The Save-Game Issue


The Save-Game Issue

Saving a game takes a snapshot of a game world and all its particulars at a given instant in time and stores them away somewhere. The player can then load the snapshot, return to that instant in the game world, and replay the game from that point. This might seem like a fairly straightforward thing to offer the player, but, in fact, it has consequences both for the player's experience of the game ”the story he's creating as he plays ”and for the way the player actually plays. Saving and restoring a game is technologically easy, and it's an essential tool for testing and debugging, so it's often slapped in as a feature without much thought about its effect on gameplay. As designers, though, it's our job to think about anything that affects gameplay or the player's experience of the game, and that includes the save-game feature.

Saving a game stores not only the player's location in the game, but also any customizations he might have made along the way. In Michelle Kwan's Figure Skating Championship , for example, the player could customize the body type, skin tone, hair color and style, and costume of the skater. The player could even load in a picture of her own face. The more freedom the player has to customize the avatar, the more data must be saved. Until recently, this has placed a limit on the richness of games for console machines. Games for personal computers could almost always be saved because PCs had disk drives available, but the feature came more slowly to console games. The oldest console machines, which simply emulated arcade machines, often had no way of saving games because they had no storage medium. If the player wanted to leave a game and come back to it later, he could only pause it and leave the console turned on. As a result, most of the games for these machines tended to feel a lot like arcade games as well. They were not designed to be played for a little while and then returned to a day or two later; they had to be played through in one sitting or abandoned .

Now that the Microsoft Xbox includes a hard disk drive, console machines can finally save games just as complex as personal computer games. This doesn't necessarily mean that Xbox games will be just like PC games ”there are still important differences between consoles and PCs ”but one significant barrier to rich gaming on consoles has been removed.

Reasons for Saving a Game

Three reasons exist for saving a player's game or allowing him to save it:

  • Allowing the player to leave the game and return to it later. This is the most important reason for saving the game. In a large game, it's an essential feature. It's not realistic and not fair to the player to expect him to dedicate the computer or console machine to a 40- hour game until it's finished.

  • Letting the player recover from disastrous mistakes. In practice, this usually means getting the avatar killed somehow. Arcade games, which have no save-game feature, traditionally give the player a fixed number of "lives" and chances to earn more along the way. Console action games have tended to follow the same scheme. Richer games, such as role-playing or adventure games, usually give the player only one life but allow him to reload a saved game if his avatar dies or he loses any possibility of winning the game.

  • Encouraging the player to explore alternate strategies. Saving the game is a useful feature in turn -based strategic games because it lets the player learn the game by trying alternative approaches. If one doesn't seem to work, he can go back to the point at which he committed himself to one plan and try another approach.

Consequences for Immersion and Storytelling

Saving a computer game is not part of its gameplay. The act of saving a game takes place outside the game world, even if it changes the way the player plays inside the game world. It destroys the suspension of disbelief. If a game is immersive and tries to create the illusion that the player inhabits a fantasy world, the act of saving a copy of the fantasy world destroys the illusion. One of the most significant characteristics of real life is that you cannot return to the past to correct errors you have made. The moment you allow a player to do this, you acknowledge that the fantasy world is only a game.

The essence of a story is dramatic tension, and dramatic tension requires that something be at stake. Saving a game in a game with a branching storyline profoundly affects the player's experience of the story. In the real world, decisions are irrevocable. Some can be changed later, their consequences modified at some point in the future, but the original decision itself cannot be unmade. But when a player follows first one branch of a branching storyline and then goes back in time and follows another branch, he experiences a very unnatural , unreal phenomenon . Dramatic tension is reduced because if the future can be altered by returning to the past at any moment and changing it, then nothing is really at stake.

Ways of Saving a Game

Over the years , designers have devised a variety of different ways of saving a game, each with their own consequences for immersion and gameplay.

Save to a File or "Save Slot"

The most common way of saving a game is to allow the player to interrupt the play and save it either into a file on the hard drive that the player can name , or, more commonly, to allow the player to save it into one of a series of named "slots" that the game program keeps track of. When the player wants to replay the saved game, he tells the program to load it from the directory of files or slots. This mechanism is useful because it allows the player to keep several different copies, saved at different points, and to name them so that he can remember which one is which.

