Have game designers failed when players are cheating?

"If somebody's encouraged to use cheats…I've kind of failed as a designer. Because they want to play a different game than the game I'm providing for them."

-The always-inspiring Sid Meier (of Civilization fame) with some food-for-thought for video game designers, courtesy of documentary Critical Path. Meier says that his studio Firaxis spends a lot of playtesting time determining if players are trying to circumvent the game's systems and break them, rather than absorbing themselves in the rules of the world. "Trying to understand why people do that is part of our game design process," he says.