I disagree that it's cheating (I was in the "all is fair" camp). These games of ours extend outside the boundaries of the executable, and that was agreed upon before starting. The only hard rule we ever established (before this incident) was that you couldn't make deals across different games. We tend to have several cloud-games active at once, so nothing like "I'll give you wine in the 4 player game if you give me ivory in the 6 player game".
Well not anymore that we have a no screen sharing rule in place, but before that yes it would be. It would have to be a virus you made and not something actively malicious in other ways. And you'd want to build in some detection that they're running Civ 6, as stealing their credit cards or spying on their private browsing would be unrelated to civ and crossing a real line. They could just as well do that to me. Unspoken rules also dictate you tell the truth when they ask "How did you know?". That would probably lead to another group meeting about no viruses. The disbelief of "you really did THAT?!" Is part of the fun. But there's no real harm done. Getting a friend to take a picture of your screen is conniving, but it's not harmful outside of the game world.
The hard part would be tricking them into installing something you've sent them, since we all live more than 500 miles from each other.
Interesting. I don’t think I’d enjoy that. It seems like it would give an advantage to people who would are most willing to push the boundaries of what exactly is considered fair play. I prefer a vigorous competition with obvious in/out of game boundaries. But, of course, that’s just me. I’m certainly not here to tell you and your friends not to enjoy things!
We played a live-action version of Diplomacy in my high school mock UN club.
Each person was part of a team and had a role. I was the Chancellor of Germany.
If an assassin from another team was able to get alone with me, without any of my countrymen, and show me a card saying she was an assassin, the Chancellor of Germany would be killed during the weekly meeting and, not having a Chancellor, not get to make any moves on the board for that week's turn. They would instead be distracted by determining the new Chancellor. If the assassin had been caught, her country's treachery would be revealed, cementing any of their opponents in alliance.
It was an awfully fun thing to be doing on the side, between classes and during free periods, but it'd be wildly impractical in an environment with less proximity!
Our mock UN group was weirder than I realized at the time. Our faculty advisor requires that we each speak in one of the 6 languages of the UN likely to be spoken by whatever country we were representing, and he'd simultranslate into English. Somehow it didn't occur to me at the time to ask why a suburban physics teacher was fluent in those six languages.
It might not be the immediate end of a friendship but if someone’s willing to cheat in a game like this, it’s a strong signal that they’re untrustworthy in general and a potential threat. You might occasionally keep an acquaintance like this but at the very least you’d know to sandbox them and watch your step.