Unfortunately, it's also the method most harmful to the game's immersiveness. The user interface for managing the files or save slots necessarily looks like an operating system's file-management tool, not like a part of the fantasy world that the game depicts. You can make it prettier with appropriate graphics, but it almost always takes the player out of the world and destroys his suspension of disbelief. Some games improve this a little by calling it the player's "journal" and making it look as if the saved games are being kept in a book.

Quick-Save

Fast-moving games in which the player's avatar is in more or less constant danger (such as first-person shooters) frequently offer a quick-save feature. The player presses a single button to save the game instantly at any time, without ever leaving the game world. The screen displays the words "Quick saved" for a moment, but other than that, the player's concentration and immersion in the world are not broken. The player can reload the game just as swiftly by pressing a quick-load button. The game returns immediately to the place where the last quick-save was done, without going out of the game world to a file-management screen.

The disadvantage of quick-save is that it usually offers only one slot, although some games let the player designate a numbered slot by pressing the quick-save button and then a number key. He has to remember which slot is which by himself when quick-loading. Quick-save sacrifices flexibility to gain immersiveness and speed. It doesn't let the player name or manage multiple saved games, but it does allow him to save and load with minimal disruption to his suspension of disbelief.

Automatic Save

A few games automatically save the state of the game as it progresses, so the player can leave and return at any time without explicitly having to save it. Sometimes they save continuously, but more often they save intermittently at checkpoints, which may or may not be revealed to the player when they occur. This is even less disruptive than quick-saving because the player never has to do anything. However, if this is the only method provided, the player can't choose to save at certain points along the way. If the player wants to restart at an earlier point, he's out of luck; and if the checkpoints are a long way apart, he might lose a great deal of progress in the event of a disaster. Continuous-save prevents the player from going back and undoing disasters. On the other hand, he can play the game confident that he can interrupt and resume it at any point.

To Save or Not to Save

Here we look at the arguments for and against saving, and we present our own perspective on the matter.

The Argument Against

A few designers don't allow players to save their games at certain points, or even at all. If the player can save and reload constantly, he can solve puzzles or overcome other obstacles by trial and error rather than by skill or brains . If the designer wants him to solve them in an uninterrupted sequence, saving and reloading defeats that challenge. Some games ( The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , for example) avoid this by saving a game only at checkpoints or particular locations, forcing the player to play the game again from that point when he reloads . Saving and reloading also enables players to avoid undesirable random events. If the event occurs, the player can simply reload the game repeatedly until it doesn't occur.

When you can save and reload at any point, nothing is at stake. Your avatar might die, lose money, or suffer some other disaster, but it can all be remedied simply by reloading the game. This takes away some of the challenge.

The Argument For

We believe that these arguments against saving are spurious and are the sign of a lazy designer. Making a game harder simply by preventing the player from saving the game is a cheap way of creating a challenge out of nothing. For example, you could set up a situation in which the player has no way of knowing which of several options to choose (for example, selecting one of three identical corridors to walk down). If two contain deadly traps and one does not, and the player is not allowed to save before walking down them, you've guaranteed that two times in three he will have to go back and start the game over, no matter how good he is otherwise . This isn't fun or even a fair challenge. If you really want to make the game harder, devise harder challenges. Forcing the player to replay an entire level because he made a mistake near the end wastes his time and condemns him to frustration and boredom. As a designer, it should be your goal to avoid those feelings, not create them.

If a player continuously reloads a game to avoid a random event or to solve some problem by trial and error rather than skill or intelligence, he is, in effect, cheating at solitaire. As the game's designer, you might not like it, but we don't feel that that is sufficient reason for denying the player the chance to save the game ”he might need to save it for perfectly legitimate reasons. After all, cheating at solitaire says more about the player's character than anything else; if he wants to ruin the gameplay for himself, that's his business. Most games now recognize that players want ”and even need ”to cheat sometimes by offering cheat codes anyway.

The bottom line is that it's the player's machine. It's not fair to penalize him just because he has to go to the bathroom or because it's now his little brother's turn to play. Whether you implement save slots, quick-save, checkpoints, or continuous-save is up to you; there are advantages and disadvantages to each. But we strongly believe that players have a fundamental right to be able to stop playing when and where they want, without losing all that they have accomplished.



Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
ISBN: 1592730019
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 148

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