Writing the World: Personal Journals in Video Games

This paper explores the remediations of personal journals and the processes of writing and reading them in the two titles Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games 2018) and Season: A Letter to the Future (Scavengers Studio 2023).As recurring features of video game storytelling, player-character notebooks appear in forms ranging from in-game artifacts with dedicated mechanics to elements of the HUD (Heads-Up Display), game menus, or collectible items scattered around game worlds.Despite their ubiquity, the potential of these ludonarrative devices to reflect on authorship, readership, and the mechanics of writing and reading within interactive media remains largely unexamined in scholarly discourse.By analyzing these two case studies, I argue that video game journals act as dynamic crossroads, where authorship, player agency, and cultural representation intersect, revealing the complex ethical and narrative processes of recording, preserving, and interacting with stories in video games.