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A saved game (also sometimes called a game save, savegame, savefile, or simply save) is a piece of digitally stored information about the progress of a player in a video game. From the earliest games in the 1970s onward, game platform hardware and memory improved, which led to bigger and more complex computer games, which, in turn, tended to take more and more time to play them from start to finish. This naturally led to the need to store in some way the progress, and how to handle the case where the player character died. More modern games with a heavier emphasis on story telling are designed to allow the player many choices that impact the story in a profound way later on, and some game designers do not want to allow more than one save game so that the experience will always be 'fresh'. Game designers approach the questions how to solve the 'save game' and if and how to 'integrate it in the game experience' in several creative ways. If the game's idea is to encourage the consumer to try things out in-game and experience the effects, perhaps 'regretting' some choices ('What if I just attack the guards?'). How would the consumer choose to return to which point in the story. Will the consumer bother the hassle managing 'save games'? Should this game attempt to simulate real life (for example Heavy Rain) or read more like a story, automatically saving while playing? Game designers allow players to prevent the loss of progress in the game (as might happen after a game over. Games designed this way encourage players to 'try things out', and on regretting a choice, continue from an earlier point on. Although the feature of save games might suggest you can retry after a game over, a notable exception is in games where save games are deleted when it is game over. Several names are used to describe this feature: 'permadeath', 'iron man', 'hardcore', and the feature has developed over the years from being the only kind of save system per game to the more modern 'suspend game' feature among regular save points. For online games the game's progress is maintained on the remote server. In some games, upon resuming the game from a save game, the software locks or marks the save game. Early examples are (u)moria (rogue like adventures), diablo 2 'hardcore' mode where the character save game is managed by the battlenet server. Depending on the game the feature may be feasible or not, depending on how the game handles interrupting or ending a game session. The use of saved games is very common in modern video games, particularly in role-playing video games, which are usually much too long to finish in a single session. == History and overview == In early video games, there was no need for saving games, since these games usually had no actual plot to develop and were generally very short in length. The relative complexity and inconvenience of storing game state information on early home computers (and the fact that early video game consoles had no non-volatile data storage) meant that initially game saves were represented as "passwords" (often strings of characters that encoded the game state) that players could write down and later input into the game when resuming. ''BYTE'' magazine stated in 1981, regarding the computer text adventure ''Zork I''s save game feature, that "While some cowards use it to retain their hard-earned position in the game before making some dangerous move", it was intended to let players play over many weeks. Home computers in the early 1980s had the advantage of using external media for saving, with compact cassettes and floppy disks, before finally using internal hard drives. On later cartridge-based console games, such as ''Kirby's Adventure'' and ''The Legend of Zelda'', saved games were stored in battery-backed RAM on the game cartridge itself. In recent consoles, which use disc-based media for storing games, saved games are stored in other ways, such as by use of memory cards or internal hard drives on the game machine itself. Some games do not save the player's progress towards completing the game, but rather high scores, custom settings, and other features. The first game to save the player's score was Taito's seminal 1978 shoot 'em up title ''Space Invaders''. Depending on the game, a player will have the ability to save the game either at any arbitrary point (usually when the game has been paused), after a specific task has been completed (such as at the end of a level), or at designated areas within the game known as save points. The available ways to save a game affect gameplay, and can represent a practice of players or an explicit decision by designers to give the game a particular feel or alter its difficulty. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「saved game」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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