'Cheating' is not playing the game the way your competition regards as fair. It's getting an unfair advantage by using techniques that your opponents wouldn't use.
Consider this: Imagine a fighting game which is unbalanced. 'Unbalanced', here, means that one character is so inherently better that using it is a victory condition in itself; maybe it can spam a really effective move without giving the opponent a chance to retaliate. Whatever the details, the person who chooses that character is guaranteed a victory assuming they play to win.
In that case, the community of people who play that game would effectively ban the character to make the game as it is played more balanced. Anyone who picks that character would be unable to find opponents, and everyone else would restrict themselves to the characters which offer both players a chance to win.
My point is, in that not-entirely-contrived scenario, doing something the game software allows is cheating because it is something the game community has agreed to be cheating. Cheating has little to do with what the un-hacked code allows. In fact, in this case, hacking the code to remove the unbalanced character (or, more likely, to make that character unavailable on the selection screen) would remove a possible cheat, making the hacked version less amenable to cheating.
David Sirlin wrote a book called "Playing To Win" which touches on a lot of what I just talked about. He was actually lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, and Kongai:
Consider this: Imagine a fighting game which is unbalanced. 'Unbalanced', here, means that one character is so inherently better that using it is a victory condition in itself; maybe it can spam a really effective move without giving the opponent a chance to retaliate. Whatever the details, the person who chooses that character is guaranteed a victory assuming they play to win.
In that case, the community of people who play that game would effectively ban the character to make the game as it is played more balanced. Anyone who picks that character would be unable to find opponents, and everyone else would restrict themselves to the characters which offer both players a chance to win.
My point is, in that not-entirely-contrived scenario, doing something the game software allows is cheating because it is something the game community has agreed to be cheating. Cheating has little to do with what the un-hacked code allows. In fact, in this case, hacking the code to remove the unbalanced character (or, more likely, to make that character unavailable on the selection screen) would remove a possible cheat, making the hacked version less amenable to cheating.
David Sirlin wrote a book called "Playing To Win" which touches on a lot of what I just talked about. He was actually lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, and Kongai:
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/