// PC GAMER — GAMING
Why I love my gaming notebooks
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From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #326 (UK, January 2019).
Something I miss when I play digital games is the tactile side of play. It’s why videogames and board games coexist in my life so beautifully. One allows for complexity beyond what a pen-and-paper can track, and the other offers tokens to hold, boards to construct, people to physically turn to as you play. Somewhere in the middle are a wonderful selection of videogames where you feel compelled to take notes.
I’m not talking about games which demand you fetch a sheet of paper as part of the experience. These are games where my experience just happens to spill over into the real world as drawings and words. The ones where I decide to keep my thoughts straight by idly jotting down words, phrases, the location of a treasure to come back to or an area to investigate more thoroughly.
After a while the odd word or two becomes a page, perhaps even a map. Arrows allow paragraphs to put out little runners, setting down roots in blank spaces and fruiting whole new clusters of notes.
Her Story is one such game. The interface allows you to store a certain amount of information—you can add tags for each video clip, and keep a handful saved for reference. What it doesn’t offer is a way to note all the different potential search terms a new clip throws up and which you want to work through when you’re constantly being sidetracked.
To stop myself forgetting, I reached for my notebook. A record of the victim started to accumulate on one page while the local pub formed another hub. The left side filled up with keywords. One cluster of notes tried to follow outfit changes but it got hemmed in by a lost baby, a widowed midwife, mushrooms, mirrors and a forensic entomologist.
I had enough for a basic solution to the crime after a couple of hours so that’s tangled in there, too. But so many words remained uninvestigated and I wanted to check my working, so I kept going. The result is a section of notebook brimming with curiosity. I like it not so much because it’s a useful record of information—my notes are as baffling to me as to a stranger once the game has faded from memory—but because the volume of writing, and the energetic connections make visible parts of the process of playing a game.
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My Return of the Obra Dinn notes take on a different form, but the affection I feel is the same. Having spent the majority of the game keeping all the information in my head or using the map and crew documents as reference points, I reached for my notepad. I needed to cross reference a lot of objects and a lot of names to make progress.