Save scumming as radical self-care

Bloodborne is one of the most frustrating, maddening, fantastic games I have ever played. It also, somewhat paradoxically, helped me manage my IRL anxiety. That is not a sentence I expected to write before booting up my first From Software game, from which I peaced out around Shadows of Yharnam because I had other things to do with my life than spend hours on a bullshit three-on-one boss encounter, but I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed the time I did sink into it. Even that kinda seems like the wrong verb to use for a Souls game: enjoyed. The difficulty level, patronising simplicity of the “YOU DIED” Game Over screen and general inscrutability mean that, largely, the language we use to describe playing a game by Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team it supposed to be more akin to some kind of a trial, a challenge, something you persevere through. In actuality, I found it pretty comparable to my own coping mechanisms.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working hard to address the anxiety I’ve suffered from for most of my life. Not only have I been identifying the triggers that make my body respond to a basic business transaction like I’ve been stuck in an enclosed space with a pack of lions (I’ve yet to test if, conversely, I would actually be super chill in a lion-taming situation), I’ve been trying to challenge them, too. One of the key triggers for me, by way of example, is new situations. Whether it’s an unfamiliar takeaway food place where I don’t know the exact protocol of ordering or a comic shop where I don’t know the layout, entering into a location or interaction beyond my usual ken causes my fight-or-flight response to activate something fierce. It’s really fucking annoying.

So what I have to do is prove to myself that nothing bad is going to happen, despite all the bodily response acting as if it will. Rather than just stick to the same three coffee shops, bagel places and nerd palaces, I’ve been forcing myself to go through this initial crucible of clammy palms and flop sweat. Because I like doing new things, and I know that after that first time, I’m absolutely fine. That place has been conquered. My brain is assured that nothing bad is going to happen, and so it cools it with the raised heart rate and sweat and panic. When I’ve cased the joint, got the schematics in my head, know where all the exits are, the anxiety is banished until the next time I’m foolhardy enough to try that new bánh-mì joint down the road. Maybe you can see where I’m going with this and Bloodborne.

My first morning with the game was the same as that of most players, in that I died a lot. Rather than being a frustrating experience, though, with each repetition of the same section I inched a little closer to my goal. Each encounter with an enemy taught me something more about the environment. I learnt from my mistakes. I started to memorise enemy placement, the best ways of dispatching them, the layout of the game world. By the time you get past that initial approach to Central Yharnam, you’re breezing through a series of bad guys without even breaking a sweat, where before you fell prey instantly to the first uggo with a pitchfork. What was once a terrifying, fraught situation where — in typical Dark Souls fashion — you’re given nary a clue of your goal, the basic mechanics or controls, or really anything, you’re now in near-complete control.

Now, I stand by my objections to Dishonored 2 on an ideological level, but I have to admit that it’s hard to dissociate those issues from the pure, biological response of panic I felt playing a lot of it. In theory, I dig the idea of completing the game any way you want, with multiple paths through each level and a bevy of different approaches to completing each objective. On more than one semi-drunken occasion I have waffled on about the still-mostly-untapped potential of emergent gameplay and narrative, those moments where a load of pre-programmed systems interact in fun and surprising ways to create moments of unique joy, laughter or terror that an interaction that’s been coded in by developers simply cannot touch. Yet it’s also exactly the sort of thing that sets my adrenal glands into overdrive.

What with my anxiety taking a form not unlike the protocol when a state dignitary visits some civilian business of dwelling — before they can enter, their security detail has to go in, lock down all the emergency exits, sweep for potential dangers etc — playing immersive sims can be kind of tricky. Rather than doing any of the cool stuff I saw people posting clips of online, chaining Emily/Corvo’s abilities in innovative ways and ghosting through levels I had trouble clearing on a high-chaos run (ie the ones where you murder everybody), I mostly just squicked out and turned the console off when confronted with any major roadblock to my advancement. This is not an argument against any kind of tension in games — if that were my stance, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my gaming life hiding in lockers and cardboard boxes in various iterations of Metal Gear — but an exploration of my own personal comfort with such things.

