cheating and redefining what it means to win at school

For my other class I’m playing SimCity 4. it’s a game about building cities, basically. It seems pretty boring, but I think it’s fun. There is no win state, there is no point where you’ve beat the game. It’s also a game that is inherently designed for cheat codes. So in my presentation on the game I asked does a game with no win state make the idea of ‘cheating’ different, since you’re not cheating to win. This brought up the discussion does winning always have to be an outcome, or is winning ‘not losing.’ In SimCity having your city not fail is winning. Having your city fail is losing. So if we applied this idea to education could we have a different idea of cheating and actually focus on learning instead of performance in skill and drill? Maybe. Maybe we should think about school as not winning at something but success is when a student doesn’t fail, that becomes the mark of winning. Then, if students needed a little help every now and then it wouldn’t seem so drastic like cheating. It would be an extra boost like a walk through to keep a student from failing (but also providing them with extra work to keep from failing, is that really a bad thing?).

We certainly go through a lot of effort to look up walk throughs, and then figure out what they mean, and what they mean in the game, and then how to use the information they’ve given. Walk throughs are not straight forward they say random stuff like “walk toward the dark spot, kill all the monsters.” Not really helpful, but if the key to that level is the walk pattern, and the person figures that out in game, they’ve decoded text (acquired learning). And they’ve used a research skill that required them to test a hypothesis in the game. So have they really just cheated? Or simply not failed?