A Busy Gamer’s Entreaty
An important but not insurmountable roadblock to carving out some time for video games has been on my mind recently. Namely, the added difficulty of enjoying longer, story-driven games where save spots can be infrequent. As a busy gamer, my gaming time is likely to be interrupted by phone calls, family commitments, and other responsibilities. Nothing is quite as frustrating as telemarketers, but a close second is making significant progress in a game but being stuck in an extended cut-scene, firefight, or strategic battle and urgently needing a save spot.
In some games, obviously, this is not a problem. Many longer games have adopted a “save anywhere” or “save almost anywhere” mechanic that make a busy gamer’s life much easier. A good recent example for me was Mass Effect, an RPG I very much enjoyed and which I knew I could pick up for 15 minutes or 3 hours and be able to put it back down quickly if necessary. A good example of a difficult game for a busy gamer is any of the PS2 Xenosaga games. I recently started playing through Xenosaga III, a traditional JRPG, and both extended cut-scenes and save spots which can be 30 minutes apart leave me anxious when interruptions inevitably arise.
Now, I’m not suggesting that “save anywhere” is the solution here (and my 12th grade English teacher would rightly chastise me for not communicating my thesis prior to the third paragraph!) There are many gaming genre’s where a sense of excitement, urgency, and vulnerability is present during the periods of the game in-between save spots. Some shooters, traditional RPGs, and adventure games for example would be much less interesting if you could just save at any time. But there’s another solution - one that has profitably been applied in some games for years, and which solves this busy gamer’s dilemma without removing any excitement: the quick save!
Quick saves, you’ll recall, have been available in portable games for years (see, for example, any of the Final Fantasy games for the GBA) and are now (basically) available in any DS or PSP game by way of the ’sleep mode’ of each handheld. When you quick save, you can pick up where you left off - but only once! If you “Game Over” before reaching a ‘real’ save spot in the game, you can’t start again from your quick save location but have to go back to your last real save. If quick saves were standard for games, you would be able to quit at any time and resume later without worry, but without removing the urgency of getting to that next real save spot the next time you pick it up. In fact, in games where this mechanic is used I find myself more likely to want to get right back into the game: I’ve left my character(s) vulnerable, in limbo!
Now, you could argue that this functionality is available in most all games through the process of pausing the game and leaving the console on. If you’re my age (ahem, let’s not go into details on that one just yet!) you probably remember leaving your NES on for days at a time, with gaming time interrupted only by trips to the local institutional learning center (ok, “school.”) I’m loathe, however, to leave my PS3 on for days (and what if I want to watch a blu-ray?) and my Xbox 360 would surely survive only hours before offering a red ring retort.
So, this busy gamer makes his entreaty to game and hardware developers: please, let’s make the quick save a standard feature! Let’s build it in to the hardware! Let’s help to embrace legions of older gamers and make the video gaming world better for busy gamers everywhere!