This was the advice I had read online before first booting up Bloodborne: death is not the end. Don’t be so hard on yourself whenever you see that “YOU DIED” screen, because you’ll be seeing it a lot. Despite being coded as suitably final, there’s a Groundhog Day-style lack of consequences to each demise. You get resurrected straight away, back where you were, and ready to give whatever situation thwarted you another shot with the new information you learned. It’s not dissimilar to the “immersive sim” genre of which Dishonored is an example.

Souls games lack many of the cosmetic markers of the immersive sim, but they do have some similarities. They are also free to explore as you choose, and you can overcome obstacles in any number of ways (I’ve seen people do all kinds of neat tricks on that first big troll guy you meet on the other sides of that gate in early Yharnam; I just threw all my Molotovs at him until he fell and I reaped that sweet sweet blood). This core gameplay loop is incredibly familiar to the anxiety sufferer trying to overcome my particular chemical quirk. It’s a safe space to test, and prove, the credo “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again”. It’s also, essentially, an in-built, approved version of save scumming, itself a cornerstone of the largely PC-born immersive sim genre.

Save scumming, if you’re somehow unaware of this practice, is yet another aspect of PC gaming that has made its way to consoles, along with huge day one patches, graphics your console can’t actually handle, and people on chat yelling homophobic slurs at you.. Graham Smith “confessed” to indulging in save scumming in a great Rock Paper Shotgun article on Football Manager 2015:

Save scumming is where something happens in a game that you don’t like as a result of your actions, and so you load an earlier save for a chance to undo it. It’s cheating, in other words – and depending on who you ask, mainly cheating yourself.

I can sympathise with that viewpoint. What do games matter if you’re simply going to keep your fingers between the pages and flick back any time you don’t like the consequences? There are a lot of games I love specifically because of the cascading failures your incorrect decisions create – whether it’s losing beloved soldiers in XCOM or dying in a puddle in NEO Scavenger.

But there are other games, too. Games which turn me into the storyteller from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, where something goes wrong and I think, “Hang on, wait, that’s not right.”..Am I cheating myself? I don’t think so. I don’t even feel like I’m cheating.

When I play games, it’s very rarely about testing my mettle against the machine. I’ve little interest in overcoming prescribed challenges set for me, and even less so overcoming obtuse systems for the mere sake of achieving higher numbers than an opponent. My interest in playing games is mostly for the stories I get out of it; anecdotes I can share with friends, write about on here, or simply tell myself out of a sense of comfort.

A commenter on the post notes that Life is Strange, like Sands of Time, integrates this kind of thing into its gameplay as well. “One of the things I liked about Life is Strange is that you could explore each choice to see what the short term consequences were – and the game actively encourages you to. This helped tamp down the ‘what if’ paralysis I often experience in games that use checkpoints. I still prefer games provide multiple ‘save anywhere’ slots though, if only to avoid the need to replay the same tedious section multiple times because of a poorly placed checkpoint.”

I largely agree with this angle. Without wanting to open up old wounds about the fetishisation of skill in video game culture (ugh), I’m also not someone who necessarily wants an insurmountable challenge when I boot up a game. I want to play the game, not be put off by the uncontrollable biological response that tries to put me off doing so, same as I wanna eat some damn Vietnamese pork in a baguette despite by brain telling me that doing so would be worse than death.

Despite my rough experience with Dishonored 2, I just bought the sorta-standalone, sorta-DLC spin-off Death of the Outsider, because who could turn down the chance to play as a one-armed, one-eyed bisexual pirate voiced by Rosario Dawson? And I’m thoroughly enjoying it, largely due to the amount of save scumming I’m doing.  Whereas the previous game had you slowly accruing abilities and weapons, until you could fully exploit all of the wonderful interconnected systems Arkane put in the game, Death of the Outsider just gives you them all right at the start (you still have the chance to collect bonecharms to “level up” various skills, and a black market where you can buy other weapons and accessories).

