Last night I was up at 4 am in my recliner, holding my baby while he slept after a feeding. I was playing Mass Effect, going through the game to get ready for the upcoming sequel. I had been playing for around two hours, and I was into the story, more than awake, and ready to go for another two. Then... death. A few bad decisions in a gun fight, and that was that for our Commander Shepard.

When I saw where the game reset me—I had foolishly assumed after a long section in the Mako and a set-piece battle it had autosaved—I just sighed and turned the console off. I didn't want to go through the somewhat annoying vehicle section again, and I just wasn't in the mood to go back over the ground I had already covered. When this happens, when you go from being drawn into a game to walking away, something in the design has failed.

So why do we quit? What makes us walk away from a game? Developers are aware of it, and at E3 I talked to a developer from Turn 10 about why they had added a rewind feature into Forza 3, allowing you a mulligan after a bad crash. "If you're at the end of a five-lap race, and you make one mistake, that's when you decide to turn the game off and go to bed," he explained. "I don't want to lose people at that point."

DiRT 2, in our preview code, likewise had a "Flashback" feature that gave you the limited ability to take back bad decisions. The impact of this feature was something I felt immediately: it made me play more, and the sessions I played were longer. Racing games are easy to walk away from: a single mistake during a twenty-minute race and you're back at square one. The Flashback feature allows you to practice turns, and it decreases the stakes while keeping the fun factor of the game. You're free to try a few different approaches into turns, and the gut-wrenching fear that comes with being in first place is somewhat alleviated.

Of course, for the big-money races, that feature disappears. For those of us who don't mind taking slightly longer to level up, it's a godsend.

Badly spaced check points are another easy way of booting the player out. As I found, oftentimes you'll simply not want to redo a section of the game that you didn't find enjoyable, especially when you had assumed you had bested that particular section of the game. You can alleviate this problem by saving more often, but you shouldn't have to; badly placed checkpoints are insanely obvious when they occur. After a big set piece, the game should auto-save. The quiet after a long firefight? Autosave. Progressing through a Bioware-style RPG, you know where the "beats" are, and this sort of annoyance at having to replay a long stretch of grinding game play is hard to excuse.

It's bad when you quit for the night; it's even worse when the game goes back onto the shelf, never to be finished.

It's not that games should be made easier, or the player given more tools to "cheat" or squeak through—the best games still provide a thrill when you finally best a challenging area—it's more like there should be much more attention paid to the moment when a player goes from "one more round" to "okay, time for bed." The best games understand this balancing act, and those are the titles that rob our sleep and haunt our dreams. The games fail when we sigh and turn the console off, suddenly losing interest in seeing where the story would have taken us.

So I ask you: what takes you from thinking you can give a game another hour or two to quitting for the night? What makes you walk away from an otherwise good game completely, and how should it be fixed? The best games are the ones we finish because we never hit these snags, but those are few and far between. What games handle this challenge well? I'm interested in your thoughts.