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It is curious that this is not true with games – the mechanic of die and try again is a totally accepted one, even in games that are as narratively-focussed as The Walking Dead, described by IGN in their review as “a deeply personal and emotional experience”. But the experience is now broken: the viewer has come out of the world of the film and back into their living room. Imagine the same thing happening during a film – the viewer doesn’t understand a plot point so they rewind a few seconds and watch it back.

So you grab the shotgun, load the shell, shoot the zombie and the game goes on. You know what’s about to happen, where the items are, and (probably) what to do. Only this time, the game doesn’t have the element of surprise. Yet it is, of course, entirely possible to fail to complete these three actions, and the zombie will reach Lee and he will die.Īnd then? Assuming you don’t turn the game off in rage/fear, it will reload from a previous checkpoint – mere seconds before the above incident – and you play it out again. It’s the first of many tense moments in the game, but very straightforward (2). As it crawls towards him, you have perhaps 10 seconds to do three things: find and pick up a shotgun, then a shell, and finally aim and shoot the zombie. Even though death is a big part of gaming, what does it really mean to “die”? Consider a specific example: early on in The Walking Dead: Episode 1, your character Lee Everett is attacked by a zombie.

This is quite a unique mechanic in today’s games – arguably, games of this century. Your role as commander is finished – you failed. You have to start the game all over again. And when those eight countries leave the Council, there is no reloading of an old save. Ironman XCOM plays out like science fiction chess: once you’ve taken your hand off the piece, there’s no going back. Brainlessly moved one of your soldiers into an enemy ambush? Forgot that the burning car you’re cowering behind will blow up at the end of the turn? Tough – you’re stuck with your actions. Playing XCOM on Ironman, there are no backup savegames – the game saves automatically after every action, overwriting itself.

I chose XCOM as a specific example here not because I can’t stop playing it (1) but because it is noticeable for one of its difficulty sub-settings, known as Ironman mode. Maybe you have three or four different backup savegames on the go, to cover yourself in the event of in-game catastrophe. Or, in the case of XCOM, you manually choose a savegame to load, and hope you do better this time. This time, you know what’s coming, you hit X in time, and the game progresses. In both these examples, what happens next? Typically the game reloads from a previous save state – usually a checkpoint – and you have another go.