We’ve all seen it. The small spinning symbol that warns players of impatient actions to disable. “Do not turn off your system when this symbol is displayed,” is the message you often see when starting up a game (or some other version of these words). The implication is clear. Saving is delicate and if you interrupt this invisible ritual, the data written to a folder deep in the bowels of your PC becomes corrupted, destroyed, exiled. You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and achievements.
But is this true? How likely is it that you… Real 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 multiple games. Was this a good idea? Don’t know. I’m a gamer, not an ideas guy.
This isn’t some giant scientific experiment. It’s simple. In each game, I’ll hit a save point, look for the relevant “save now” icon, and hit my “power off” button while the icon is showing. Sometimes the save points are manual, sometimes they’re location-sensitive autosaves. In all cases, I time the power off as best I can. Sometimes I perform the act multiple times, sometimes I only do it a few times. It’s worth noting that I only use the “power off” button on my PC. Fear prevents me from turning off the power at the wall during this process. That’s the scarier version of the same experiment. As we’ll see, it can make a big difference.
To help me understand the reasons behind this symbol, I will also speak with the developer of Getting Over It, Bennett Foddy. That feels appropriate for an experiment that requires something to be restarted repeatedly.
But first let’s see what happened. Disastrous data loss? Or sweet foxtrot alpha? Read on to find out!
Hell 2
Mel’s violent journey through hell is often automatically saved. It saves between rooms, it saves after you pick up blessings, after you upgrade your altar skills, after you pick up post-battle treats, and probably a bunch of other places I didn’t notice. Statistically, someone out there had a power outage at exactly the worst time, right? Well, I tried to emulate that and destroy my save file a few times while the witchy “save now” symbol was showing. Nothing happened. Every time I restarted my PC and played the game, I was safe and sound. It hasn’t even set me back a single step.
Result: No data loss.
Still awake the deep
The save icon in this first-person horror is an unobtrusive set of spinning circles in the corner of the screen. I tried to interrupt, cut off the same self-destructive force during a save in many different places on the oil rig. Nothing went wrong. It might be affirming to hear that The Chinese Room’s game is more robust than the rusty machines used by the cheap fictional oil company Cadal.
Result: Absolutely damned.
Terrible delusion
Dread Delusion’s save points are ornate contraptions of gleaming crystals, and the save icon is a dusty old tome, once again in the corner of the screen. Of all the games I’ve tried to corrupt, I had the perverse hope that this reasonably good retro RPG would fall victim to my sabotage. It was made by a small team, I thought; maybe they hadn’t had time to absolutely stupid-proof their save process. But no. Even after multiple attempts, there was no corruption, no data loss, no catastrophe.
Result: I’m starting to find it increasingly boring to enter my Windows password.
Cyberpunk 2077
The save process in Cyberpunk 2077 takes milliseconds. The little spidery “Do Not Power Off” icon appears and disappears too quickly for me to react. In order to simultaneously power down and save the game, I need a second person to help me with the process. We’d have to treat it with the eyeglass-correcting precision of a pair of military scientists, simultaneously counting down and turning our keys. It’s theoretically possible to accidentally ruin your save data in this game, but you literally couldn’t do it if you tried.
Result: I regret starting this pointless experiment.
Alien: Isolation
Aha. Here’s one to do the countdown for you. Alien: Isolation’s save slots are a sight to behold, in that they are actual physical slots on the walls of the space station, into which you insert a small card reader. The requisite save symbol also appears (in this case, a small cassette tape). I inserted Ripley’s card, waited for the save process to begin, acknowledged an “overwrite game” message, and immediately turned off my PC as soon as the tape appeared. Did the notoriously lousy Sevastopol Station machine corrupt my save file? Nope. Even the idiots at Seegson Electronics seem to be able to create a reliable save process.
Result: I’m glad this is over, honestly.
Game saved successfully
There you have it. Absolutely no save data horror stories. So why do games show you this warning? Did I just get lucky? Will turning off your PC while saving actually do any harm, or is it just a secretive habit 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 complete and you will end up with a corrupt save. But there are a lot of caveats…
“Everyone I know writes to a running set of slots to handle file corruption. So if one file is corrupt, it just loads the second most recent file. But there’s no guarantee that the game you’re playing will do this.
“Some games have very small save files – like Getting Over It, which barely writes any data when it saves. In those cases, it’s statistically unlikely that you’ll interrupt a save process, even if you unplug the power cord. You might have to power cycle the computer 100 times to have the misfortune of corrupting a save file for that game.”
Foddy’s last point here reminds me of the Cyberpunk 2077 saving process during my foray into mad science above. In that particular case, the save file could be large or small, I don’t know. But no matter how CD Projekt RED handles it, the shooter seems to be salvageable incredibly quickly, making it unlikely to be interrupted.
But Foddy also thinks that my method of pressing the “power off” button probably won’t do any damage at all, because it starts a shutdown process that “should complete any ongoing file writes and safely shut down the drives.” Ah. So we MUST repeat this under more severe conditions, “power failure at the wall”.
There’s another possible reason why this warning is showing up in so many games you play. In some cases, it may simply be forced on developers as part of the publishing process. Back in 2012, Braid and The Witness creator Jonathan Blow complained about this exact requirement in the certification process . In other words, including this warning is one of the rules that game creators have to follow in order to have their games sold on storefronts like the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam.
“Every game should be REQUIRED on launch to say, ‘Sometimes this game will save, when you see this animated icon in the corner, DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE, etc.,'” Blow wrote in an email to Ars Technica. “This is something developers have to implement and test, which costs a lot of time and money, but worse, it impacts the user experience by making launching the game just that little bit more bureaucratic.”
Blow then complains a lot about that certification process, essentially making the same point as Foddy: that there is a technically reliable way to create a failsafe for data corruption. That would make the warning pretty much redundant.
“[It] It could also be a historical console requirement,” says Foddy. “I haven’t checked lately (and I suspect the license would prevent me from telling you if I did). They can also be developers who follow the reflexive convention. I bet that’s part of it.”
Conclusion
Ultimately, we may be none the wiser about this particular spinning symbol of uncertainty. The certification requirements alone make it likely that we will continue to use it in our games for the foreseeable future. But yeah, it seems largely pointless. You’re more likely to lose your save file to an overzealous roommate or a younger sibling than to an abrupt loss of power. At least, judging by mine scientifically rigorous experiment anyway.
But science is an open book. Peer review me, reader! What about you? Have you ever had a save game corruption disaster? Lost 55 hours of Persona 5 to the cybervoid? What’s the most devastating save loss of your life? Unload your personal history to me, if we can’t always reliably save the game, let’s at least save each other.