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This month on ephemeral, we've been talking about the evolution of video games.

Dating back to the simple beginnings of Pong and Space Invaders,

all the way up to the supercomputers that power our imaginations today.

But in today's episode, we wanted to focus on the worlds inside those video games.

Video games can remove us from reality and place us in a magical and surreal world.

But given the ephemeral nature of video game saves, all of this wonder,

amazement, and experience can be gone in the blink of an eye,

leaving this world to exist only in our memories.

I could probably give you a story about me being involved in like a lost save file from pretty much any time period of my life.

My name's Matt Davidson and my qualifications as a video gamer I would say are pretty extensive just because of the generation I come from.

So I was born in 1983, which puts me right in the middle of original Nintendo era,

and I stuck with it enough through current times to where I played every different era of video games

on pretty much every different console at one time or another.

It wasn't necessarily me losing a save file, but I played the Diablo series.

So both in Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, there's a mode that you can elect to play called Hardcore Mode.

In Hardcore mode, you agree at the beginning that if you die,

all your progress is lost.

And what it does is it resets you from zero

no matter how many hours you've sunk into this character.

The ones that really hurt the most

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