Why do people cheat in games?

Sometimes they're more interested in the game's story than they are in the game's challenge. They want to progress quickly and with minimal hassle so they can get to what they consider the good bits. It's also often just a convenience thing; if you're on your fifth Skyrim character, you might decide that leveling up traditionally doesn't really interest you. There's also the unfair advantage factor. If, for example, you're obsessed with Steam Achievements or something, you can use cheats to get them all for a game like Skyrim quickly. In Multiplayer games the benefits of cheating/hacking are far more obvious; you get to crap on all the other players and be a living God.

My reasoning for cheating is only to progress in a nearly impossible part of a game, or to make it more fun. Making the game so easy it's boring, now that's a different story.

1. Pride. People don't want to be the guy who has 1 kill but 10000 deaths. People want to be the guy who has 10000 kills and no deaths.

2. Reward. You've probably heard about some players and teams that were perm banned from cs: go for fixing matches. It's reported that they did it to get better weapons so they call sell it.

3. Jealously. There was a story about why bonds used steroid. It said he was jealous that McGwire was getting all the attention even though everyone believes that he was doing steroids.

4. Harmless consequence. Who are you hurting by cheating. Nobody. There's no victim. I don't care if you beat a game on super uber legend mode by cheating. You're not hurting me and you're not hurting anybody else. I don't care if you're #1 on the leaderboard.

More than just Cheating.
How about those who have to have a 100% game, going around looking for a Save to load in their machine to brag to friends, how "they" beat it.
Some hardly even knowing what is in the game if questioned.
OR the modders, who load the game so they can win without effort, under the guise of making it "look" better.
1. Cheat because they cannot handle the mechanics of the game.
2. Cheat because they do not want to be bothered playing the game and want a quick end.
3. Cheat to screw with the game to try to "break" it.
Getting bored usually means the Person cannot get anywhere in the game.

Most gamers are casual gamers. Doing things legit or straight forward are either too boring to them or frustrating. To them using cheats makes the game fun cause you get to do crazy stuff with minimal effort which makes them feel like they achieved something. To them, people who do things legit are crazy and don't have a life ( which makes no sense cause saying a gamer has no life while your playing games too just makes you look stupid). Not saying all casual gamers are like this. Alot just don't care enough to do things without cheating. I don't consider Mods that just change appearances and are there to add customization to appeal as cheating. But things like stat changing, abusing glitches or using hacks to give yourself an advantage in a multiplayer game is cheating.

i assume that you're talking about online games there is a few reasons.

The first is kinda obvious people don't like to lose to they hack in an aimbot to do the killing for them i could go on and on about how they suck but i have a little bit of a life ok.

The second is just for laughs every now and then i watch videos of these absurd hackers going into lobbies with every hack imaginable and just pulling the trigger and filling up the kill feed i thought that it was quite hilarious and people who can't appreciate the comedy in something like that really just need to calm down it's ridiculous how serious people take hackers they aren't physically harming you so why get so upset over something like that?

in offline games i have sometimes used cheat codes but it wasn't that often and it was usually in Lego games to get coins quickly and i think i also used a points cheat code in the Force Unleashed for the PS2 so i could get powers faster. tbh these cheats didn't make much of a difference in legos i got characters faster which was pretty cool. These are the only cheats i have ever used in games. I don't really like my games to be easy nowadays so i don''t cheat any more. But i could understand how a person more interested in just the story aspect would want to just breezed through the game.

some times cheats be fun like in saints row the fourth things like one shot kill or unlimited money or in gta vice city, or star wars Jedi temple both theses games have cheats where you can play as characters in the game like Luke Skywalker or etc. But i will admit and your probably talking about cheats that make games to easy. People who use those cheats may just wanna have fun and some times to much challenge can take the fun out of a game for a person. But if it ever does than just don't use cheats on it.

Sometimes I cheat just to mess around, such as putting on god mode so I can have an endless rampage in GTA, but otherwise I usually refrain from doing so. Cheating in order to beat a game usually seamed pretty boring to me, as it takes away from the challenge. I can see it in a few rare cases though where a game has a particularly annoying game mechanic that you want to get rid of. I will never understand cheating in online competitive games though, what is the point of 100 kills and 0 deaths when it took no skill because you had god mode and aimbot?

Some people cheat because they are bad at the game and they wanted a way to get further. Another is because it can be fun depending on what hack they have. Or they love ruining other people's day. But in the skyrim, fallout, and other games like those, I think it's alright to hack it just aslong as it doesn't affect someone else in their game play

makes the game more fun,especially on pc. some examples
1:elder scrolls oblivion-you can open any door. and I mean ANY door, including ones that where never meant to be opened, provable right at the start of the game. fun as heck because you can see things you where never meant to see..like the sky filled sea vessel at the beginning..
2:wrestling old games action replay. whats better than wrestling?wrestling with gigantic 100 foot sized characters. really funny.
3:in general in gaming-infinite health/other stat like mana. because I want to make this quick and not make an effort today.

in general, cheating in single player really opens the game up and lets you have for more fun, making the game your own, I miss it.
its also variable, I mean you can mess with ANYTHING. you don't have to enable it al y'know?