The Simple Joys of Taking Notes While Playing Video Games
How note taking deepens interactivity in all mediums and the unique storytelling potential and power of video games
Oh no, she’s writing about video games this week! You’ve all been tricked, hoodwinked, bamboozled! I lured you in with a blog about books and writing when, actually, it’s about storytelling in its many, diverse forms. Gotcha!
*Discussions of all these games are spoiler-free but if you want completely blind playthroughs of these games (two of which are over 10 years old), you’ve been warned.
If you sent me a text about two weeks ago and got left on read, the reason I didn’t answer you is probably because I was playing Blue Prince.
Blue Prince is a genre-bending rogue-like from developer Dogubomb. In it, you explore a 45 room mansion attempting to reach the mythical Room 46. Every day, you’re building your mansion from scratch. Each time you open a door, you’ll choose between three random rooms to draft. Every room has benefits and drawbacks.
So, you must draft these rooms with care to get the resources, information, and path you need to go deeper into the house toward your goal. At the end of the day, when you’ve run out of energy or are stuck behind dead ends or locked doors, you head to bed, and the next day the house is reset and you start all over.
It’s buckets of fun rolling the dice and trying to fill out your mansion. Most days end in failure, but every day arms you with new information you get to take with you tomorrow. While your draft resets, the knowledge and information you find are yours to keep.
Early on, the game gives you a suggestion that you take notes while you play. There is so much information to keep track of — how puzzles work, how certain rooms are connected, which rooms you need to solve which puzzles, which keys go where, how to open certain doors. It is a feature, not a bug, that you will discover information that you can’t immediately do anything with. Making sure that information sticks around from day to day is crucial. Without any kind of in-game infrastructure to do it for you, the onus lies on you, the player, to make sure things are recorded.
By the end of the game, my notes looked like a mad person’s scribbles as I connected the dots and solved the game’s many puzzles (both big and small). I won’t share a photo as to not spoil things for those yet to play the game, but it looks something like this:
Blue Prince was not my first experience taking notes while playing a video game. My first time playing Elden Ring, I took notes to keep track of characters and story beats. At first, just detailing which characters I found where, what they said, and whether they mentioned where they’d be next or if they were looking for a certain object. Eventually, this bled into taking notes on the game’s world and lore. Which of the Gods were related to each other, what locations used to be before The Shattering, and what the major factions stood for. It was fun piecing together the game’s asynchronous story through things as seemingly insignificant as the description on an item I’d never use. This makes it sound like I made a noble choice to take notes when, really, it all started as an analog solution to a mechanical problem. The game forgoes a feature that is common in most other games of its genre: the quest log or journal.
Quest logs are an in-game mechanic that keeps track of key information on your behalf. It offers a functional to-do list that records the people you’ve met, the things you’ve been asked to do, and guidance on where to go next. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it as a design element, and there’s a reason it’s commonplace. It reduces friction, eliminates the need for guesswork, and, most importantly, keeps players playing. But the absence of it in Elden Ring was a wake-up call about how passive an experience it can render games. And how it functionally rips apart the integration of story and gameplay.
When The Last of Us came out in 2013, Naughty Dog’s stealth zombie shooter was lauded for its cinematic story of latent grief, fatherhood, and morality. But, such focus on the story as opposed to the gameplay led to a recurrent criticism that The Last of Us was a video game that didn’t seem all that interested in being a video game. That its narrative elements, while strongly emotive and visually stunning, are not meaningfully integrated into the gameplay. It’s not so much that they have nothing to do with each other, more that one does not fully necessitate the other. If you watch a compilation of the game’s cutscenes and dialogue, you will get the full picture of the story. But, more to my point, you could skip every cutscene and still complete the game just following what the quest log and map markers tell you to do. The two elements match each other, but they function more as a pairing than as a single unit.
When it comes to video games, interactivity is all too often conflated with having control, especially when it comes to interactive storytelling. The metric upon which choice-based video games are judged is usually how impactful player decision-making is on the final product. How much each individual choice “matters”. This is, more or less, an impossible goal to put upon games. It would take entirely too much code to create a game that is fully responsive to every single decision players make.
And, as I’ve discussed, structure is one of the key elements of a good story. This is one of the reasons storytelling in open-world games can fall a little flat. Giving players the ability to decide when they want to progress the main story or bugger off to other tasks, collapses narrative structure. In The Witcher 3, players are tasked with finding Geralt’s adopted daughter Ciri, who is in grave danger from an ancient magical army that is hunting her. The task suggests dire urgency, but after the tutorial, the game opens up and allows you to choose whichever task you want to do next. You can keep plugging away at the main story or explore side quests and tasks. If you, for example, fall in love with Gwent, a trading card mini game, you could spend in-game weeks building your deck instead of facing the existential threat to your daughter and the entire world.
This is where control undermines structure. There is no consequence to leaving Ciri to fend for herself in the wilderness while you sell all your possessions to fund your Gwent habit. Any tension that’s driving the story is only present where it’s convenient, robbing it of its power to push the story forward. It superimposes a structure that works in other mediums (like books and film) but forgets to add support beams that make those structures work.
In Blue Prince, players have astoundingly little control. Every day is won or lost at the mercy of a random number generator. While there are ways for players to push the odds in their favor, it’s likely a day will end not because of a mistake but because of an inopportune dead end. Yet the player retains enormous agency that keeps the game feeling responsive and interactive. It is the player’s ability to piece together information and solve puzzles that drives progression. Any day that contributes new information or gets players closer to solving any of the game’s many puzzles is a successful day.
It is probably possible to play Blue Prince passively—opening random doors, picking up items, hoping you get the right combination on the right day to get the desired outcome. The same goes for Elden Ring. The game can be played by bumbling around and fighting whatever thing happens to be in front of you until you eventually find the final boss. But, the fun of it—the art at the core of it—is in your ability to figure it out. To pay attention and listen, to interact with what’s in front of you, and—as you do quite literally in Blue Prince—build the structure from the ground up.
I say all this as a person who loves The Witcher 3 (and, contrary to popular belief, I do love it for reasons beyond Gwent). But also as a person who felt a change in my brain chemistry when I took notes while playing Elden Ring. It was the first time in a long time a video game dared me to actually pay attention to what was happening in all the “boring parts”. To actually listen to the information being given to me—not just because it was interesting, but because it was necessary.
That first note taking experience got me taking notes on just about everything. I take notes on the books I read, the movies I watch, the restaurants I dine at, and the video games I play. Not always as a matter of progression and not always to mine ideas for future blogs. But to make sense of my thoughts, to deepen my relationship to the things I consume. To interact with the world instead of just watching it.
We’ve switched to a cadence of every other week as I continue the transition from writing about writing to longer form essays about storytelling and how story is found in everything. I hope you like it as much as I’m enjoying writing it. Until next time, my friends.
—Em