Breath of the Wild and the ethics of amiibo hacking
For the past week, I’ve been cheating in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I don’t mean that I’m running an illegally obtained version of the game on an emulator, or that I’m exploiting the game’s design flaws to skip over parts of the story I’d rather not deal with. Instead, I’m relying on pieces of counterfeit software code to access items in the game that are otherwise hidden behind Nintendo’s elusive amiibo figurines. Whether that constitutes cheating in the true sense of the word is debatable, and there are a lot of factors to consider before coming down on one side or the other.
First, an amiibo primer is in order. These small NFC-equipped toys are collectibles, but…
