I’ve been maintaining a video game diary since 2021.  I post it publicly on my pillowfort.  It is not the only media diary I maintain, I also review books (though I read very slowly).  Media diaries are very rewarding to maintain, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.  Sharing the diary publicly (to a small number of readers) is also rewarding, but in a more complicated way that I don’t necessarily recommend.  It challenges me to reconcile what I want from the diary, and what readers might get out of it.

For comparison, I’d like to discuss a couple game diaries maintained by public figures.  Gaming youtuber Razbuten has a diary on a second channel, titled “Games I played in [month]“.  Dark Souls youtuber Iron Pineapple has a series “Souls-like games you’ve never heard of” where he plays hundreds of games that could conceivably be described as “souls-like”.  Immediate caveat: both of these series are commercial products.  The youtubers make money off of them.  So I’m taking each of these series as a reflection of what viewers/readers like to see in a game diary.

The primary answer is reviews.  Recommendations.  Curation.  Discovery.

The diary as discovery mechanism

When readers use a game diary as a way to discover new games, this is at tension with what I want to get out of writing the diary.  In a game diary, I want to talk about good games and bad games alike.  But for a reader looking for recommendations, it’s kind of a waste of their time to hear me talk about a game they otherwise never heard of, only for me to recommend against playing it.

In my experience, bad games are where the diary is most rewarding.  Instead of writing off the time I spent with the game as a loss, I can use that game to construct larger insights.  I get to speculate about game design principles, or at the very least form a deeper understanding of my own preferences.

Also, a game diary does not need to contain any reviews at all!  Sometimes I just want to talk about a specific aspect of a game that interested me.  Sometimes it’s a game I liked very much but I’m talking about an aspect that I didn’t like very much.  So if you read it as a review it sounds very critical.  And I’m not trying to mislead people, so I’ll say that I liked the game, and briefly explain why.  But if I were just writing a private diary, there would be no risk of confusing anyone, so I’d probably just leave that out.

Non-review diaries are even more obvious when talking about books.  If I’m reading the fourth book in the series, frankly there is no point to writing a review.  Either you’ve read the previous books and you already know whether you’ll like it, or else you’re not interested in the series at all.

However, I’ve found that in practice it’s quite hard to excise the review from the diary.  Reviews are a very easy and very natural way to talk about media.  You talk about how you felt and why you felt that way.  In principle, a diary entry does not need to contain a review, and the review does not need to be the central focus.  But maybe it’s not worth really forcing myself to write differently.

Diaries as conversation

Now something I really appreciate about Iron Pineapple’s series, is that it’s not wholly focused on reviews and game recommendations.  While he does review every game he plays, a lot of those games are what we might call “shovelware”.  This includes solo projects, hobby projects and student projects.  He recognizes that they are not necessarily commercial products, says some nice things about the game, and commends the devs for working on it.

Why does this appeal to millions of viewers?  Surely part of it is the spectacle of really janky and weird games.  Personally, I really like it because it’s understanding and respectful of what it takes to create a game, even a game that has a lot of problems.

Here’s another way to think about it.  In literary theory, “genre” is often described as a conversation.  What is a souls-like game?  Souls-like games share many common elements like the dodge roll, a dark and decaying world, the “bonfire” checkpoint system, and a high degree of challenge.  But not every game in the genre shares all these properties.  The more important aspect of a souls-like, is that it is in conversation with the form.  Not always sticking to the formula, but always responding to it.  One souls-like game might say, “I want the player to break barrels by rolling into them, that’s a really fun and iconic aspect of souls-likes.”  Another might say “What we swapped the grim and dirty setting with something brightly colored?”  Either of these will be highlighted in Pine’s series.

Pine’s series is directly engaging in the genre conversation.  Rather than sticking to the biggest commercial souls-like games, he explores far-flung corners, discussing what smaller creators have to say.  Even if I’m not interested in trying those games, they often have really interesting ideas.

This is what interests me most in maintaining a game diary.  I like engaging with the artistic conversations, even if I’m mostly speaking to myself about it.  For example, I play a great number of puzzle games, and I like contrasting them with each other.  This game constantly betrays expectations.  That game requires a lot of planning and forethought.  And that game has a brilliant way to handle hints, which is similar to this other game.  So on and so forth.

And I could even write about games I haven’t played, that aren’t even out yet.  The very first thing that a game contributes to the conversation is in its marketing.  What unique idea does a game propose?  And if I play the game later, we can ask how well the proposal worked out.

I find myself gravitating towards this style of game diary.  But I think it doesn’t necessarily align with readers.  After all, it’s just seen by a few internet friends, not necessarily by puzzle game megafans.  I’m talking about how game X is like game Y, but with a little bit of game Z, and that’s just not very useful if you’ve never touched X, Y, or Z.  And although I like reacting to games I haven’t played, it feels improper, so I often keep it to myself.

I’d like to maintain the diary in the way that I personally enjoy the most.  But by sharing it publicly, even to a small token audience, makes me think about what other people might or might not enjoy.  That’s not entirely bad, it just adds a little low-stakes challenge.