The act of playing digital games can sometimes feel ephemeral, lacking the physical presence of traditional board games. Yet, a select group of video games compels players to bridge this gap by taking notes, transforming their digital experiences into tangible artifacts of words and drawings.
This compulsion stems from a desire to organize thoughts, track down treasures, or mark areas for further investigation. What begins as a few scattered words can evolve into full pages, complete with hand-drawn maps. Arrows extend from paragraphs, branching into new clusters of notes in blank spaces, creating a visual representation of the player's thought process.
Her Story, for example, offers an interface for tagging video clips and saving favorites, but it falls short of accommodating the sheer volume of potential search terms and investigative threads that emerge. To manage this, a notebook becomes indispensable. One page might detail the victim's background, another the local pub, while keywords fill a separate section. Attempts to follow specific narrative threads, like a character's outfit changes, can become entangled with seemingly unrelated elements such as a lost child, a widowed midwife, mushrooms, and a forensic entomologist. While a basic solution to the crime might be found, the uninvestigated words and the desire to verify findings encourage continued note-taking. The resulting notebook pages, brimming with curiosity, are cherished not for their long-term utility as a record, but because the sheer volume of writing and the energetic connections made visible the intricate process of playing the game.
Return of the Obra Dinn presents a different notetaking experience. While the majority of information is processed internally or by referencing in-game documents, a notepad becomes necessary for cross-referencing names and objects to progress. Unlike Her Story, where notes accumulate narrative details, Obra Dinn's notebook is used to eliminate possibilities. Numbers and names are circled and grouped, forming a kind of code with abstractions and shorthand that reflect a fading memory. These pages feel like a cipher, documenting a complex deduction process.
Esports, particularly games like Dota, League of Legends, and Smite, inspires another form of note-taking. Recording each match in a notebook—listing players, character picks, and bans—serves as a ritual to settle in and as a journalistic reference, even though the data could be found in VODs or wikis. Repeatedly writing character names helps absorb in-game trends and provides an analogue feel to the digital experience. Skill sets for less-played characters might be written out, alongside significant kills, major fights, unusual decisions, or item choices. During tense matches, the excitement translates into faster, less legible writing, punctuated by uppercase exclamations and ellipses.
Ultimately, these notes—scrawled maps, lists of suspects spanning double-page spreads, or spider diagrams in marker pen—are treasured possessions. They allow the digital world of gaming to spill into the physical, expressing the time, excitement, and mental energy invested. While their meaning might fade with time for anyone other than the author, they serve as a powerful testament to the engaged and multifaceted experience of playing video games.