded me of something quite interesting: Video-game players often hold radically different views on what constitutes cheating. Today's digital fare represents the first time we've argued about the precise meaning of cheating.

It didn't used to be so hard to figure out. Johann Huizinga, one of the first big philosophers of ludology – the study of play – defined cheating as when you pretend to obey the rules of the game but secretly subvert them to gain advantage over another player. In traditional games, it's usually obvious. Stuffing an ace up your sleeve in poker, slathering a baseball in spit, moving the chess pieces when your opponent goes to the bathroom? Yeah, that's cheating.

Today's multiplayer games – like Unreal online – are pretty similar to the old-school stuff. If somebody uses an illicit aimbot to give themselves perfect targeting ability, most gamers agree that's unfair. But where things get super weird is with single-player video games.

What exactly are the "rules" in a single-player game, anyway? You're not competing against another human – you're battling the computer, and, in a sense, yourself. On top of that, the game industry has actually co-opted the idea of "cheats" – by hiding secret power-ups inside the games that publishers slowly, teasingly leak to the public as a marketing tactic. (They also collaborate on the creation of walkthroughs and game guides.) And then there are hardware hacks – like the Game Genie – which game designers don't particularly like, but which aren't illegal by law ... so what are they?

Confronted with this bewildering array of possible and permissible behavior, gamers have become almost Talmudic in staking out different stances. Mia Consalvo, a game academic at Ohio University, interviewed dozens of players about their attitudes – which she'll publish in the book, Cheating, this summer – and found that we cluster into a couple of loose groups, each with a different ethical vision.

A small hardcore group are die-hard purists, like my friend. They don't use any cheats or guides, because they consider it "cheating yourself" of the subtle pleasure of getting stuck in a game – then suddenly spying the way out.

The next group is the walkthrough folks, like me. We regard guides as a form of travel literature; I'd never have located all the cool, secret areas in Final Fantasy XII without a FAQ. (In contrast, the hardcore crowd seems to relish the idea that they'll miss out on stuff, because it's part of the mystery of game.) But I almost never use cheats or manipulations of code to grant myself "unearned" power. I like the idea that if I'm born into this virtual world, I'll abide by the fictions that govern its reality.

Then there's the final group of gamers – the "by any means necessary" crowd, as it were. Like the ancient gnostics, or like Morpheus in The Matrix, they know the world around them is just code – and the fun is not in obeying it but mucking with it. Single-player worlds are toys, to be hacked with any available Easter eggs, exploits or hardware mods; you can't have the truly l33t experiences if you're not tricked out with sick amounts of weaponry and skillz.

From this view, cheating a single-player game isn't possible because, as one interviewee told Consalvo, "you can't cheat a Gamecube – you can only cheat another player." If part of the goal in a narrative game is to finish the story, what's wrong with using any tool at hand to do so?

I personally don't agree with the free-for-all position; I think self-imposed limits are what make a game a game. But this is the ultimately cool thing about the cheating debate: It's a form of moral philosophy. When I haggle with friends about single-player cheating, it's like arguing over different conceptions of sin. Can you commit a bad act when you're alone, in a room? Is morality limited to one's bad behavior to others, or does it extend to one's bad behavior to oneself?

These are the sorts of debates over justice that we humans love to engage in, but frequently don't – because they usually crop up in domains like politics or religion, where we're afraid of offending others by seeming too puritan or too libertine. But when it comes to cheating? Let it fly!

Games are the perfect philosophical métier, because they're both supremely meaningless and meaningful – they're "just" entertainment, yet they plunge such deep existential hooks into us that we'll argue over them until the sun explodes.

And, of course, being human we don't always stick to our own moral codes. When hard-core purists hit an unsolvable level, they'll sneak a peek at a game guide. Every once in a while I'll get sick of merely reading about a cool region I can't reach – and go all Konami Code to get there.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

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