Schizophrenic’s Guide: Cheating

I, Dalton Lewis, have a debilitating mental illness which prevents me from successfully doing a lot of things that other people naturally do — work a normal job, communicate my needs, or eat healthy food and live a moderate lifestyle. I do, however, play Starcraft 2 an awful lot. I love the game — it is an esport and a strategy game and an intellectual challenge. I want to get better and learn to be a smarter person and better competitor. However, today, someone said that I don’t deserve my victory.

I got mad. I do deserve my victory. I don’t even know what the hell he meant by that. I assume he thinks that I cheated. I did not cheat. I do not cheat. I attacked him with reasonable units — I had an oracle that killed fifteen or so of his workers which gave me a strong economic lead which I then parlayed into a larger army than him. I don’t know what I have been accused of.

People do cheat sometimes. A player won Adepticon, a big Warhammer 40k tournament, with 1851 points back when the max was 1850. Another player was found to have pushed models and given himself attacks on overwatch when he should not have gotten those rolls. One time I played against a player who rolled his dice behind some terrain and lied about the results — in a game which he was blatantly going to win anyway.

Why do people do that? I don’t do that. I don’t ever do anything like that. I try to get the rules as right as possible. And yet — in video games I understand the desire to play a thief character or an assassin character. Needing to sneak around people and deceive them is a lot of fun. Crime in video games is a lot of fun.

Watching people commit crime is a lot of fun, too. Heist movies are a blast. Wanting to make a lot of money with a little bit of work sounds great, too. I know that people want to do things for themselves and explain them away by saying that they deserved a piece of the pie. Well, I wouldn’t do that in real life, but I understand the motivation. I also would like to say that a homeless mentally ill man killed four other mentally ill homeless men in NYC recently, and that is a shame. I don’t want that for anyone — my fellow mentally ill people are suffering.

Thanks, and take care, friends.