Mental State Saving

I was thinking about why I could go back and easily get back into a saved Bejeweled game, but not other, more complicated games, such as Arkham City or Deus Ex. It’s certainly not a question of favoritism. If you asked me which game I liked more, the answer will be Deus Ex, by a considerable margin. But what is it, then? I find it more difficult to load up a save of Deus Ex than it is to pick up my phone and fire up Bejeweled. There are many possible answers, but I think one of the more interesting ones to explore is hedged in complexity and mental state.

If we were to ask which game is more complicated, certainly, games like Deus Ex win by a landslide. They have conversation arcs, location maps, branching decision trees and story paths, inventory systems, and so on. Even a very simple single player FPS such as Serious Sam will have things such as which weapons you have, which map you’re on, and what stuff you have/have not picked up and secrets you have/have not found yet. Bejeweled, on the other hand, has very few simple rules, and while they may change from game type to game type, overall the playing field is very homogenous.

Similarly, the rules are different. For Bejeweled, the entire ruleset can be and in fact must be kept in the player’s head if they are to be successful. There are only a few ways to move gems on the field, and only a few ways to make successful combinations. Contrast this with a FPS where the minimum information you need is where you’re at, where the enemy is at, what weapons you have, and how much ammo.

I think the difference in picking up the game again, particularly long after the last time I’ve played it, comes down to the idea of mental state. Can the player hold the entire state of the game in their head, and do they need to? For simpler games, the answer is really no. I can pick up my saved Bejeweled game at any point and immediately get into it. The state is revealed in full, immediately, when I load the playing field, and the rules are simple enough that even if I’ve temporarily forgotten them some experimentation will quickly reveal them to me again. Contrast this with many other game types, where even the loading screen tips and reminders may not be enough. What objectives have I accomplished? Which side objectives do I need to pick up or already have? What’s in my inventory? Who did I talk to last, what’s my character’s relationship state?

Steps can be taken to mitigate the problem of restoring the player’s mental state, like the aforementioned loading tips and reminders, and of course many games implement something like a log book to help you keep track of what you’ve done in this save file. However, they tend to be necessarily incomplete; they do not contain all of the details, and they certainly cannot be expected to keep track of certain personal goals a player may have set for themselves ( like try to get a certain weapon early because you knew where it might be stored ).

However, in the end, the simply PopCap style games can be said to be devoid of player state. The player needs to bring nothing to the game besides a desire to play, and no matter where they were last or what they were doing, they can quickly and easily get back into gameplay. For me, this low barrier makes them often more strangely more alluring than trying to run Arkham City again and try to remember everything I feel I need to know as well as what button throws the freeze grenade if I even have it. Of course, I still like the big deeper games better. The depth is welcome, the storylines intriguing, and a good game can get me to explore myself a bit.

But it’s still interesting to think about, both as a player ( why do I have more hours logged in on my iPad than my PS3? ) and as a budding game designer. I’ll need to keep these things in mind as I make large and complicated games. Saving and loading the state of the game, that’s easy; getting a player back into a game after months of them not touching it and trying to restore their mental state sufficiently to a point that they’re not repeating tasks or getting frustrated, that’s hard. Difficult, but definitely worthwhile to try and overcome.