Isn't saving your game a minefield of possibility and potential disaster?
Probably not, no.
It is quite interesting though. I've recently been playing LIMBO, a fantastic game on a bunch of formats including PC. It's an indie platform game, though to call it such is to do it a disservice- it doesn't rely on pure platforming for its thrills, rather an ingenious run of puzzles and set pieces. The graphical style is sublime as is the audio, but this isn't a review (however: buy it because it's awesome). What it got me thinking about was the way in which save-game/restart points are handled in video games. LIMBO auto-saves before every new puzzle/trap, so if when you die the first few times you don't have far to go to try again. It's brilliant because it removes frustration almost entirely. I couldn't help but wonder that if it was made by someone else (read: big name publishers) it would have split the continuous flow up into explicit stages, and forced the player to replay entire sections to get back to where they died; thus artificially expanding the play time at the expense of your sanity.
But then I thought- when the hell did I become such a wussy?
Platforming progenitor Super Mario Bros. had exactly that style of restart system, in addition to having no saves whatsoever- World 1-1 for you every single time you start sonny. Hell, SMB3 did the same and that sucker was massive. That's how real men used to play games (real men have always been Nintendo's firm gender preference), and we never complained. We played those bad boys until our hands bled on those sharp-edged pads and our lungs collapsed through blowing the cartridge over and over (stop sniggering at the back). If modern platformers were like that I'd be outraged. Yes, actually outraged due to a poor awareness of perspective.
The same goes for games from the same era that had passwords, passwords that were huuuuge. Seriously, you think I'm going to write a 30 character password down every time I want to save my game and not once come around to your house to kick your family pet? Apparently that was a fair assumption, because we never complained.
Even as recent as Final Fantasy X we had fixed save game points in RPGs (I stopped paying attention to the series after that one, here's why: Youtu.be). Don't get me started on the Metroid Prime series, I love those games more than strawberry toothpaste but for the love of all that is holy those save game points were a million miles apart, and that really poked my bear. Resident Evil had that annoying ribbon system, which would many years later be transformed into Resident Evil: Revelations' absolutely genious system- the 'only one save file per account, no going back to redo a level that you like buster, hahahahahahaha, we're not even going to give you advance warning when the autosave is about to take place, hahahahahaha, we're going to give you a useless one-dimensional partner to keep annoying now that you're angry hahahahaha' system that makes me want to punch a tree.
Fall of Angels allows you to save your game at any point. This is partly because it is on a phone so you may need to quickly save and dash when you see the train ticket conductor coming your way, and partly because fixed save points seem so 17th century.
Has our attention span dropped? Have we become wussier? Or did we just put up with that crap in the 80's/90's because save game files hadn't been invented yet and we had worse things to worry about ? Perhaps it's because the amusement arcade is no longer the starting point for video games, so games are no longer made with a single play in mind.
Or perhaps nobody cares. All I'm saying is next time you boot up Fallout 3, start a new game and play it through without using savegames you big girl.
Interesting points. I guess what has had the most profound impact on us is the fact that we've simply grown accustomed to other saving methods. It's really the same as graphics. Apart from nostalgia, no one would like to play an NES game again just for its graphics, however stunning they might have been on the game's launch (that doesn't affect great pixel-art, though, since this is more of a technique used till today, and less a norm that has passed). It's only logical to exclude saves from arcades, when you're not likely to pick up the same game day after day anyways.
I don't know if the often saves nowadays are a good or a bad thing, I guess the developer must balance between repetition (rare saves) and too easy challenges (often saves). By putting the save control in the hand of the player, the developer doesn't have to make that decision, as it depends on the individual to make his choices. It might be the closest to a solution to this "problem", at least for the time being.