With a recent blog post , Raph Koster, founder of the company now developing Metaplace , and formerly game designer for Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, suggests that the majority of MMORPG players are cheaters.

In short, what he suggests is that making use of spoiler sites and detailed guides might be considered taking an advantage ofver the game mechanics:

Information is absolutely a mechanic. Look, I knock game theory often enough, but this is one case where those guys have the terminology and the logic to back it up, too.

The key thing to realize here is that games provide information to you, the player, about the game state. What’s more, they provide it under defined circumstances. Once you have that knowledge, it’s certainly “in the wild” and you can do with it whatever you want, but the game releases it on a schedule and in specific places, by choice.

For example, in variants of Poker, we see differences in how much information is given to other players. In Texas Hold ‘Em, each player sees their hand, each player sees the face-up cards, each player cannot see the other hands. There could easily be a poker variant where players do not see their own hands, but do see everyone else’s. Poker is a game driven heavily by lack of information.

So are role-playing games. RPGs do not give you the location of every spawn in advance, the stats on every weapon in advance, the solution to every quest in advance, and so on. For a reason. Finding the spawn, discovering the stats, solving the quest is part of the game.