I turned off my PC during the “Do Not Power Off” symbol in five different games to see what would happen and it was an annoying experience.

We’ve all seen it. The small rotating symbol warns players not to turn off their computer out of impatience. “Do not turn off your system when this symbol is displayed,” says the message we often see when starting a game (or some other version of those words). The implication is clear. The backup process is delicate and if you interrupt this invisible ritual, the data that is written in a folder deep in the bowels of your PC will be corrupted, destroyed, scrambled. You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and achievements.

But is it true? What is the probability that you Really I had to suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells. To find out, I decided to spend a very painful afternoon turning my game console off and on for several games. Was this a good idea? I don’t know. I’m a player, not a man of ideas.

This is not an extremely scientific experiment. It’s simple. In each game, I’ll reach a save point, watch for the corresponding “now saved” icon, and press my “power off” button while the icon displays. Sometimes the save points will be manual, sometimes they will be location-aware automatic saves. Either way, I time the power down as best I can. Sometimes I perform the act several times, sometimes I just do it a few times. Please note that I only use the “shutdown” button on my PC. Fear keeps me from turning off the power to the wall during this process. This is the scariest version of that same experience. As we will see, this can make a big difference.

To help me understand the reasons behind this symbol, I’ll also turn to Getting Over It developer Bennett Foddy. Which seems fitting for an experience that involves starting something over again over and over again.

But first, let’s see what happened. A disastrous data loss? Or a nice alpha foxtrot? Read on to find out!

Hades 2

Mel’s violent trek through Hell is often auto-saved. She saves between rooms, after picking up perks, after upgrading your altar skills, after picking up post-battle treats, and probably a bunch of other places I didn’t notice. Statistically, someone out there had a power outage at the worst possible time, right? Well, I tried to emulate that and destroy my save file multiple times while her “Saving” witch glyph was displayed. Nothing happened. Every time I restarted my PC and launched the game, I was safe and sound. It never even took me back a single step.

Result: No data loss.

The depths wake up again

The save icon in this first-person horror is a non-intrusive set of rotating circles in the corner of the screen. I attempted the same self-destructing power outage, cutting out a save at many different locations aboard the oil rig. Nothing went wrong. It’s perhaps encouraging to learn that The Chinese Room’s game is more robust than the rusty machinery used by the fictional cheap oil company Cadal.

Result: Absolutely shit.

Madness of terror

Dread Delusion’s save points are ornate contraptions containing glowing crystals, and the save icon is a dusty old tome, again in the corner of the screen. Of all the games I’ve tried to corrupt, I had the perverse hope that this rather good retro RPG would fall victim to my sabotage. It’s made by a small team, I thought, maybe they wouldn’t have had the time to make their save process absolutely foolproof. But no. Even after several tries, there was no corruption, no data loss, no disaster.

Result: I’m really tired of entering my Windows password.

Cyberpunk 2077

The save process in Cyberpunk 2077 takes milliseconds. The little “Do not turn off” icon appears and disappears too quickly for me to react. To simultaneously cut the power and save the game, I would need a second person to assist me in the process. We would have to treat it with the eyeglass-correcting precision of a pair of military scientists, counting down and turning our keys at the same time. It is theoretically possible for your save data in this game to be accidentally destroyed, but you literally couldn’t do it if you tried.

Result: I regret having started this useless experiment.

Alien: Isolation

Haha. Here’s one that counts down for you. The save locations in Alien: Isolation are a thing of beauty, in that they are actual physical locations on the walls of the space station, into which you insert a small map device. The required save symbol also appears (in this case, a small cassette). I stuck Ripley’s card in, waited for the save process to begin, confirmed an “overwrite game” message, and quickly shut down my PC as soon as the tape appeared. Did the notoriously crappy machines at Sevastopol Station corrupt my save file? No. Even the idiots at Seegson Electronics seem to be able to perform a reliable backup process.

Result: I’m just glad it’s over, to be honest.

Game saved successfully

So. Absolutely no horror stories about backup data. So why do games show you this warning? Did I just get lucky? Will turning off your PC during a save actually do any harm, or is it just an obscure custom of game developers?

“I think the answer is probably ‘it depends,’ unfortunately,” says Bennett Foddy, creator of Getting Over It. “Yes, if you remove the power cable from the PC or console while writing your save file, the file writing will not finish and you will get a corrupted save. But, lots of caveats …

“Everyone I know writes to a rotating set of locations to handle file corruption. So if one file gets corrupted, it just loads the next, most recent one. But there’s no guarantee that the game you’re playing will do.

“Some games have tiny save files – like Getting Over, it writes almost no data when saving. In those cases, it’s statistically unlikely that you’ll interrupt a save process even if you pull the power cord. Maybe you’d have to turn off the computer 100 times to have the misfortune of corrupting a save file for that game.”

Foddy’s last point reminds me of the Cyberpunk 2077 save process during my foray into mad science above. In this particular case, the backup file may be large or small, I don’t know. But no matter how CD Projekt RED handles it, the shooter seems to save incredibly fast, making any interruptions unlikely.

But Foddy also believes that my method of pressing the “power off” button is unlikely to cause any harm, since it triggers a shutdown process that “should include ending any ongoing file writes and safely shutting down the drives.” Haha. So we need to repeat this under more severe, “power out at the wall” conditions.

There’s another possible reason why this warning is showing up in so many games you play. In some cases, it may simply be imposed on developers as part of the publishing process. As early as 2012, Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid and The Witness, complained about this exact requirement in the certification process. In other words, including this warning is one of the rules that game creators must follow to ensure their games can be sold on storefronts like the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam.

“Every game is REQUIRED to say at startup: ‘sometimes this game saves, when you see this animated icon in the corner, DO NOT TURN YOUR CONSOLE OFF, etc.,'” Blow wrote in an email to Ars Technica. “This is something that developers have to implement and test, which costs a lot of time and money, but even worse, it impacts the user experience because starting the game becomes a little more bureaucratized.”

Blow continues to complain repeatedly about this certification process, essentially pointing out the same thing as Foddy: there is a technically sound way to create a failsafe against data corruption. Which would make the warning virtually useless.

“It could also be a historical requirement of the console,” Foddy says. “I haven’t checked recently (and I think the license would prevent me from telling you if I did). It could also be that developers are following an instinctive convention. I bet that’s part of it.”

Conclusion

Ultimately, we may be none the wiser about this rotating symbol of uncertainty. The certification requirements alone make it likely we’ll continue to see it used in our games for the foreseeable future. But, yes, a lot of it seems unnecessary. You’re probably more likely to lose your save file to an overzealous roommate or younger sibling than to a sudden power outage. At least judging from my experience scientifically rigorous experimentation nonetheless.

Yet science is an open book. Peer review me, reader! What about you? Have you ever had a save corruption disaster? Lost 55 hours of Persona 5 to the cybervoid? What’s the most devastating loss of your life? Unburden me with your personal story, if we can’t always reliably save the game, let’s at least save each other.