Playing a video game is a deeply personal experience. Unlike other mediums, you’re in control of what happens. I’m not just talking about making choices in an RPG, but the way every single press of a button or tilt of a stick adds up to make your playthrough different from mine. While we always bring something of ourselves to books, movies or albums, the core text never changes. Unless you decide to cut up a novel and then stick the pages together in the wrong order or something.
You can watch someone else play a game, and there are now more ways to do so than ever, but it’s not the same as poking around in someone else’s game, something I’d never given any thought to. Not until I saw a message on Twitter asking for help with Elden Ring. This person, who I’m going to call Sellen, because they asked to be anonymous and it’s the first Elden Ring NPC name that sprang to mind, had messed up their Elden Ring save game. They’d accidentally killed an NPC that they very much did not want to kill and were quite distraught. They shared that save with their partner and didn’t want to potentially ruin the game for them.
Sellen was offering to pay someone to recreate their Elden Ring save, but without the unfortunate death of poor Jar Bairn. I can totally understand why, as young JB is an adorable little example of Elden Ring’s fascinating pot people. Paying someone to play a game for you may seem strange, but after chatting with them privately, I discovered that they were both busy folks with little time to play games. While they’d only played the game for sixteen hours or so, that represented a couple of months of shared time that would be hard to get back. Intrigued by the challenge recreating their save presented, I accepted the oddest commission of my freelance career so far.
