There arehardly anybarriers in place for Nintendo's online gaming strategy. We’re not talking about players injecting reaction-improving drugs up their nostrils - rather, we’re talking about the trend of repeatedly exploiting glitches and gameplay imbalances to score an easy win over potentially more skilful opponents.
But like the steroid poser, the morality of this issue is a moodylicous shade of gray. After all, these people aren’t cheating per se, are they? They’re not breaking the game rules, or putting us off our game by Wii-mailing us pictures of sad kittens, or doing anything that we couldn’t hypothetically learn to do ourselves. If we want to compete, we’d just better learn to beat them at their own game, right? But what if we don’t want to? What if we find the repeated use of a single move to be so bitterly tedious and game-breaking that we don’t want to play any more? Well, perhaps that’s just tough nuts for us. Or is it?
