Gaming in Windows

I've been reading about gaming changes in Windows Vista, and I must say it's a good start.  Game ratings have been around for too many years to have no OS integration yet.  If you haven't heard yet, Vista will allow you to restrict user accounts for movie ratings (DVD), music ratings (CD), and game ratings.  The game ratings can use ESRB or other ratings services along with administrator-set preferences to allow or disallow the game to run.  As parents of young kids will know, this is pretty handy!  Especially I hope that this works with my system where all children's game CD's are mounted virtually from a network location.

The new games themselves look nice, the icons look very fancy, but that's such eye candy.  What I don't see any indication of, is a better save game manager.  This has been on my mind for a year or two, and still no sign of progress toward it.

The basic premise, is that Windows itself should provide support for saved games.  Some games are written well enough that games are saved to the My Documents folder, but not enough.  I want a My Game Saves folder alongside My Pictures and My Videos.  A subdirectory per game would segregate the save files nicely.  Ideally, Microsoft would provide an API for saving game state.  Standard features would include save point name, description, still image, and optional information such as player/game stats or other game-specific info.  This is all metadata for the actual game data itself.  Then, players can browse their save game points from within the game, in whatever way the game engine lays out, but from Windows itself, you could use Windows Explorer to view saved games, similar to fonts or control panel entries, using shell hooks.  A player could browse saved games, sort by play date, name, etc., then double-click to launch the game at that point.  Very convenient.

Here's the best part -- with a standardized save game mechanism in a standardized location, backups/restores and transfers are simple.  The Files and Settings Transfer (FAST) Wizard would backup game data and simple backup tools would copy game save info along with other user data.  To take it a step further, it would be great to provide a hook to easily integrate flash storage with the arrangement, so a user could target a certain game to a memory stick, or simply copy saved games between a memory stick with little more than popping in the stick and clicking a prompt.  This allows a player to bring a saved game to a friend's house, then copy the progress back to the home machine without manual file copies.  If you've ever looked at many games, the saved file naming is often pretty cryptic, intended to only be used by the game itself.

Adding a Saved Game State Manager to DirectX X (ooh, that doesn't work for naming does it!) would benefit users, and developers should like the consistency.  This seems like the kind of idea that a company would come up with, then patent!  It's a little bit original, and ties existing things together nicely.  Patents sure can be dumb.

Hopefully we'll see a feature like this before too long.  Game developers need to target things well in advance to integrate them up-front, though it seems like a patch could allow an existing game to work with the system.  Let's see what develops...