GD101: Design Shouldn’t Break Immersion

A game which warns me to "save often" seems to be fundamentally broken. Breaking the fourth wall probably shouldn't be a design feature.

— Boon Cotter (@faultymoose) January 4, 2013

This doesn't quite land in the 'rant' category, but it's nevertheless a constant source of amazement (and irritation) to me that the designers behind an otherwise outstanding experience so often manufacture game difficulty around the principal of player-dictated save points. There's really not much exposition needed to lead into this topic: You're forcibly interfering with my suspension of disbelief by requiring me to perform regular system maintenance.

Oh you lost an hour of gameplay? That's your fault for forgetting to break your immersion to perform a mundane housekeeping task.

— Boon Cotter (@faultymoose) January 4, 2013

If I forget to save the game  - a tendency which is directly proportional to the degree of immersion I am experiencing - then every death is a punishment for enjoying your work. The nerve of me, right? Inevitably, I begin to feel that your engaging narrative (or your stunning visuals, or your addictive gameplay, or whatever it is that's keeping me engrossed in your work) is in fact a negative aspect of your design. To suffer retribution for being lost in your fiction is absurdly unforgivable... And yet so many games do just this.

It's like watching a film where a title card flashes up every few minutes with the text: "Don't worry, they're all actors!"

The mind boggles.

As someone who loves challenging gameplay, I am not remotely interested in switching on faceroll mode and drooling through the experience: I want to utterly drown myself in it, until the space you've created is so far over my head, every move I make is a careful and anxiously fought skirmish for survival. But when this kind of experience requires constant smashing of the fourth wall for the sake of mundane manual tasks that utterly destroy any sense of immersion, you're at cross-purposes with your own creative goals. Assuming your goal is having me enjoy your work.

Difficult gameplay should punish me for stupidity, impatience and poor planning. It should not punish me for forgetting to bring up a save-menu every ten minutes that screams "HEY IT'S JUST A GAME" in my face and leaves me lightly skimming the shoreline of a rich fiction I'd like nothing more than to dive into. STOP IT.

There was a time when a combination of technological limitations and design trends meant that player-dictated manual game-saves made sense. That's usually not the case any more, and this system is now a relic of another, less sophisticated era that has far outstayed its welcome.