As Robert Yang wrote in his somewhat pessimistic blog post about the poor sales of recent immersive sims about these new mechanics, including “Foresight” — which lets you float an astral projection around for a limited period and mark guards and points of interest, allowing you to plan you approach in a manner akin to Invisible Inc — and how they change the gameplay:

Death of the Outsider is also more relaxed than previous Dishonored games. You get plenty of taser bullets and gas grenades, mana quickly regenerates, and new powers are unlocked instantly.

Most importantly, you can switch your play style from mission to mission without incurring the wrath of a global “Chaos” system. Instead, they encourage specific play styles for specific missions — a “Contracts” side-quest system encourages you to carefully ghost around the bank and avoid noise, or for the museum, you’re told you can murder almost everyone (like 50+ people!) in the entire level…But again, Foresight makes two big changes that depart from Dark Vision and the detective mode — it lets you fly around as an invisible ghost, and it freezes time as you do it. This basically transforms Dishonored into a turn-based stealth strategy game with sort of “semi-complete information.” It rejects the continuity of space and time — it’s no longer a game about first person creeping through a level from point A to point B with incomplete information. It even visualises the guard’s next patrol path.

That means that, from the off, you’re encouraged to experiment. You’re also encouraged to hit the Options button and then simply hold down R2 for a few seconds to quick save, and L2 to quick load. So, along with enjoying the story and characters and characteristically gorgeous art design, I’ve been having a lot of fun just fucking about. Can I teleport down there, knock out a guard, steal his face and then walk straight into a bank vault without anyone questioning it? Can I pull somebody into a cupboard using a wire mine, close the door, and have none of their colleagues on patrol notice their absence? Is it messed up if I lure a baddie into a room full of blood flies by throwing a series of glass bottles to get his attention? Some of these approaches worked. Some of them resulted in my getting shanked in the chest. None of them felt like a waste of time and, crucially, none of them made me feel like I was having a panic attack.

I’ve also not felt much anxiety during my time with Arkane’s Prey, although almost every Mimic encounter does involve a fair amount of blind wrench-swinging and accidentally switching my flashlight on as my hands mash the controller. Partially that’s down to it being in the lineage of System Shock-inspired shooters (ala BioShock), a sub-genre that’s got a nostalgic comfort to it. But I think the save-scumming aspect also has a role to play there, as does the fact that the space station TALOS-1 is split up into discrete areas for you to mess around in. It’s striking that right balance between empowerment and powerlessness. I’m certainly not totally comfortable in every section I stumble into — least of all the first time I came across the ten-foot-tall alien antagonist suitably dubbed the “Nightmare” — but neither do I just freak out and leg it.

I think the chaos system in Dishonored 2, which is absent from Death of the Outsider and Prey (whose own version of a kind of gamified morality system is something I’ll address in my forthcoming, proper review of the game), doesn’t help either. There’s added pressure not to just go crazy and kill everybody when in a tight spot, because you’ll get a worse ending. You have to do it right in these situations where you don’t know where any guards or exits are and oh my god kill me now.

These are not necessarily watertight criticisms of the games highlighted, more a personal reflection on how they trigger certain responses in me. But as with in my real life, I’m interested in digging into these triggers, confronting them and challenging them rather than just accepting it as some insoluble part of my broken brain. It’s interesting because, along with stumping for emergent gameplay, one of my other old saws is enjoying games that throw off the shackles of the traditional empowered hero narrative, and don’t give you what you want (Cameron Kunzelman actually wrote a great piece about how Dark Souls 2 brings the idea of repetition into its gameplay and narrative, enhancing the horror of its premise). I like games that aren’t about making you an unassailable super-being. Being able to turn back time and deal with things like a regular human being, though, is a god-like power I can get behind.