14 DAY TRIAL // Save Scumming has been a contested subject of debate ever since people figured out that you can often get much-hailed random number generator gods to bestow an advantage upon you, if you're patient enough.
The term comes from the roguelike community, where players tried to eschew the permadeath penalty by resorting to this, which defeats the whole purpose of a roguelike game, and thus was highly frowned upon.
Over the ages, save scumming has become a method employed by many gamers attempting to get the most out of a certain encounter while not risking anything, and I have often resorted to it during my gaming career, especially during the times where you need a particularly lucky shot to start things off smoothly, such as killing an enemy with a headshot in Fallout 2.
This works very well in single player, and the reasoning behind it is pretty simple. About to start a war? Don't know if you'd win? Save and find out. Should the results be to your satisfaction, then very well, get a tap on the shoulder and carry on. Should you get your hopes and dreams crushed, just reload and whistle innocuously like nothing happened.
Furthermore, some developers even make it a necessity, especially if you're the kind who wants to get all the achievements, and Japanese developers are notorious for rewarding this kind of dedication, making some encounters so difficult that you need to get lucky in order to be able to progress.
Another more "legitimate" use of save scumming is meant to save the state of the game at a branching point, in order to explore the story from a different perspective later on without having to start all over again, but for the purposes of this article, I'll only be referring to the nefarious one.
Over time, some video game developers, particularly in strategy titles, thought of ways to remove it, since luck is a factor that should be taken "as is" and not taken advantage of.
As such, I remember listening to a podcast where the makers of Alpha Centauri were discussing a clever way they meant to prevent players from abusing luck by storing the seed used to generate random numbers in the actual save file, which lead to the same result occurring over and over again and prevented players from altering the course of an encounter by getting a lucky shot.
The result was that a tester came to them to report a bug, after trying to win the same battle over and over again by resorting to save scumming, and finding that the result was the same every time. Nobody expected this to be interpreted as a bug, and the devs eventually decided to make this an optional feature, instead of denying their players the option to cheat.
The problem escalated to the point where in Civilization 3, the spearman vs. tank gif became a meme, and was integrated into the game's lore, sparking countless debates on the game's forums. Civilization also prevented save scumming by saving the RNG seed, but you could get a different seed by moving around for a bit before repeating the intended action.
As such, it sometimes becomes a necessary evil to use save scumming in order to get out of otherwise embarrassing situations, particularly when it all boils down to faulty design, but it's a slippery slope.
The flipside is that there are people who take advantage of any kind of glitch in order to defeat the poor computer. I remember a friend telling me about how he gets around bad enemy AI in games such as Morrowind in order to gain an unfair advantage when confronted with a large number of enemies, which prompted me to consider the implications of using this method.
I want my games to treat me fairly, and as such, I want to treat them fairly. That means that when I fail to pick someone's pocket in Skyrim, I don't sigh and reload, I cut them down or flee and live with the consequences of my actions.
Which is the reason I was very glad to find that some developers went out of their way to ensure that players who use save scumming hoping to get lucky have a bad day, by making sure that your chances to lose the next battle after a save skyrocket.
I know there are people in the world who reload the game each time a lockpick breaks and who take glee when the AI in Heroes of Might and Magic casually walks into your hale of arrows while you hold back your melee troops to defend, but should that kind of unfair behavior really be encouraged?
I am always in favor of punishing save scumming, but in the end, it's a matter of personal choice. Some people take pleasure in torturing the poor computer over and over, like that kid who always changed the rules of the game on the fly so he would win all the time. Should developers let that kid have his way?