I enjoyed Consalvo’s readings on how the experience of gameplay extends beyond direct interaction. This brings us to the idea that the “sandbox game,” Minecraft that I am presenting, has no specific goals to accomplish, giving players a huge sum of freedom in deciding how to enjoy the game. Although, there is an achievement system.
When you create an environment that gives the player that much control and power, you want to push it and test the boundaries. For any anyone that is playing this game, they have guides and walkthroughs to help players get around difficult situations. But some take other routes. Some prefer to manipulate the games coding for their personal benefit or satisfaction. That could be anything from coding to have dozens of lives, changing their head to be the presidents, or even trolling.
You would think the developer of the game initially wouldn’t want people tampering with their coding. But along with the foundation placed to create your world, I noticed how players enjoy expanding their imagination and testing the projected boundaries placed on them. This stretches to different mediums such as YouTube that creates a participatory community and network. In this society, players share their “cheats” and communicate ideas that extends beyond direct interaction.
Game Studies 
I thought this reading and the presentation you made were interesting. Minecraft was a great example to use because the question of cheating becomes useless or it becomes one of the biggest issues. I think minecraft alone as in survival or creative or even switching to creative while in survival mode cannot be cheated and players cannot necessarily cheat themselves, unless they themselves establish rules they want to follow (like spawning on an island with nothing more than one tree in the middle of the ocean, it only becomes cheating if they go into creative and go against their own rule of not spawning anythings else).
The idea with using game guides, friends, video tutorials being cheating I think can be far reaching. When you are stuck in any scenario whether its in understanding these articles, maybe a complex film, art in a gallery, most of us would use our phones or friends to ask them their opinions and get insight. Again this blog as a whole is a great example. If someone gets confused by one of the readings, and then comes here for a better explanation, is that considered cheating? Did they cheat themselves out of trying to grok it for themselves?
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Consalvo’s article “explores several issues, including how respondents chose to define cheating in their own terms, both as an abstract concept and related to game playing; if respondents cheated or not in actual gameplay and why; how this reconciled with their definition(s) of cheating; and what actual material and social elements they used, items ranging from walkthroughs, strategy guides, GameSharks, hacks, cheat codes” and so forth. A common trend that ran through “all the definitions of cheating was the sentiment that cheating creates an unfair advantage for the cheater.” Consalvo adds that “although many times this advantage was in relation to another player in a multiplayer game, it was also mentioned in regard to single-player games as just an unfair advantage in general.” This claim was mentioned as well by players who thought walkthroughs “were“ or “weren’t” cheating, and those who felt you could “certainly” or “never” cheat in a single-player game.
Interestingly, “the common thread seemed to be that cheating was more than just breaking a rule or law; it was also those instances of bending or reinterpreting rules to the player’s advantage. Playeactively made ethical judgments about gameplay that extended beyond the coded rules of the game.
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