Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

I read something about this in the Book “Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#” by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

Basically, every Player has some Intention or the “Player Intent” which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

• The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
• The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
• The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
• The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

• The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
• The Spoilsport who doesn’t care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player’s experience

So, the motivation to “cheat” could either be that this player doesn’t really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to “win legitimately”.

As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn’t about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of “don’t feed the trolls”.

With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be “What is their motivation” and the answer to that is “to win the game, at all costs”. And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.

I totally agree. I had it a few times in which someone calls me, rips me out of my thoughs, we discuss something, hang up and I have nothing retained from what we talked about. Or, even better, someone says something on a call and I do that and then they never said anything about that.

Even worse, I can’t listen to the conversation in 1-2 weeks because that is the time I could actually work on it and remember every detail that we talked about.

Now I am strictly going with emails. Sure they can call me and we talk about the feasibility or discuss possible solutions but any request for implementation has to happen either over an email of which I then create a ticket/issue or they create one directly themselves.

That way I can prove that what I implemented was based on what was requested and if that was wrong then the request wasn’t clear enough.

Mountain Man: 10 Books by Keith C. Blackmore. Basically, the Zombie Apocalypse happens and a Dude tries to survive alone, physically, mentally and emotionally while also trying to go on supply runs, running into Zombies and generally trying to stay alive while coping with everything. I think it would be good to have some other zombie-related Series that isn’t The Walking Dead.

Expeditionary Force: 18 Books by Craig Alanson. Earth and Humanity are attacked by Hamster Aliens, another alien Race, Lizards, who attack the hamsters saving Earth in the process and then recruiting Humanity into a war on a galactic scale but the Hamsters aren’t the real enemy of Humanity. I’m only at the end of the 5th Audiobook but they are great and I would really wish Skippy is voiced by the Audiobook Narrator R.C. Bray in a TV adaption.

Kyralia series: Been a while since I read it but a fantastic series related to magic By Trudi Canavan, I think there are just not enough good Magic-related Shows.

Tales of the Otori: A 5-Book Series by Lian Hearn is set in a fictional feudal Japan. The Main story follows a Boy, Takeo, through his life to avenge his adoptive father and escape the legacy of his biological father. Probably the only series in which I had to put down the book at one point and just had to process what was happening.