— read write play

Jack Arnott’s recent speculation about the possible end of game endings opens with the recognition that “before the advent of ‘saving’, the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time.” I’m not sure I’ve ever fully realised the consequences of that difficulty for how I treated game narrative then – and now.

Let me try to explain: I’m a member of a generation of gamers who grew up playing ridiculously hard games, completion of which was routinely outside the reach of most players. I don’t say that with pride in the presence of casual gaming – pause to spit on discarded Wii – but to remember that even when the dearly departed Crash¹ was prepared to dedicate page after page to maps of my favourite platformers,² death followed death followed death.

Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner may, technically, have been games about collecting champagne flutes after an epic bender so you would be allowed to go to bed, or struggling to collect keys before you suffocated in a mining accident.³ But they were also about falling to your death in an endless recursive loop until your lives were gone. Or brushing against a small, innocent-looking green bush on the first screen and discovering that it was apparently coated with insta-death poison. In those perilous circumstances, engagement with narrative becomes a luxury.⁴

It’s for these reasons that I might have developed particularly obsessive save habit, memorising quick-save and quick-load shortcuts before anything else. So now I try to preserve my fragile avatar, saving before and after cut scenes; before and after character load-outs and talent choices. Stealth games are particulary demanding: I think my first ride through Thief: the Dark Project⁵ produced over 300 distinct and largely pointless saves. But even then I’m still – from time to time – panicking and saving myself into a figurative corner, reloading to find myself forever miliseconds before an unavoidable explosive death. In other words, regardless of the game, I seem to be stuck playing Jet Set Willy.

1. Many of Crash’s most memorable covers were painted by the talented Oliver Frey, who also has a fine side-line as a prolific creator of gay erotic art. Let Google be your guide. [↩]
2. Yes, platformers. Other genres of games may have greater reputations as eye-gougingly tricky, but my pre-teen years were spent repeatedly falling from small platforms due to ill-timed jumps. In games as well as in real life, hardy harr harr. [↩]
3. No-one worried that these were games that children would play. I like to imagine the Daily Mail’s response today. “Debauchery simulator!” [↩]
4. It was a war, man. A war! [↩]
5. For the record, I am not now nor have ever been “a taffer.” [↩]