We’ve all seen it. A small rotating symbol to warn players against impatient shutdown. “Do not turn off the system when this symbol is displayed,” is the message you often see when starting a game (or some other version of those words). The implication is clear. The saving process is delicate, and if you interrupt this invisible ritual, the data being written to some folder deep in the bowels of your PC will be corrupted, destroyed, destroyed. You will lose all your progress, all your rare swords and achievements.
But it is true? What is the probability really suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells? To find out, I decided to spend a very annoying afternoon turning my gaming rig off and on again during several games. Was it a good idea? I don’t know. I’m a gamer, not a suitor.
This is not a very scientific experiment. It is easy. In each game, I hit a save point, watch for the appropriate “now saving” icon, and hit the “off” button while the icon is displayed. Sometimes the save points will be manual, sometimes they will be auto-saves based on location. In all cases, I time the shutdown as best I can. Sometimes I do the act several times, sometimes I only do it a few times. It’s worth noting that I only use the “shut down” button on my PC. Fear keeps me from chopping power at the wall during this process. This is the scarier version of the same experiment. As we’ll see, it can make a big difference.
To help me understand the reasoning behind this symbol, I’ll also be talking to Getting Over It developer, Bennett Foddy. Which is convenient for an experiment that involves restarting something repeatedly.
But first, let’s see what happened. Catastrophic data loss? Or sweet foxtrot alpha? Read on to find out!
Hades 2
Mel’s violent journey through Hell is often automatic. It saves between rooms, saves after collecting boons, after upgrading your altar skills, after collecting treats after battle, and probably a bunch of other places I haven’t noticed. Statistically, someone out there had a blackout at exactly the worst time, right? Well, I tried to fake it and destroy my save file a few times while his “now saving” magic glyph showed up. Nothing happened. Every time I booted up my computer and started the game I was safe. It never even knocked me back a step.
Result: No data loss.
Still Wakes The Deep
The save icon in this first-person horror game is an unobtrusive set of spinning circles in the corner of the screen. I have attempted the same self-destructive power cut, cut off during rescue in many different places aboard an oil rig. Nothing went wrong. Confirmation is possible that The Chinese Room game is more robust than the rusting machinery used by the cheap fictitious oil company Cadal.
Result: Absolutely fucking.
A terrifying delusion
Dread Delusion save points are decorated mannequins with shiny crystals, and the save icon is a dusty old tome, again in the corner of the screen. Of all the games I try to spoil, I was holding out a twisted hope that this pretty good retro RPG would fall victim to my sabotage. It was made by a small team, I thought, maybe they wouldn’t have time to make their save process absolutely stupid proof. But not. No damage, no data loss, no disaster even after several attempts.
Result: I’m really bored of typing my Windows password.
Cyberpunk 2077
The save process in Cyberpunk 2077 takes milliseconds. A little spinning “don’t turn off” icon appears and disappears too quickly for me to react. To simultaneously cut the power and save the game, I would need a second person to help me with the process. We would need to treat it with spectacle correction with the precision of a pair of military scientists counting down and turning keys at the same time. It’s theoretically possible for your save data to get randomly locked in this game, but you literally couldn’t do it if you tried.
Result: I regret that you are starting this pointless experiment.
Alien: Isolation
I see. Here’s one that counts down for you. The beauty of Alien: Isolation’s storage slots is that they are actual physical slots on the walls of the space station that you insert a small card device into. The desired save symbol (in this case a small cartridge) will also appear. I plugged in the Ripley card, waited for the save process to begin, acknowledged the “overwrite game” message, and immediately shut down the computer as soon as the cartridge appeared. Did the notorious Sevastopol station crappy machinery corrupt my save file? No. Even the idiots at Seegson electronics seem to be able to do a reliable save process.
Result: I’m glad it’s over, to be honest.
The game was successfully saved
Here you are. Horror stories with absolutely no data saving. So why are games showing you this warning? Am I just lucky? Does turning off the computer while saving do any harm, or is it just some mysterious habit of the game developers?
“I think the answer is probably ‘it depends,’ unfortunately,” says Bennett Foddy, creator of Getting Over It. “Yeah, if you unplug the power cord from your PC or console while it’s writing your save file, the file won’t finish writing and you’ll get a corrupted save. But lots of caveats…
“Everyone I know writes to a rotating set of slots to deal with file corruption. So if one file is corrupted, it will just load the next most recent one. But there’s no guarantee the game you’re playing will do that.”
“Some games have small save files – like Getting Over It writes almost no data on save. In those cases, it’s just statistically unlikely that you’ll interrupt the save process even if you unplug the power cord. You might have to shut down your computer 100 times to be unlucky and corrupted the save file for this game.”
Foddy’s last point reminds me of the Cyberpunk 2077 save process during my foray into mad science above. In this particular case the saved file might be big or small, I don’t know. But however CD Projekt RED does it, the shooter seems to save incredibly fast, so it’s unlikely to be discontinued.
But Foddy also believes that my method of pressing the “shutdown” button probably won’t do any harm at all, since it will start the shutdown process, which “should include completing all ongoing file writes and safely shutting down the drives.” I see. So we NEED to repeat this under harsher “wall blackout” conditions.
There is another possible reason why this warning appears in so many games you play. In some cases, it may simply be forced on developers as part of the publishing process. Already in 2012, Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness, complained about this very requirement in the certification process. In other words, including this warning is one of the rules game creators must follow to make sure their games can be sold on stores like the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam.
“Every game MUST say on launch, ‘This game will sometimes save when you see this animated icon in the corner, DO NOT TURN OFF THE CONSOLE, etc.,'” Blow wrote in an email to Ars Technica. “This is something that developers have to implement and test, which costs significant time and money, but worse, it impacts the user experience because it becomes just a little bit more bureaucratic to launch the game.”
Blow complains a lot about this certification process, basically making the same point as Foddy – that there is a technically sound way to create security against data corruption. Which would essentially make the warning useless.
“[It] it may also be a requirement for a historical console,” says Foddy. “I haven’t checked recently (and I suspect the license would prevent me from telling you if I did). They could also be knee-jerk developers. I bet that’s part of it.”
Conclusion
In the end, we may be none the wiser for this odd rotating symbol of insecurity. The certification requirements alone make it likely that we will continue to use them in our games for the foreseeable future. But yeah, it seems pointless most of the time. You’re probably more likely to lose your save to an overzealous roommate or younger sibling than a sudden power outage. At least in my opinion scientifically rigorous experimenting anyway.
Yet science is an open book. Compare me, readers! what about you Have you ever experienced a save corruption disaster? Lost 55 hours of Persona 5 to cyber? What is the most devastating loss of your life? Tell me your personal history, if we can’t always reliably save the game, let us at least save each other.