Writing the World: Personal Journals in Video Games

Kübra Aksay's paper examines personal journals as ludonarrative devices in video games, focusing on how these in-game artifacts raise questions about authorship, readership, player agency, and cultural representation. Drawing on literary and media studies, particularly life-writing scholarship, the author argues that game journals serve as crossroads where these concerns intersect, revealing the ethical and narrative processes involved in recording and interacting with stories. The analysis proceeds through two case studies: Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) and Season: A Letter to the Future (2023).

In Red Dead Redemption 2, Arthur Morgan's journal is written automatically rather than by player input, yet its content and length still reflect the player's choices and the character's branching arc, complicating simple notions of authorship. The paper also notes the journal's extension beyond the game through fan-made replicas and an official companion app, which fulfill fans' desire to own and read imaginary books. In Season, the protagonist Estelle's journal is a customizable, scrapbook-like artifact that invites players to contribute photographs, sketches, and recordings and to select among her reflections, making it a site of coauthorship. Estelle writes explicitly for an imagined future archivist, so her documentation is framed as deliberate preservation, which the author reads as potentially entangled with cultural interference or even colonization.

The study situates these analyses within life-writing debates on gender and the diary, and within critiques of traditional autobiography's narrow, universalized subject. By examining how fictional authors' identities and contexts shape their records, the paper suggests that video games can extend the evolution of life-writing studies. The analysis is qualitative and text-based, relying on close readings of two titles rather than on survey or quantitative data.