I was playing the new zombie-whacking game Dead Rising, and the last time I’d been able to save my progress was fully 20 minutes ago. That meant that when I resurrected, I had to start way back near the beginning of my mission and numbingly repeat the whole thing again: Find the terrified victims, lead them to safety, confront the growing horde.

Five times in a row I almost finished the mission, when bang: I was dead, and back at my long-ago save point. It was like some unholy version of Groundhog Day.

And it was around Attempt No. 6 that I began to realize why “save points” are one of the most potent and fraught issues in today’s video-game design. They govern the most gut-wrenching part of your game experience — the consequences of failure.

In Dead Rising, you’re trapped in a Romero-like mall, trying to complete dozens of mini missions to unearth the mystery behind the ghoulish invasion. There’s a lot to praise in the game: the intriguing story, the super simple combat system, the moist, appetite-destroying sounds of golf clubs and baseball bats cracking open zombie skulls. But nearly all critics have bemoaned one thing: You’ve only got one Save slot, and the save points — the places where you can save your progress to return to if you die later on — are few and far between.

The upshot is you’re always walking on eggs. You might find yourself unable to save in a difficult mission, then constantly thrown back to the beginning, like me. Or you might accidentally save in a dangerous situation — then never be able to fight your way out of it, and literally have to start the entire game over again.

Yep, that happened to me, too, at which point I responded like all l@mers — I hurled the controller across the room and whined about it to my friends on instant message.

Except one of them set me straight by asking an interesting question: If I’d been able to save the game whenever I wanted, would the game have been easier — or just more boring?

He was right. Save mechanisms are key to the emotional stakes in a game. Personally, I tend to prefer titles like Half-Life, where you can save anywhere you want, instantly — and save as many different copies of your life as you want. (A sentence of utterly Philip K. Dickian weirdness, if you think about it.)

For me, constant saving makes me feel more free: I can take more chances, go down risky alleyways, and explore the game more boldly — because death holds no sting. I get whacked? No problem; I just restore to a moment a few seconds before my death. (It also allows me to fit a game into a busy day, since I can play in short chunks: Go for 10 minutes, stop; go for 30 minutes, stop.)

In contrast, a rare-saving game like Dead Rising forces me to be ultra cautious. I don’t dillydally, explore needlessly, or take any big chances. When I creep across the mall’s open lawn at midnight, when the zombies are more aggressive, my heart is in my throat — not just because the scenario is inherently scary, but because if I die I’m gonna lose another half hour of the most nonrenewable resource in existence: my time.

I’m jumpy because I’m constantly on the verge of mind-bending frustration.

Yet here’s the thing: One could just as easily argue that infrequent saving is a much more intense and authentic experience. It forces you to put some skin in the game. That’s why people seek out life-threatening sports like sheer-face mountain climbing and skydiving. In situations of genuine danger, your senses snap open and you experience things more fully — or, as any extreme athlete would boast, you live more fully.

It’s certainly true that in Dead Rising I was focused with cheetah’s intensity on my enemies. I pretty quickly learned to give a wide berth to even a seemingly slow-moving, harmless zombie — because if one grabs you, it’ll hold you still long enough for the others to stagger over and pile on. I can’t say I ever studied the enemies so closely in an easy-saving game like Doom III.

This is why gamers have such heated debates about save mechanisms: They’re metaphoric stand-ins for the way life works. Playing a game with frequent save points is kind of like being the child of a billionaire: You can soar through life without worrying about financial problems because if you fail, there’s a “restore” point waiting for you. Games with few save points force you to live like a scrappy, coming-from-nothing immigrant: You embrace scary amounts of risk to get ahead because you’ve got no safety net.

Unlike in real life, games let you choose which of these paths you tread.

All of which makes me look, I’m afraid, pretty coddled and weak-willed. About halfway through Dead Rising, I messed up the mission for the seventh time in a row — and popped the disk out of my Xbox 360. Let the zombies take over the food court; let the last terrified survivors huddle in the sporting goods store. Nothing can save them now.