Shades of gray: when does a glitch become a cheat?”
- Andrew Hogan
- Jul 21
- 10 min read
Cheating in video games is a subject full of ambiguity and gray areas, from fundamental questions about its legality, to industry-wide debates as to the best course of action to curb it.
One of these gray areas concerns the use of glitches aka exploits, and whether this should be considered the same, i.e. as bad as cheating.
For a business dedicated to keeping gaming fair and safe, this is an important subject. Which is why we wanted to cover it in this blog. We’ll be looking into many of the debates around the use of glitches and exploits, discussing how context and motivation are critical, weighing up the different sides of the debate, and finally evaluating the risks for the games industry.
Let’s start with a few definitions we can hopefully agree on. What is a glitch is and how is it different to a cheat? And for that matter are glitches and exploits the same thing.
On this point there seems to be a broad consensus:
A glitch is an error or bug in the game that causes something unexpected to happen - for example a character can suddenly walk through a wall. Generally, players love stumbling on one of these and look at finding one as a good thing.
An exploit is the (often repetitive) use of the glitch or similar flaw in the game to gain an advantage, e.g. duplicating items, infinite gold, flying, skipping hard levels. This is where things start getting a little gray.
A cheat is software or code created externally and (usually) sold to players so they change the game e.g. a wallhack or aimbot. As well as breaching a game’s Terms of Service, cheats will also often infringe upon copyright.
But that’s where consensus and the simple answers end, and the nuance and ambiguity begin.
Context is everything
Ultimately the acceptance or otherwise of players who exploit glitches depends very much on the context. Several factors need to be considered:
Single player vs Multiplayer
In single-player games, players often have more freedom to exploit glitches for personal enjoyment or experimentation. As many of us were warned in school - you’re only cheating yourself! However, in competitive multiplayer games, or those with economies that can be impacted, exploiting is more likely to be frowned upon, disrupt the experience for others, and get you banned.
Community Standards and Norms
Related to this is how the specific game community views exploiting glitches. If a game is competitive, then the player community is unlikely to forgive anyone caught repeatedly using a glitch. On the other hand, a sandbox type game’s audience may see it as a legitimate form of gameplay that just makes the game better, so long as it doesn’t harm the experience of other players.
Intent and motivation
Using an exploit to avoid grinding or to customize the experience in an open world style game is unlikely to cause too many problems with either other players or the game developers. Although this can get complicated when it comes to economy glitches like coin duplication, that can affect game balance.
However, using a glitch to beat a challenge and gain an advantage over another player or for bragging rights, whilst claiming they’re playing legit, will always be an issue.
Type of Glitch
Cosmetic or harmless glitches (floating objects etc) are usually not a big deal. Game-breaking or exploitative glitches (like the aforementioned duplicating items or clipping through walls in multiplayer shooters) will likely be considered cheating by both players and developers.
Does that clear things up? Thought not.
Well, to bring these factors to life, and try to draw some solid conclusions, we’re going to look at some specific examples of where exploiting glitches is a big debate and often strays into outright cheating.
Competitive gaming
Most people now think of a League of Legends or Dota live esports tournament when asked to think about competitive gaming. But there are more ways to compete than that.
One of these is Speedrunning which has existed as a challenge or format across multiple games in almost every genre, for years.
From single player platformers like Super Mario 64 and Sonic Mania, to RPGs like Skyrim and The Legend of Zelda, and even shooters like Half Life and Doom Eternal, there are speedrunning communities, and events like the European Speedrunner Assembly and Games Done Quick, all over the world.
And so integral is the question of glitches, that it defines many of the categories of competition.
For example, in the ‘Glitched’ category the intentional use of glitches or unintended mechanics to complete the game faster is permitted. On the other hand, competitions can be designated ‘Glitchless’, where play is limited to using the mechanics, the developers intended.
Get caught exploiting a glitch in a ‘Glitchless’ speedrunning competition, and you may as well be found using an aimbot in an esports final.
