We’ve all seen it. The little rotating symbol warns players not to turn off their computers in impatience. “Do not turn off your system while this symbol is displayed,” says the message often seen when starting a game (or some other version of those words). The implication is clear. The save process is delicate, and if you interrupt this invisible ritual, the data that is written to a folder deep in the bowels of your PC will be corrupted, destroyed, scrambled. You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and achievements.
But is it true? What is the probability that you Really I had to suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells. To find out, I decided to spend a very painful afternoon turning my game console off and on for several games. Was this a good idea? I don’t know. I’m a player, not a man of ideas.
This isn’t a highly scientific experiment. It’s simple. In each game, I’ll reach a save point, watch for the corresponding “now saved” icon, and press my “power off” button while the icon is displayed. Sometimes the save points will be manual, sometimes they’ll be location-sensitive autosaves. In all cases, I time the power off as best I can. Sometimes I play through the act multiple times, sometimes I do it just a few times. It’s worth noting that I only use the “power off” button on my PC. Fear keeps me from turning off the power at the wall during this process. This is the scariest version of this same experiment. As we’ll see, it can make a big difference.
To help me understand the reasons behind this symbol, I’ll also turn to Getting Over It developer Bennett Foddy. Which seems fitting for an experience that involves starting something over again.
But first, let’s see what happened. A disastrous data loss? Or a cute alpha foxtrot? Read on to find out!
Hades 2
Mel’s violent trek through hell is often an autosave. It saves between rooms, it saves after collecting boons, after upgrading your altar skills, after collecting post-battle treats, and probably a bunch of other places I haven’t noticed. Statistically, someone had a power outage at the worst time, right? Well, I tried to imitate that and destroy my save file multiple times while its “saving” wizard glyph was showing. Nothing happened. Every time I restarted my PC and launched the game, I was safe and sound. It never even made me take a single step back.
Result: No data loss.
Always awakens the depths
The save icon in this first-person horror game is a set of non-intrusive rotating circles in the corner of the screen. I attempted the same self-destructive power interruption, cutting out during a save at many different locations aboard the oil rig. Nothing went wrong. It’s perhaps reassuring to learn that The Chinese Room’s game is more robust than the rusty machinery used by the stingy fictional oil company Cadal.
Result: Completely rubbish.
Scary illusion
Dread Delusion’s save points are ornate contraptions containing glowing crystals, and the save icon is a dusty old tome, again in the corner of the screen. Of all the games I’ve tried to corrupt, I had the perverse hope that this rather good retro RPG would fall victim to my sabotage. It’s made by a small team, I thought, maybe they wouldn’t have had the time to make their save process absolutely foolproof. But no. Even after several tries, there was no corruption, no data loss, no disaster.
Result: I’m really tired of entering my Windows password.
Cyberpunk 2077
The saving process in Cyberpunk 2077 lasts a few milliseconds. The little “Do Not Power Off” icon appears and disappears too quickly for me to react. To simultaneously turn off the power and save the game, I would need a second person to help me with the process. We would have to treat it with the eyeglass-correcting precision of a pair of military scientists, counting backwards and turning our keys at the same time. It’s theoretically possible that your save data in this game could be accidentally destroyed, but you literally couldn’t do that if you tried.
Result: I regret starting this pointless experiment.
Alien: Isolation
Haha. Here’s one to count down for you. The save slots in Alien: Isolation are a thing of beauty, in that they’re actual physical slots on the walls of the space station, into which you insert a small card device. The required save symbol also appears (in this case, a small cassette tape). I stuck Ripley’s card in, waited for the save process to begin, acknowledged an “overwrite game” message, and promptly shut down my PC as soon as the cassette tape appeared. Did the notoriously crappy machines at Sevastopol Station corrupt my save file? Nope. Even the idiots at Seegson Electronics seem to be able to pull off a reliable save process.
Result: I’m just glad it’s over, to be honest.
Game saved successfully
So. Absolutely no horror stories about backup data. So why do games show you this warning? Did I just get lucky? Will turning off your PC during a save actually do any harm, or is it just an obscure custom of game developers?
“I think the answer is probably ‘it depends,’ unfortunately,” says Bennett Foddy, creator of Getting Over It. “Yes, if you unplug the power cable from the PC or console while it is writing your save file, the file writing will not finish and you will get a corrupted save. But there are plenty of caveats…
“Everyone I know writes to a rotating set of locations, to handle file corruption. So if one file gets corrupted, it just loads the next most recent one. But there’s no guarantee that the game you’re playing will do this.
“Some games have tiny save files, like Getting Over It which writes almost no data when saving. In these cases, it is statistically unlikely that you will interrupt a backup process, even if you unplug the power cable. You might have to shut down the computer 100 times to have the misfortune of corrupting a save file for this game.”
Foddy’s final point here reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077’s save process from my foray into mad science above. In this particular case, the save file may be large or small, I don’t know. But however CD Projekt RED handles it, the shooter seems to save incredibly quickly, making it unlikely that it’ll be interrupted.
But Foddy also believes that my method of pressing the “power off” button probably won’t do any harm, because it triggers a shutdown process that “should include ending any file writing in progress and stopping the readers safely. Haha. So we have to repeat this under more difficult, “power outage at the wall” conditions.
There is another possible reason why this warning appears in so many games you play. In some cases, it may simply be imposed on developers as part of the release process. Already in 2012, Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid and The Witness, complained about this specific requirement in the certification process. In other words, the inclusion of this disclaimer is part of the rules that game creators must follow to ensure that their games can be sold on stores such as the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam.
“Every game is REQUIRED to say at startup: ‘sometimes this game saves, when you see that animated icon in the corner, DO NOT TURN YOUR CONSOLE OFF, etc.,'” Blow wrote in an email to Ars Technica. “This is something that developers have to implement and test, which costs a lot of time and money, but even worse, it impacts the user experience because starting the game becomes a little more bureaucratized.”
Blow continues to complain repeatedly about this certification process, essentially pointing out the same thing as Foddy: there is a technically sound way to create a failsafe against data corruption. Which would make the warning virtually useless.
“This could also be a historical requirement of the console,” says Foddy. “I haven’t checked recently (and I think the license would prevent me from telling you, if I did). It could also be that developers follow an instinctive convention. I bet that’s part of it. »
Conclusion
Ultimately, we may not be any wiser about this rotating uncertainty symbol. The certification requirements alone make it likely that we’ll continue to see it used in our games for the foreseeable future. But, yeah, it seems largely unnecessary. You’re probably more likely to lose your save file to an overzealous roommate or younger sibling than you are to a sudden power outage. At least, in my experience. scientifically rigorous experimentation nonetheless.
However, science is an open book. Peer review me, reader! And you? Have you ever had a backup corruption disaster? Did you lose 55 hours of Persona 5 to the cyber void? What is the most devastating loss of your life? Unload your personal story on me, if we can’t always save the game reliably, let’s at least save each other.