The Companion Notebook
Essays on the characters who travel with you
Plain terms for a journal that publishes opinion about characters in games and sells nothing.
The Companion Notebook
Essays on the characters who travel with you
Plain terms for a journal that publishes opinion about characters in games and sells nothing.
By reading these pages you accept the terms below. They are short because this journal is a set of essays with nothing attached to them: no accounts, no purchases, no submissions and no promises about anything you might buy elsewhere.
Each essay is a written account of what three readers could recall of a companion character twelve months after finishing a game. The recall grades, hour counts and figures come from index cards written from memory before any notes were reopened, as described in the practice page. They are recorded honestly and they are not measurements in any rigorous sense.
They are not reviews and should not be read as buying advice. The games are not named, so no essay can tell you whether to acquire anything. Nor are they claims about how a game was made: where an essay speculates about a follow system, a timer or a navigation failure, that speculation is a reader's inference from play and is labelled as such.
No essay is commissioned, sponsored, gifted or reviewed by anyone outside the journal before publication. We take no review copies, run no advertising, carry no affiliate arrangements and receive nothing of value from anyone connected to any game discussed. Games are bought at retail by the reader who plays them.
The essays and the artwork on this site were made for it and remain the property of the journal. You may quote a reasonable extract for discussion, criticism or review provided the journal is credited and the sense is not altered. Republishing an essay in full, or reusing the artwork, is not permitted without our agreement.
Where a figure or a description turns out to be wrong, we amend the essay in place and record the correction at the foot of it rather than removing the original claim. The index cards behind each essay are retained so that a disputed figure can be checked.
This is a small self-funded journal and the site is provided as it is, with no undertaking that it will remain reachable, complete or unchanged. Volumes are sometimes late. Essays may be revised or, rarely, withdrawn if the method behind them turns out to have been compromised.
The essays are offered for interest and argument. To the extent the law allows, we accept no liability for any decision taken on the basis of anything published here, including decisions about how to spend your time or money on games we have deliberately declined to name.
Where any page here points to a destination we do not control, that destination is governed by its own terms and we make no representation about its content, accuracy or availability.
These terms describe the journal as it currently operates. If the way it operates changes — if it ever accepted funding, for instance — the terms would be rewritten before that happened and the change stated plainly on this page.