I don’t find shame in cheating in video games. It was a stigma to hear about growing up, that cheating in video games meant you prefer the shortcuts in life or that you didn’t know what earning anything was. When, that was all just bullshit talk.
I cheat in video games, when available to on some games, to give me a little kick of fun. Sometimes I don’t have the patience to tediously go through the standard way. Other times, I feel I’ve earned it anyways, because of having undergone the stresses and frustrations or the time I’ve played of certain games to go through the normal way.
Like in Terraria, it’s a game I’ve clocked in upwards of 900 hours. I felt like I had done everything in the game prior to the content that added the Moon Lord and many other things. At that time, it was 850 hours.
So the point of the matter is, yeah I don’t find it that big of a deal to cheat in video games. If I cared to and want to, I’m decent enough to handle games without cheats, given enough time.
Multiplayer of course I never cheat in those.
I really find I can’t cheat on an ongoing save even when I think most people would consider it completely justified, an example being when the medusa enemy was first added to terraria it was pretty buggy and could turn you to stone from off screen and through walls (despite explicit patch notes saying it should not do this) so I ended up losing all my gear to an objective bug. Tried save editing it back in but it still ruined the feeling of the save to me.
The only time I can cheat and not ruin my own fun is for testing purposes in games without any kind of creative mode, particularly 4X games which tend to be pretty long and I don’t want to play a several hour game just to test a random theory about how 2 mechanics might interact in a lategame build.