Ethics Professor Weighs in on Save Scumming ‘Debate’ Reignited by ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’

Baldur’s Gate 3 is just a little over a month old at this point, and its iron grip on the pop culture zeitgeist doesn’t seem to have any interest in weakening. That’s just as well, because everyone still seems to have no interest in admitting that putting Baldur’s Gate 3 on the pedestal it’s been occupying is actually just a global practical joke that I missed the memo on.

Whatever the case, it won’t be leaving the wider gaming conversation anytime soon, and a game of this size was always going to leave plenty to talk about in its wake, such as the exhausting back-and-forth on the topic of “save scumming,” which, regardless of your opinion on the practice, is a rather rampant tactic amongst the Baldur’s Gate 3 faithful.

For those of you not in the know, save scumming is the practice of saving your game right before the state of affairs could potentially turn a bit dire, and simply reloading that save if such an omen turns out to be true, putting you back to where you were before you took that plunge and effectively eliminating the risk at play in any given moment.

The practice has drawn a lot of flak from those who view it as cheating or otherwise unethical, but the other side of the fence may have just gained a marked boon in this asinine discourse in the form of Dr. Dr. Casey Fiesler, who recently took to TikTok to point out the absurdity of making a value judgment against someone for practicing save scumming in a single-player video game.

And Dr. Fiesler, like pretty much every person who’s participated in this debate since it first entered the ring, has completely missed the point of the actual harms that the existence of save scumming represents from a game design perspective, on account of getting swept up in some myopic dispute about the ethics of the players.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rather woefully-crafted game; that isn’t to say it’s a bad thing or a bad piece of media, but it is, by essential metrics, a bad game, and the fact that it allows save scumming highlights that immaculately. All gameplay is built upon decision-making, wherein both the gains and ramifications of that decision (and I mean actual decisions like sacrificing a spell slot or taking a high-risk, high-reward position in combat, not accidentally doing something that Gale disapproves of) stimulate the brain in a way that only games can, and subsequently leads you to crack each individual code for the win condition with whatever tools you have at your disposal.

By permitting save-scumming, then, the developers have rendered both the gains and ramifications of most every decision moot, which butchers the gameplay to a marked degree, and that’s without getting into the flimsy foundation that Baldur’s Gate 3 builds its rather sparse mechanical gameplay on in the first place.

But I’ll save that breakdown for another time. For now, rest assured that you’re not a bad person if you save scum in Baldur’s Gate 3, and if anyone challenges that, you can now tell them that Dr. Fiesler said so.

(featured image: Larian Studios)