[phantom_oracle]

Counter-intuitively, I wonder what gaming would be like if everyone ran the same cheats/mods? Would it be the same as "if everyone is rich, then nobody is" or would it devolve into such a state where cheating/modding gets so boring that people just go back to casual play ...

On the other hand, gaming is now a big commercial entity, including 'pros' and 'streamers'. With money involved, fraud and cheating ain't far behind.

[seoaeu]

If you look at what's happened to certain games without anti-cheat you can actually answer that question! It turns out that it mostly devolves into a bunch of AIs playing against each other with the actual humans just passively watching. Perhaps exciting to see your aim bot beat the others, but overall not much of an interactive experience anyone

[sweetbitter]

Here's an example from Minecraft, in which duplication exploits enable the emergent gameplay of 'crystal PvP'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYMd2sIBlDU

And a hell of a lot more where that came from. There was one instance where players had exploited a popular no-rules server to spawn in items that dealt 32,000 damage, the administrator attempting to patch it and the players playing the cat-and-mouse game of trying to keep using them for as long as possible. The creativity is really something else. As for their music choice in that video- par for the course when dealing with the 4chan of Minecraft.