About

Cheesing is an Internet slang term referring to the practice of purposefully exploiting a glitch or other elements of gameplay mechanics to the player's advantage, particularly within the subgenres of competitive fighting games and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

Origin

The coinage of the term, as it is used in the context of video gaming, can be traced back to the players of the 1991 arcade fighting game Street Fighter; the earliest known online mention of "cheesing" can be found in a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) for Street Fighter II that was posted via Usenet's newsgroup alt.games.sf2 as early as on August 25th, 1993.

04. What is considered "cheap"?

* Fireball Traps
* Grabbing then HHS w/ Honda
* Zangief's SPD (not!)
* Playing keep away
* Picking Vega or Bison (!)
* Cheesing them w/ Bison
* Electricity then bite w/ Blanka
* Doing FB-DP all the time
* Jumping all the time
* Chun Li's flipping neck breaker

Spread

On November 20th, 2003, RPGNet forum member ReverendKeith started a discussion thread asking others for advice on "how to cheese" in the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeon & Dragons 3.5 Edition.

On April 27th, 2004, Urban Dictionary user KarmaGhost submitted an entry for the term "cheeser," defining the often-stigmatized practice of exploit in fighting games for the first time:

On October 19th, 2004, GameSpot published an article titled "Ten Things That Need To Change in Sports Games," in which the author Brian Ekberg underscores the phenomenon of cheesing in online sport games as a poorly formed practice.

Incapable of winning by skill, wit, or a combination of the two, the cheeser instead exploits a particular feature of a money play and drives it (and you) into the ground. On the other hand, the sheer prevalence of cheesers found online means it can be darn near impossible to find a good contest against a perfect stranger. As it stands now, the best defense against cheese is simply refusing to play anyone you don't know.

On December 1st, 2005, IGN forum member LegacyAccount explained how easy it is to defeat an opponent in most popular fighting arcade games by "cheesing and "button mashing" in rebuttal to the thread "Virtua Fighter = The Worst Fighting Game Ever." Throughout the latter half of the 2000s, "cheesing" continued to gain traction as a widespread glitch-exploiting tactic through its appearance on various guides and cheat sheets for various action role playing and real-time strategy games, such as Dark Souls and Starcraft, and multiplayer online sports games like Madden NFL, NBA Live and FIFA, as well as first-person shooter (FPS) and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, including Battlefield, World of Warcraft and Destiny, among many others.

Academic Research

On August 24th, 2006, MIT Press published a research paper titled "The Ecology of Games" which describes "cheesing" as a practice of exploit that is largely stigmatized by the online gaming community as it diverges from the norms and conventions of gameplay. In November 2009, The International Journal of Computer Game Research ran an academic paper titled "Cheesers, Pullers, and Glitchers: The Rhetoric of Sportsmanship and the Discourse of Online Sports Gamers," in which the co-authors and video game scholars, Ryan M. Moeller, Bruce Esplin and Steven Conway, address the enduring issue of "cheesers" in online sports games like Electronic Arts' Madden NFL series.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References