In these instances, it is 100% the community standards and player intent that defines whether exploiting glitches is cheating.
As an aside, if you want to see how animated the speedrunning community can get around deceitful behavior, it’s worth checking out the Cody Miller Halo 2 controversy from back in 2011.
Cody was a revered Halo speedrunner who when asked to recreate a record-breaking run (for charity at GDQ!) was forced to turn the level all the way down to Normal after toiling for over 4 hours - he’d been aiming for around 2 hours!
He was later revealed to have created the video of his original record-breaking attempt by splicing together segments from different runs. The irony and one of the telltale signs he was a phony, was he didn’t know the glitches he would need to use to make the target time! It’s worth looking up the video – it’s a painful watch!
Leaderboards
Another hot topic when it comes to glitches are Leaderboards. Specifically, suspiciously high scores and impossible achievements, sudden jumps in rank or dodgy score patterns and history. These will often arouse suspicions that a player has been exploiting glitches and not being open about it. If a score looks too perfect, it probably is.
Leaderboards have of course been a part of gaming since the days of arcade hits like Pac-Man and Pole Position, but it’s the advent of online gaming that has made them so integral, as they track an increasingly wide range of metrics, use machine learning to match players, and serve as the backbone of massive online ecosystems.
Seeing your name at the top of a leaderboard can be a real thrill and at their best leaderboards create a sense of community and (fair) competition within the game. That said, leaderboards can create a sense of elitism and exclusion within the gaming community. This can lead to toxic behavior, and crucially, the use of glitches or exploits that allow players to unfairly manipulate their ranking, leading to mistrust within the community.
There are several ways leaderboards can get manipulated.
Exploiting glitches is one of these but there are also other exploits available, much closer to all out cheating. From memory editing to modifying scores or timers, manipulation to alter local save files and inject a high score, to speed hacking the game clock.
If you’ve got the time and inclination, you can mess with a leaderboard.
Streaming
A quick search on YouTube will confirm almost nothing gets player communities madder than streamers using cheats.
There are countless videos about the top streamers who got caught using cheats in virtually every big multiplayer game, and the comments are mostly scathing.
But things are a little more blurred when it comes to exploits. Even the Twitch Community Guidelines are a little vague on the topic. You may not:
Engage in any cheating, hacking, botting, or tampering that gives the account owner an unfair advantage in an online multiplayer game.
You could argue that glitches fall under tampering but note there’s no explicit call out for ‘glitches’ or ‘exploits’.
So, no surprise it remains a topic for discussion across Reddit and elsewhere. The general take is that using glitches in single player games is fine, provided the streamer is open about it and isn’t trying to con their followers.
On the other hand, using glitches in a multiplayer is seen as no different to cheating. Not only is the streamer doing it to look better than they are and gain an advantage over their opponents, but they are also trying to fool their followers whilst making money from them at the same time! As well as being incredibly cynical, this also causes plenty of suspicion towards streamers as many comments on Reddit show:
It is obvious to me that 90% of streamers that perform at a high level are cheating in some way…
What's crazy about this is it is true lol, these streamers have multiple monitors and talk about "looking at them (or specifically one) for their stream/chat/whatever. In reality, a lot of them have radar up on another screen using their eyes to look over and glance and using the excuse of chat etc.... It's not really walls and it's not aimhacks but it gives them such an advantage in knowing where people are at and the situation they're in.
Watch a lot of streamers. You'll see them glance when they're playing suddenly, super subtle and quick, watch when they alt tab or aren't playing. Eyes don't lie.
Where does this leave the game developers and publishers?
It won’t surprise you to hear this is also a little gray and that essentially it depends on the type of game and/or type of glitch.
Although most glitches are the result of unintended bugs, not all are seen as problematic or unwelcome. Designers will sometimes embrace them as a new form of gameplay, if they’re doing no harm and not giving players an unfair advantage. They can even go on to become key features of the game.
