This week was really interesting for me as I am someone who has never really explored a game with cheats. I think at first I may have gotten a bit carried away. Going right into episode two I made my self invulnerable, gave myself all weapons and keys, and enabled walking through walls.
However, I found that by using these cheats, especially walking through walls, I was not really able to fully understand and experience the level design. I found myself just sort of zipping through each level without paying attention at all to my surroundings.
I solved this problem best by disabling walking through walls. Disabling this cheat in particular still allowed me to explore what it feels like to play a game with cheats while still allowing me to effectively tour the architecture of Doom without fear of being killed.
Exploring Doom in this manner really allowed me to explore the level design in a very different way than how I explored level 1. The play through of level 1 allowed me to learn about what it was like to look at and play the game from a players perspective. Whereas touring the game in episodes 2 and 3 allowed me to see more of the developers’ and designers’ perspectives and made me think much more about the overall story of Doom and how that is portrayed.