Let’s design games so it’s easy for users to power off their device without losing progress.

There are some structural reasons in the way the consoles and games are designed that encourage users to just leave them powered on.

For example, many games have specific checkpoints where the games progress is saved. For many roguelike or arcade games this is often even reduced to between runs or tries. But when in between checkpoints and with no opportunity to safely leave and shut down the gaming device, players will often just pause the game and leave the device running, wasting a lot of energy.

Simply put, letting players save the game at any moment is not only more fun for the player, but also the planet!

If for whatever reason this solution isn’t available, ways to mitigate the energy waste include Pausing Properly, Don’t Leave the Engine Running and simply communicating that the game state will persist if the device goes into sleep mode (assuming that’s the case).