Complex Numbers

Save Game

Share an instance in your life when you would have liked a do-over.

There's a primitive computer game called NetHack, which has its origins back in the days of DOS, monochrome monitors, and ASCII graphics. It's a dungeon-delving game that takes its inspiration from early editions of D&D; you play as a protagonist on a quest to recover a specific artifact for your deity. Along the way, you fight monsters, explore dungeons (randomly generated), solve puzzles, and avoid traps, much like in D&D.

Lack of graphics aside, the primary thing that sets NetHack apart from other computer games is that there's no save function. What I mean is, you can save a game and come back to it later if you need to, I don't know, sleep or work or something; but you can't come back to an earlier save point if your avatar dies in the game.

Of course, there are workarounds for that, but they go against the spirit of the game; it would be like cheating at solitaire. You're supposed to play the game, figure things out as you go along, and if you die, all you can do is start over with a different character - but with the metaknowledge you've gained as a player on the previous run. It's a challenge, but that's why I play games. (There's also a wizard mode where you can figure a lot of things out without dying, and that's not considered cheating, but the results of any wizard mode games don't "count.")

By contrast, most modern single-player games - Fallout 4, for example - let you save at almost any time; if you run into a battle it turns out you can't handle, you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning. You reload a later save, and hopefully prep for the battle more effectively. This is good, because while a NetHack game can take 24 hours (and let me tell you, nothing sucks more than dying just before you're about to turn the artifact over to your god), a game like Fallout can take 24 days or more.

I mention this because it's possible that no one thinks about do-overs more than gamers. However, we're painfully aware that, in life, there are no save points, no do-overs, no coming back from battles we can't handle.

But you know, I'm okay with that. While there are many things I wish I'd done differently, if I were magically (or scientifically) handed the opportunity, I'd have to decline. That's because there are only two possibilities I can see:

1) I would have memory of both the original event and its do-over - in which case, I'd give it a 50/50 chance of the do-over making things worse; or

2) I would have no memory of the original event, in which case I'd just want another do-over.

Every mistake I've made has helped make me who I am, so even though it's a fine exercise to think about how we might have done things differently - it helps with similar situations in the future - as with most wishes, the reality of it could never live up to one's expectations.