Some people get joy out of making other people unhappy. It’s not about winning, it’s about making others lose. Cheating in games is a very low stakes and easy way to achieve this. I’m no psychologist, but this is the only explanation I’ve been able to convince myself of.

Cheating has a rich set of reasons, and any one cheater may be doing it for a mix of them. For some it is to show power over other (like to make them unhappy in your example), for some it might be a sense of entitlement (I've paid for this game I should have the right to win it how I like), in some games there are people paying others (in game tokens or real world money) to level up for them and those doing the levelling up are using cheats to improve their profitability, and a number of other reasons.

Some people play for the socialization, some people play for the challenge, and some people play to win (ie, display their “dominance”). It’s just different personalities and values.

The latter group will often cheat if necessary as winning is the need and the priority. The talented ones usually end up in profitable pursuits like business and poker rooms. The losers (pun intended) will gravitate toward friendly competitions where people have their guard down and cheating is easy. At least that’s what I’ve seen.

The best strategy is to detect these people and ban them because appealing to values won’t work.

Reminds me of joining a lobby of the original Modern Warfare 2 only to find that there was a cheater, but a generous cheater. All players were flying around in noclip mode, armed with pistols that shot giant explosive rounds. It was a blast.

If there are gonna be cheaters, I'd rather they do silly shit like that than just be using wallhacks, radar, or aimbots.

Sorry, that was me. I about 12 years old at the time. There was crazy stuff you can do like decrease the time between shots, but what I liked to do was play as the tie bomber, fly around(also unfair), and drop mines at a normal rate.

People cheat at games because games invoke some fundamental response that's hard wired in us that drives us to achieve goals, win, out-compete, etc. and as they say all is fair in love and war.

People say they "play for fun", but something is not just inherently fun, it's fun for a reason. That might vary from person to person, but you would always find some victory condition, goal, or competitive behavior in there. Even the people complaining in this thread that people are not playing for fun - if they were "playing for fun" as they put it and winning did not matter, then why would it matter that other people are cheating? Shouldn't they just be playing for fun? No, the reality is if you have no chance to ever win or achieve anything, it's not fun for anybody.

So the better question is why don't you just find it fun to test your skill against others? And some people certainly do and get little satisfaction winning games dishonestly, but there is some drive to just win in all of us. In evolutionary terms, practicing and persisting and honing skill would have been extremely valuable. So would deceiving and cheating and playing unfairly to win so it's in all of us to some degree.