scumming
Pluralscummings (some meanings)
- 1The practice of reloading a saved game, or restarting it, so as to play on with a better outcome than the first attempt produced.
Purists sneer at the scumming that lets players reload until every dice roll goes their way.
The game deletes your save when your character dies, precisely to stop scumming.
Note
The fuller name is save-scumming: reloading until the dice fall right, so that bad luck never has to be lived with. It shares the sneer of the easy-rewards tactic, and games with permanent death delete the save when a character dies partly to rule it out.
- 2The scum that is skimmed off the surface of a liquid.
Similarskimmings
Note
Mostly met in the plural, like its near twin skimmings: the scummings are the gray froth a cook lifts off a simmering stock and throws away. The singular, scumming, treats the same matter as a mass. It is the kitchen cousin of the printer's word, built the same way.
- 3The tactic of gathering easy rewards in areas that pose little challenge, as when a high-level character returns to the early levels of a roguelike game.
Hours of scumming on the shallow floors had left his warrior rich but no stronger.
Veteran players dismiss that kind of scumming as a waste of a good character.
Note
Gamers probably reshaped skimming into this word, letting scum lend it contempt: the player skims easy rewards off the top, from levels the character has long outgrown. It is a charge rather than a neutral name for a tactic, and calling someone's play scumming says they are taking the reward without the risk.
- 4A buildup of sticky ink on a printing plate.
Scumming on the plate meant the blank margins came out faintly tinted.
The pressman blamed the scumming on a poor balance between ink and water.
Note
A press fault that shows where the page should stay clean: ink clings to parts of the plate meant to repel it, and blank margins print with a faint tint. On an offset press, printers often trace it to the balance of ink and water or to a worn plate. The word is simply scum with -ing, a film settling where it should not.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of scumming apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origins
Formed from scum + -ing.
Probably from skimming, altered under the influence of the derogatory sense of scum.