new super mario bros

‘Saving the Day’: Save Systems and the Real Life of Gamers

5:00AM Maggie Greene | One aspect of game design that many people point to when wailing about the lack of difficulty in many games these days is the save system. Older games, they argue, doled out saves like precious gems, and thus made the whole experience much more challenging. ‘Where’s the difficulty when you can save wherever and whenever you want?’ However, as designer David Sirlin argues in a Gamasutra article, this is a false dichotomy: “We can allow the player to stop playing without excessive penalty and make a challenging game. It’s just a matter of defining what ’saving’ actually means”. In short, there are plenty of examples of challenging games that don’t punish the player for having other things going on in their life that don’t allow for structuring a day around gaming: More »