Is it possible to cheat in a single player game?

Of course it's subjective, but when I say "worse experience," I don't mean "worse for the player" (though that can easily be the result), I mean "less evocative of the developer's desired message." Players will almost always cheat to make themselves feel more comfortable, and feeling more comfortable isn't always the game's objective. Ideally, I would want games to be considered like literature. Getting through Heart of Darkness or Beloved isn't a universally loved activity either, but that doesn't mean I'll endorse using the spark notes if you don't feel like struggling though the prose. I genuinely think that it isn't worth even bothering with novels like that if you're not going to engage with the text. They might not be your cup of tea, but that's kind of the point. By being different, tough, and uncomfortable, they expand your mind and hopefully improve you as a person. It's not just listening another story, it's grappling with an alternate mode of thinking. Getting the plot like you do from spark notes is secondary to the act of immersing yourself in the prose.

Like I said, most games aren't really there yet, nor will most ever be (it's not like every game can be as complex as rare literary masterpieces), so I don't expect every aspect of their being to be perfectly evocative of the game's underlying themes. Games are also in an interesting position where their narrative can be interesting and challenging while their gameplay isn't and vice versa. Hell, given how many dimensions games have compared to books, there could any number ofsmall aspects that someone could hate. In those situations, cheating is a perfectly acceptable tactic, but we should call cheating like it is: altering the experience usually to feel more comfortable. I'm not saying that's universally bad, it isn't. Just don't expect me to just tell someone to go ahead and cheat unless it's last resort or unless I know they likely wouldn't miss out on anything.

I think it's a shame that someone might miss out on the gratification of beating a super tough boss after multiple attempts or the tension that goes along with XCOM without save-scumming. If they're hell-bent on playing the game, but simply can't do it, sure, cheat, but I'd still encourage them not to.

This is why I'm all for variable difficulty levels. I wish that differences in difficulty had more attention put into them and more options in general (e.g. hours needed to grind), but something is better than nothing. The intended experience might be less mitigated that way. Ideally, these kinds of difficulty settings could be built more naturally in the game as well, like Dark Souls' summoning mechanic, but again, anything more curated is better than nothing.

And let's lay lay down some distinctions between modding and cheating. Modding can certainly be used to cheat, but not all modding is cheating. I'd define modding as either an experience unto itself or something that attempts to improve the existing experience of the game, whereas cheating is something that undermines the experience of the game without adding any significant experience of its own. There's a difference to toggling god mode on and actually providing an experience of a god, or cheating in a sack of cash and discovering a large quantity of gold left by a dead adventurer (even that would seem cheap without maybe a curse to go along with the gold).