"Save scumming"—the practice of quickly reloading saves after an undesired result in a video game—brings out some really weird opinions on Al Gore's internet. But maybe people have weird opinions about save scumming because save scumming is itself "weird." Players are used to "game over" screens or fail states that dump them back at the last checkpoint.
According to Mimimi Games head of design Moritz Wagner, plenty of players—players who even rely on save scumming in games—tend to think of it as "cheating." "They feel like they're doing something that's not intended by the game, because that's how it often is games," he said. But mitigating that feeling can be a matter of design, as it was for his team during the development of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew.
Read his thoughts on why players are averse to this type of in-game rule-bending, and how he set out to address its accompanying sense of guilt by baking save scumming right into the game, in our interview over at Game Developer.