You can never win, for I have saved my game.

In this story, I have the power. Time is on my side. I am the chosen one. You can surprise me around the next corner, but you will never stop me. I can dodge all your moves now. I know all about you. You've tried to kill me thousands of times, but I’m coming back for more. All you can see is my success. You can never win, for I have saved my game.



Does anyone hear an ear piercing tune right now? Just me?

It is common courtesy to give the player a save option or a pause option. We often need to be able to stop playing a game when there is something else more important to do. (Something more important to do… hah!) Most of the games that I have played recently include the option to save a game.

But we didn’t always have it. The old NES and Atari games that I started out on didn’t have any way to save progress. Sometimes we had passwords, but I hated passwords for the most part. Most of the time we had to leave games like Ninja Gaiden behind and go have dinner. We either lost all of our progress or we left the system on and risked our parents shutting the system off to save power.

I would stack up other Nintendo games to cover up the red light next to the power button so no one knew it was on. It was a useful technique when I tried to play through Final Fantasy when the save game battery was dead. Still, something I would do all the time when I was little was to tell my parents, “Give me a minute! I have to save my game!”

Most of the games, back in the day, were based on high scores. You could say, in games like Pac Man, that the only progress you can save is your score.

Today, in games like Mass Effect, you can save anywhere. It’s extremely useful for the player. It makes it very easy for you to get everything exactly right. Your main menu even has a load option. You will lose some time loading and saving, but it ends up being worth it if you are dealing with your character’s love interest. How empowering is it to be able to systematically rule out all errors when flirting with your significant other?

These thoughts might be obvious to some. But what is not obvious is how these things change a player’s emotion, or how it changes the player’s story.

Which brings me to this: In theory, even in multiplayer games, you can eventually play out the exact story that you want to play out. No matter what mode you play, no matter how difficult. Unless you are stopped by rules in the game, you can play out any story within that world. With some skill and memory, you can beat Ninja Gaiden. With some time on your hands you can get a level 99 character in Diablo 2’s hardcore mode.

Diablo 2’s hardcore mode is one of the harshest game-play modes I’ve seen. The challenges in the game stay the same, but if you die, you lose all progress. I know how many hours my friends have spent on getting their Diablo 2 characters over level 80. One of my friends told me that losing a level 90 hardcore mode Diablo 2 character was the first time a video game made them cry. Eat that Aries death scene.

Which brings me to what I think is a fundamental rule: Save games alleviate the punishment of lost progress. That is what they do. That is how they roll. A secondary function would be to make sure you have your progress saved when your machine is turned completely off.

But, something about this worries me. I mean, it is so cool to have the power of Groundhog Day, but often I have played games where the enemies and villains have fallen short because of a feature that isn't supposed to be part of the story. It’s hard to be the villain when you are fighting the chosen one. It’s even worse when you have difficult games like Prince of Persia being tempered by game features that rewind the game so that you can try again.

If video games are going to continue to use save game features, then there needs to be even more of an effort to integrate the feature into the system and get rid of the annoyances that show up with this kind of feature.

I feel that the biggest issues come up when you are spending most of your time in menus, saving your game around every corner. If the game you are playing is so difficult that you find yourself doing this, then why not an auto save feature? This hearkens back to my experience with the old Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Half-life, etc. I wasn’t the most skilled player at the time, but eventually other games like Halo 3 would just auto-save. After that, I didn’t lose nearly as much progress. And I didn’t have to increase my skill level. I was much less inclined to throw my controller.

At first I was ashamed. I wasn't buying games that were difficult. I wasn't playing games like Ikaruga that punish you, but give you that feeling of accomplishment for getting through it. Maybe I was buying games like Tales of Symphonia because they felt safe.

But the feeling of shame subsided when I got into my career. I had no time to play games that I could lose progress with. I had no patience for games that didn't save right when I wanted them to. I don't normally have time to play a game that puts the next check point a half hour ahead. I only really have two good hours after work to play. I mean, in some older games, you could literally lose more than those two hours if you hadn't saved progress.



I've looked around for games with new ways to make video games that alleviate the pain of lost progress. And I found VVVVVV. It’s strange, because in this game, you’ll never lose progress. Every single challenge has a checkpoint. This is one of the first games that I have played that I was both able to appreciate the high difficulty and didn’t have to save my game around every corner. Save the game only when you want to quit. If you die, you lose almost no progress at all. I didn’t feel like any time I spent on that game was wasted. Perfect. It was very well thought out.

My thoughts go a little further into how save games could affect game-play or story.

For one, if you had the power in real life to save your game, it would be like keeping a memory that you could think back to and then will yourself back in time. If those memories were a part of the main character’s secret powers, then why not add save games to a forgetful protagonist’s memory to load up and play out scenes from his or her childhood. Those scenes might be triggered by finding an old toy you used to play with, and may give you clues about a mystery.

And, about the villains, the one thing that a villain could do to stop your character (if he knew about your ability to save your game) would be tricking you into saving your game in the wrong place. I can imagine a whole game based on tricking you into saving your progress inside a jail that you couldn’t get out of, or saving before a challenge that you could technically never finish. It’s a game with a lot of dead ends, but that would be the point.

A big puzzle could be made out of it and give you big twists in the story, like realizing that you have to go to the beginning of the game because you missed something that you should have done at a crucial moment at the very beginning of the game. It would be a very tangled web, but could be very interesting if someone thought of the proper puzzle. I didn’t like the movie Next (the one with Nic Cage), but it was derived from a story from Philip K. Dick called The Golden Man that would fit perfectly into this type of game. It has a character that is bent on figuring out the best of all possible futures, and picking the right one. The movie has a point in the story that brings the audience all the way back to the beginning of the story, and it was quite a twist. (Dick’s short story is much better though.)

I have high hopes for the future of games. I enjoy them more and more as they become more main-stream and as companies and indie contributors get more and more competitive.

I hope I have given everyone some food for thought.