Barely an hour into Elden Ring From Software

Barely an hour into Elden Ring, the latest furiously difficult fantasy adventure by the Japanese studio From Software, I made a vital discovery: enemy warriors can be tricked into falling down lift shafts. Or off cliffs. I even managed to tempt one skilled and deadly knight to walk out of his castle and into the path of a giant boulder – a trap that had been meant for me. It killed him instantly, saving me an intense battle that would have probably involved multiple deaths and restarts. I knew that I had crossed an important, almost forbidden Rubicon – I was now cheesing one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year.

Cheesing is video-game slang for beating tasks or enemies through tactics that while not exactly cheating, are certainly not following Queensbury rules. When you cheese a game, you’re exploiting systemic quirks or apparent design oversights to gain maximum advantage for minimum skill or effort. Players have always cheesed. It’s something I discovered via the 1985 fighting game Way of the Exploding Fist, in which every single one of the enemy fighters could be beaten by continuously using the leg sweep move. Later, Street Fighter II became notorious for its vulnerability to cheese aficionados. These ignoble warriors would invariably play as Blanka, whose electrification move afforded vital seconds of invulnerability.

Recently, I tweeted a request for people’s favourite memories of their own cheesy video-game victories, and the replies were an absolute delight. From kicking enemy soldiers off battlements in Assassin’s Creed to pummelling bosses just as they appear on screen in Streets of Rage, to standing in exactly the right spot in Zelda 2, respondents delighted in beating computer-controlled enemies in ways the designers probably hadn’t conceived. The most popular response, however, was from Andrew Brazier, who wrote:

“In Rollercoaster Tycoon on the mission where you had to have a more popular park than the one next door – I built a rollercoaster that launched riders over the boundary fence to their death. The fatalities get recorded on the other park’s stats, so their popularity bombs.”

The tweet garnered more than 300 likes. Evidently people admired its combination of ingenious thinking and extreme violence.

But is cheesing inherently wrong? Is it bad? I don’t think it is – it’s just a more abstract and tangental approach to victory. The writer and philosopher Edward de Bono defined lateral thinking as “breaking out of the concept prison of old ideas”, and this is kind of what cheesing is about – it challenges accepted concepts of gameplay and game skill. Lateral thinking during conflict is something we have begrudgingly admired throughout history, from the Trojan horse, through machiavellian political philosophy, to today’s sports stars. One of the most celebrated victories in tennis history was when young pretender Michael Chang beat superstar Ivan Lendl at the French Open in 1989 through literally underhand tactics.

Cheesing represents an interesting dichotomy between two types of video-game consumers: “game players”, who see the experience in abstract terms, as a puzzle to be defeated through any affordance available, and “role players” who seek to inhabit the character and the universe, and exist within its narrative constraints. Neither of those is wrong per se, they’re just coming at the idea of victory from different perspectives.

There are, however, gradients on the cheesing scale. For example, standing in an area that a computer-controlled enemy can’t legitimately get to is one thing, but taking advantage of an enemy getting helplessly stuck in the scenery due to a character model glitch is quite another. I mean, I’m not above this – it’s how I defeated most of the boss battles in Cyberpunk 2077 – but it feels more like cynical exploitation rather than gaming the system. Replying to my tweet on cheesing, the games journalist Jason Schreier cheerfully admitted to beating one of the toughest bosses in the co-op online shooter Destiny by yanking out his LAN cable at a vital moment, thereby taking advantage of an error in the game’s net code.

Look, as a race, human beings are designed to seek, understand and exploit patterns and systems: nobody ever killed a sabre-toothed predator while playing by its rules. There is a peculiar pleasure in beating a system in a way that the system didn’t expect; it reminds us that we are individuals and that we have agency. Sure, when I beat Elden Ring’s awesomely powerful Tree Sentinel by hiding in the alcove of a church and repeatedly poking him with a spear, I didn’t walk away feeling glorious (it would not have made a great ending to a Homerian epic or Hollywood action flick). But I did walk away, which is more than could be said for the Tree Sentinel.

There is a vital lesson here, which goes beyond gaming. The victories that you celebrate with a wry smile are often more lasting and meaningful than the ones accompanied by a fist pump and a yell. If the system is set up against you, every quiet disobedience is a triumph. To slightly misquote Katharine Hamnett’s 1983 T-shirt slogan: cheese life.

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Barely an hour into Elden Ring From Software

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