What Videogames Can Learn From Board Games: No Save States

If anything, this is a continuation of the third debate topic—no, I won't bring up Marx again. Instead, let's talk about love.

2-player 4-hour long board game Fog of Love offers a rich, intensive simulation of romcom-esque relationships from beginning to end. The game starts with each player designing a character using some "Trait" and "Occupation" cards, and then the players choose a scenario— work buddies trying to keep a professional love, summer fling turned long term, etc. Once the players have introduced themselves and established their relationship, they are put into a series of randomly drawn situations. The game works as follows:

1. Player A plays a situation card.

2. Situation card describes short narrative and gives both players a choice to make.

3. Choices are labelled A, B, and C, and each have specific rewards, drawbacks, and narrative effects.

4. Players need to predict the choice that their partner will make, or choose an option that benefits themselves. For example, they might want to choose A "Stay in tonight" because it will help their character, but hurt their partner, weakening the relationship. Or they predict that their partner will choose B "Go out," and so they do what will help the relationship.

5. Players make choices independently, both reveal choices, see how it affects stats. (Literally a wicked choice in which you do not have enough information because it is purposefully upside-down)

This game is brutally unforgiving. Not matching with your partner can result in pregnancy, injury, arrest, and even comically tragic amnesia. It is a game that really asks the player to understand their partner's wants and needs, to invest in a story, and to consider every decision they make. Without getting mushy gushy, playing it left me really reconsidering what it means to be in a committed relationship. Every decision mattered.

Now, not everyone wants to play an immersive, cooperative dating simulator. I get that. But if we want to consider this game as a framework for ethical decisions in games, we can understand its replay mechanic. This game doesn't have save states. But messing up leads to more interesting, catastrophic pathways. It allows players to attempt to resolve their previous actions through increased action, which is how mistakes work in the real world. Its replay mechanic is basically our IRL "apology" or "second chance" mechanic, which doesn't cheapen the poor decisions, but instead reinforces their effects. Oftentimes, the game's narrative momentum encourages players to make narratively-sound but mechanically-poor decisions.

I see few instances of this in games. One is Lisa: The Painful RPG. In this game, you can *spoilers* choose to save members of your party or lose limbs from your character. The game discourages save-spamming, though it has allowance for it. Still, it wants you to make such a decision and live with the consequences. It prioritizes the story over the mechanics.

I don't think every game should be permadeath, but I do think there's value in having games so enrapturing that you don't want to play them again. You don't need to play the alternative choices to know whether yours was the best, you need only see its effects to understand what could have been done differently. This is long, and I should stop. Talk Kant to me.