How are game states/saves shared as a string?

Question

I know enough to get myself in trouble here and butchering terminology but how do games condense their save file into a sharable string or text file?

For a few of my idle games and what not you can either get a download of your current save state via a x-length alphanumeric string or a slightly bigger text file/hash. Also works for custom levels.

In: Technology

Answer 1

There are two possible solutions.

Games that give you a file may be storing all of the game state in that file.

Games that give you a short alphanumeric string probably aren’t storing the whole state. What actually happens is that the full game state gets uploaded to a server somewhere, and that alphanumeric string is just the code that lets you access it. When someone else types in that string, they download the whole file.