Possibly the most famous of these is the creepers in Minecraft which were originally the result of a coding error when the game’s creator was trying to design the pigs and (with a hint of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge) got his width and height dimensions muddled up and ended up with something tall and thin.
Rather than throw this away he gave it the now infamous leaf texture and kept it.
Obviously in this instance the decision to keep the glitch wasn’t going to give any group of players an advantage - quite the opposite.
Developers tread a fine line when it comes to glitches that are seen as just fun by players - take these out too soon and the complaints will come quick. Just look at bhopping aka bunny hopping.
The result of a bug in the engine, bhopping started way back in games like Quake and Half Life, and later Counter Strike (which began as a Half Life mod), when players discovered that air strafing increased their speed and they could maintain this faster speed if they jumped up, and then jumped again the exact moment they hit the ground.
It became so popular it became a game in itself; often played on private servers by a dedicated player community using custom created maps to show off their skills.
Over time it’s evolved, with new techniques (wall strafing etc) popping up regularly and being shared online - although these days players often rely on an autohop mod to make it easier!
At various points Valve has taken steps to make it harder to do to maintain competitive integrity, but to the best of our knowledge it is not strictly banned. That said on the ‘Valve Developer Community’ website, it’s claimed using the autohop scripts and mods can get you banned - although in many speed running communities and servers these are explicitly permitted and even encouraged.
So, what should they do?
The critical thing, particularly when it comes to multiplayer games, is taking decisive action when required and providing clarity for the players.
With glitches that give players an unfair advantage over other players, a developer needs to identify and fix any glitch as quickly as possible. This largely tallies with player expectations, as Jessica Backus of Purdue University wrote in her paper ‘Players Perceptions of Bugs and glitches In Video Games’ (1):
Overall, they (the players) had mixed opinions about developers patching bugs…For competitive multiplayer games or severe bugs, it makes sense that players prefer if these bugs are patched vs. “minor” ones in non-competitive contexts.
Many publishers make their position clear on their websites. They encourage players to report any glitches they stumble on. Unsurprisingly players generally feel it shouldn’t be up to them and that it’s the developers’ job to keep on top of things. Backus quotes several players in her paper:
It should not be left to the public in general because...they are not there to, you know, find the bugs for you.
But that is something that the developer should be looking into. Just to make sure that doesn't happen a lot.
I think it's the developer’s responsibility to seek out whether or not those bugs are occurring. And then patch them up accordingly.
But many developers do also point out that being caught exploiting glitches can get you banned and effectively equate this with being caught using cheats.
For this to be meaningful it’s crucial that developers always keep up to speed with all the glitches and become aware of them quickly, understand their impact on the game and player experience, so they can prioritize which needs fixing first. Relying on player reports alone to do this feels unrealistic.
This is also important from a communications perspective. If bugs and glitches are ignored and effectively allowed to exist in the game, you can’t blame players for exploiting them, and assuming they’re doing it with the developer’s blessing.
In conclusion
Reducing things to fundamentals you could say that:
Finding a glitch = No problem
Exploiting that glitch = Potentially problematic
Using cheats = Always problematic
The middle one is always going to be a bit messy. As we’ve seen, it depends on intent, context, community expectations, game genre, and impact.
However, taking these aspects into consideration should help developers and their security teams, decide whether exploiting a particular glitch is equivalent to cheating, and communicate this to the player community asap.
The enabler for this is intel and knowing about glitches as early as possible.
Player reports are an important part of this but can’t do all the heavy lifting on their own. Game Security, QA and Player Support teams all have an essential role to play, monitoring and engaging with the player communities to uncover potential glitches after every update and release as quickly as possible.
In this way they can focus on fixing the problematic ones and letting the fun ones become a part of the game.
References
1. ‘Players Perceptions of Bugs and glitches In Video Games’ – Jessica Backus April 2025
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