You’d think by now, deep into my life as a person who plays video games as part of their job, that I’d have mastered certain best practices. And in many ways I have: I turn on subtitles to make sure I spell characters’ names right and quote dialogue accurately. I poke around all the settings and control menus. I do my best to manage my senseless need to rush through tutorials. But I have never, and maybe will never, be the kind of person who sensibly saves their games.
For some reason, any time a game has a manual save, I save over my previous save file. In my head this is tidier, or more “space-spacing,” though if I investigate this justification more deeply, I’m not sure exactly what my brain means by “space”--hard drive space? Space in the list of saves? Generally, it just seems tidier to have one save, or maybe a couple if a game has a choice point I want to explore the options of.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that this is a terrible way to do things. I even know this is a terrible way to do things–the most notable case of it biting me in the ass was when I got the bad ending in The Witcher 3, where I thoroughly fucked up my relationship with Ciri and had no hope of fixing it without totally starting over. You’re going to get yourself in trouble, I whisper to myself as I save over my saves, watching my hands carry out their cursed task anyway and then feeling an unearned, nonsensical satisfaction at my sparse list of saves.
(Light spoilers ahead for the second chapter of episode 5 of The Long Dark story mode.)
I was reminded of the pitfalls of this habit this weekend, while playing the latest story episode of my favorite survival game The Long Dark. In the beginning of the second chapter, protagonist Will Mackenzie has to navigate a corridor full of wolves with little in the way of defense. I’d been managing to scare them off pretty well, but one caught me out, giving me the afflictions of blood loss, infection risk, and a sprained wrist. I had the bandages to deal with the blood loss, and when I needed to climb down a rope and couldn’t because of the sprain, I made a new bandage to take care of it by ripping up Will’s hat.
But I sort of forgot about the infection risk, not realizing my health was ticking down until I’d already passed a couple story checkpoints. I figured it’d be fine; story mode is generous with loot, and I’d find some antiseptic along the way. Except I didn’t. Things kept happening, and there was so much loot, but none of it was the one thing I needed. I charged ahead in the story anyway, navigating dark corridors and poison gas in a mine, figuring any minute now the game would solve my problem for me. I played so much game, pressing forward even as Will’s vision blurred and he staggered through his final death throes before eventually succumbing.
My latest auto-save was no good. My subsequent story checkpoint saves were no good. I peered at my one manual save, thinking of all the saves I’d saved over that could have gotten me out of this situation, wondering if I’d have to start the whole chapter over to undo what I’d done. I realized how much of my time, of my one and only life on this earth, I was now going to spend replaying the section I’d just played, not out of enjoyment, but as a remedy for my own bad choices.
Eventually I reloaded the save and was relieved to find it was right before the rope climb, where I could see some old man’s beard in the valley below. But I still had to play through a bunch of cutscenes, a protracted chase sequence, and a bunch of the mine again (somehow a second playthrough didn’t make me any more efficient at it, a real kick in the teeth). This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it did waste a bunch of my available game-playing time for the weekend. And I felt like a dumbass about the whole thing, especially when the story mode is so generous with auto-saves and lets you manually save wherever you want.
None of this had to happen! I should utilize the essential purpose of manual saves by making a lot of manual saves. If they take up too much of whatever my brain has decided is “space,” I can just delete the old ones! There is simply no reason to be this kind of person so deep into my video game-playing life.
I learned my lesson and have now been making too many manual saves, but I know myself well enough to know it’s a lesson I will totally abandon the moment I open up a different video game. All those manual saves just bug me, even if each one represents a second chance and the actions of the prudent, reasonable person I clearly falsely consider myself to be.
But surely I am not alone. Surely some of you are out here living on the edge too, with nothing but a Marie Kondo list of saves to show for it. Help me find peace for why we’re like this.
