We’ve all seen it. The small rotating symbol warns players not to turn off their computer out of impatience. “Do not turn off your system when this symbol is displayed,” says the message you often see when starting a game (or some other version of those words). The implication is clear. The backup process is delicate and if you interrupt this invisible ritual, the data that is written in 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 suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells? To find out, I decided to spend a very boring afternoon turning my gaming 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 talk to Getting Over It developer Bennett Foddy. Which seems appropriate for an experience that involves restarting something repeatedly.
But first, let’s see what happened. Disastrous data loss? Or a sweet alpha foxtrot? Read on to find out!
Hades 2
Mel’s violent trek through hell is often autosaved. She saves between rooms, after collecting boons, after leveling up 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 power outage at exactly the worst time, right? Well, I tried to imitate that and destroy my save file several times while its “Saving” witch glyph was displayed. Nothing happened. Every time I restarted my PC and launched the game, I was safe and sound. He never even made me take a single step back.
Result: No data loss.
The depths are awakening again
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.
Madness of terror
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’ve harbored 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 time to make their backup 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 spinning “don’t turn off” icon appears and disappears too quickly for me to react. To turn off the power and simultaneously save the game, I would need a second person to help me with the process. We should treat it with the correction precision of a pair of military scientists’ glasses, counting down and turning our keys at the same time. It’s theoretically possible for your save data in this game to get corrupted by accident, 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.
“Some games have tiny save files – like Getting Over, it writes virtually no data when saving. In these cases, you are statistically unlikely to interrupt a save process even if you pull the save cable. ‘power. Maybe you would I have to shut down the computer 100 times to have the misfortune of corrupting a saved file for this game.”
Foddy’s last point 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 regardless of how CD Projekt RED handles it, the shooter seems to save incredibly quickly, making any interruptions unlikely.
But Foddy also believes that my method of pressing the “power off” button is not likely to cause any harm, because it triggers a shutdown process that “should include ending all ongoing file writes and safely shutting down the drives.” Ah! So we MUST repeat this under more severe conditions, such as a “power outage at the wall.”
There’s another possible reason why this warning appears in so many of the games you play. In some cases, it may simply be imposed on developers as part of the publishing process. Back in 2012, Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid and The Witness, complained about this exact requirement in the certification process. In other words, the inclusion of this warning is part of the rules that game creators must follow to ensure their games can be sold on stores like the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam.
“Every game should have a mandatory startup message that says, ‘Sometimes this game saves, 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 that developers have to implement and test, which costs a lot of time and money, but worse, it impacts the user experience because starting the game becomes a bit more bureaucratic.”
Blow then complains a lot about this certification process, noting essentially the same thing as Foddy: there is a technically sound way to create a failsafe for data corruption. Which would make the warning practically useless.
“(It) could also be a historical requirement of the console,” Foddy says. “I haven’t checked lately (and I suspect the license would prevent me from telling you if I did). It could also be developers following an instinctive convention. I bet that’s part of it.”
Conclusion
Ultimately, we may be none the wiser about this rotating symbol of uncertainty. The certification requirements alone make it likely we’ll continue to see it used in our games for the foreseeable future. But, yes, a lot of it seems unnecessary. You’re probably more likely to lose your save file to an overzealous roommate or younger sibling than to a sudden power outage. At least judging from my experience scientifically rigorous experimentation in any case.
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.