The Companion Notebook
Essays on the characters who travel with you
Three readers, nine games a volume, and a twelve-month delay between finishing and writing.
The Companion Notebook
Essays on the characters who travel with you
Three readers, nine games a volume, and a twelve-month delay between finishing and writing.
We write about companion characters in games, and only about companion characters. Not the plots they appear in, not the systems they are attached to, and not whether the game is worth buying. Whether a person you travelled with for forty hours still exists in your head a year later strikes us as a question nobody is asking, so we ask it four times a year.
Three readers, none of whom write about games anywhere else. We play the same nine games each volume, separately, at our own pace, and we do not discuss them with each other until the recall test is complete. That separation is the only methodological discipline the journal has and we take it seriously.
We publish under the journal's name rather than individually, and where an essay says "I" it means whichever of us drafted it, with the other two having checked their own recall against the same companion. Where an essay says "all three of us" it means exactly that, and it is the strongest claim we make.
A companion written about the week you finish a game is a companion you have just spent forty hours being told about. Everything is available: the name, the arc, the voice, the resolution. Writing at that moment produces an accurate description of what the game presented.
What it cannot tell you is whether any of it took. Twelve months later almost all of the presentation has gone, and whatever is left was not presented so much as accumulated. That residue is the only subject this journal has.
This is the question we are asked most and the one we are least willing to move on. Naming the game turns each essay into a review, and a review of a year-old game is a genre with no audience and no purpose. More importantly, it changes what the essay is about. Readers would arrive to find out whether we liked the game rather than to follow an argument about behaviour and memory.
Every essay describes the companion, the behaviour, the hours logged and the recall outcome in enough detail to be checked against your own experience if you happen to have played the same thing. Several readers have written to say they recognised a companion from a description. That is the correct amount of identification for what we are doing.
It is not. Games are bought at retail by whichever of us is playing them, hardware is what we already own, and the site costs very little to run. Nothing on this site is paid for by anyone and nothing on it is for sale.
The practical consequence is that we publish nine games a volume rather than thirty, and that volumes are late when life is busy. We consider that an acceptable trade for never having to think about who is paying.
The recall tests are the raw material and we keep the original index cards. Where an essay states a figure — eleven pauses, thirty hours, four of four names — it is taken from the cards written before notes were reopened, and the discrepancy with the contemporaneous notes is reported rather than smoothed over. When we get something wrong we amend the essay in place and say so at the foot of it.
Volume four closed with a revised argument in essay six: behaviour repeated without progression outlasts scripted scenes, and behaviour directed at the player is what carries identity rather than atmosphere. Volume five will test the second clause deliberately, by selecting games with companions whose habits are largely inward, and seeing whether the names go the way the sleeping scholar's did.
If you want the method rather than the argument, it is set out step by step in our practice page.