Glitches: A force for good or evil?

Glitch. This is a term any gamer knows very well. It is (usually) the bane of a gamer’s existence. A glitch is what happens when the gaming gods decide to mess with the player. The player will usually find themselves put into an impossible situation that cannot be solved without restarting the game from scratch.  

The Evil

Glitches can do so many things to put the screw to a player. 

Glitches will sometimes make it so a boss can’t die. Maybe they will sometimes make your character randomly freeze in place. The best ones are when you randomly die for unknown reasons. Some can be downright creepy. Some of them can be funny or kind of entertaining, but those are few and far between.

I look back and think about all the glitches I have encountered. Right off the bat I will say about 95.7% of them are horrid memories. For example, I remember one time while playing Warframe, my frame suddenly froze in place. I could not move, nor could I use my weapons. My frame randomly decided to stand still and look pretty for the enemies that came up to bite his face off. 

The Good

There is still that 4.3% that tickles my fancy though. That 4.3% is generally made up of memories of Halo 2. For those of you who know Halo 2 online multiplayer well, you know it was filled with glitches. One of the most well-known glitches of Halo 2 is the glitch ‘high jump’. 

The reason I bring up this specific glitch is because it is allows you to exploit some of the most entertaining bugs in Halo 2. You will see that the player in the video above uses the high jump to go outside of the levels boundries. When my friends and I played Halo 2, we found a bunch of places where this was possible. It made exploring the multiplayer maps so much more fun, because we would try and discover all the secret locations that existed because of glitches. 

If you were a real jerk, you could also use the high jump to reach places where others could not easily find you. This was so much fun to do in Halo 2 King of the Hill matches (I was so not one of those jerks. I swear).

They can be helpful, too!

It is true that glitches have often caused me a great deal of agony. However, some glitches have actually added to the challenge of a game or even bettered the experience of a game. 

There are some glitches that are even beneficial to players. In Skyrim, there is the infinite book glitch. There is a certain book in Skyrim that can be found infinitely off the corpse of one enemy. Kill the enemy and you can get as many copies of the book as you want. Utilizing this glitch makes it really easy to earn money early on, because you can sell the books for about 50 gold each. 

Thanks to that glitch, I was able to craft the ultimate armors and gear early on in the game. 

Which is it?

So, I begin to wonder which it is. Are glitches good or bad? It is true that glitches have often caused me a great deal of agony. However, some glitches have actually added to the challenge of a game or even bettered the experience of a game. 

I would have to lean towards glitches being a force of good. This is because I enjoy the unpredictable element. Its awesome how something even beyond the scope of what the developers had planned can happen.

It sounds crazy, I know. Glitches usually cause more pain than good. However, think back, can you honestly say there was never a time you thought a certain glitch made a game better instead of worse? Let me know in the comments.