Do you ever take (paper or digital) notes while playing?

When I was younger I remember having a big stack of papers filled with maps, cheats, combos and other useful information written down that I had learned from whatever games I was playing at the time. But as I grew up I stopped doing that, or at least did it very little. These days I might take a cellphone shot off the screen if I need something readily available without too much hassle or I'll tab in and out of a game if I need some sort of guidance.

But when I heard about Her Story I decided, due to the nature of that game, to go into it making sure to take notes with ink and paper. What I found was that not only was it a good way to remember small details about the story, but it actually enhanced the experience to such a degree that when the game was done, it was like walking back into reality.

I ended up filling up about 4 pages of notes. Ranging from a mind map starting out with Hannah and branching out, small bios of all the characters she mentioned, an events timeline, clothing and interview dates and knock code dots. Etc. The pages helped solidify how I viewed the story and helped put some thoughts into perspective.

I am sure I would have enjoyed the game without taking notes, but I completely underestimated how much it added. After this experience I think I'll actually start doing more of this where applicable. Games do have a tendency to keep track of things for you, so it's generally not as needed. But who knows, not relying solely on the game's information might be rewarding in itself.

So how about you, ever do paper (or maybe just digital) note taking while playing?

I considered doing it with Fez and then couldn't be arsed. I remember writing paper shortlists for Championship Manager, though.

I do, but not as it pertains to important quests or story beats and such. I keep half-page to page-long jot notes on how a game makes me feel, what I think of it, interesting mechanics, good and bad aspects, etc. and then I write a review or a retrospective on it when I'm done. Since I spend so much of my life playing games, I thought it would be important to really understand how each game makes me feel and keep a record of it, otherwise it's just lost to the empty space in my brain forever.

I did it a lot for oldschool RPGs. Most nobably, I had a glorious tome of Morrowind knowledge during the three years I played that game. I still kinda miss getting lost trying to follow vague quest directions.

I find it useful to archive logs of SolForge matches since recording and analyzing the strategy on video is too much effort.

Her Story also triggered the same thing for me and I enjoyed it a lot.

I still write them when I know there's random codes to doors and safes. It really depends the game.

Occasionally. Last time was during my playthrough of Witcher 3. I opened up a notepad document and typed out a couple lines that I had to be able to repeat later. It doesn't happen often though. There really aren't a lot of puzzles or things of that nature that demand it anymore.

When I was playing P4G recently I was using notepad to keep track of how many items I needed to collect in the dungeons in order to complete quests.

For games that need it? Sure. Those games seem few and far between nowadays, but they do pop up occasionally. Otherwise, I only ever take notes on games I want to write something about, in order to help my absolutely awful memory remember those details I wanted to mention later on.

I took notes during The Talos Principle, largely to keep track of which worlds had undiscovered stars (and what I had already done to try to get them). When going after certain challenges in Reus, I would create a post-it detailing the ambassador order I wanted for each build. Super useful!

All the time when doing Sidequests and such when going for 100% or for a real head scratcher Adventure Game Puzzle. Always on paper. But usually only for things I've looked up in a FAQ when I've either really hit a wall or have finished a game and am going to back through to find what I missed. I may be getting older, but my memory is still sharp enough that I generally always remember where I've personally noticed probable secret items are that I need to backtrack to when I get a later powerup, or hints a NPC drops etc.

I usually take notes for games that involve crafting and the like. I play Pokemon a ton too, so when it comes to thinks like breeding or how I want to train certain Pokemon, I tend to jot a ton of that info on paper too.

Depends on the game. I actually need to get into the habit of taking notes more often, especially for strategy games. Dwarf Fortress is a great example of a game I periodically go back to and a page or two of notes would really benefit me so I don't forget any of the basic steps.

Can't really say I've found any need to take notes for any game I've played since the PS2 era. Nowadays I'll just look stuff up. I really can't be bothered with esoteric shit anymore.

I usually go with paper notes, but lately I'm using digital.

I do. Usually I do this more with new games, not so much the old ones. Though, whenever I'm doing something such as a review, or a criticism of sorts. I will always take notes down on my computer right next to my gaming setup. I'll usually keep a notepad open and just write down my thoughts on certain topics and whatnot. Usually so by the time I'm done I'll have a summary of my opinions of a title down.

I usually only keep these as reference in case the game has me remembering something redundant. Such as codes, names, story that might be important (Ace Attorney) and otherwise :p

I used to write down cheat codes when those were still a thing. Now I just make digital notes if I'm trying to learn a fighting game or any other sort of competitive style game.

I do paper notes for somewhat older mystery games, stuff like Famicom Detective Club and things of that nature. More recently I took notes for Her Story, just because that was kind of a fun experience of watching the videos and frantically writing down notes about the sequence of events and key words. Mostly just because it feels thematically appropriate, though.

Interesting takes on it so far, glad to see different reasons for taking notes. Some of which I hadn't actually considered personally. I do agree that a lot of modern gaming and the availability of the internet makes note taking a bit of an archaic solution. But I found it personally rewarding to figure things out without without necessarily breaking the illusion. I suppose in a way, the note taking became a sort of role pay mechanic outside of the actual game.

@the_nubster: I really like that reason to take notes, I might actually start doing something similar. Especially as a way to remember nuances of the game that I may have forgotten by the end of the experience.

Just recently I took notes for Her Story. Helped me out quite a bit.

I make notes infrequently to remind my future self what I was working towards in a game. Such is in my semi-regular (annual) return to Final Fantasy X where my current save might have different characters levelling for different things (such as trying to max Yuna's strength for her Aeons while getting Tidus through Yuna's sphere grid to get Holy, or maybe repeatedly fighting Dark Yojimbo for Break Damage Limit weapons). This way I can jump in and understand the otherwise confusing equipment and levelling development part-way towards a goal. This is still very rare though.

Nooooooooooope. Maybe when I was a kid, but I legit can't think of any time in the past 10+ years I've taken notes while playing a game.

I do, but only for modern Fallout games.

Let me explain: the most recent Fallout games (and, it seems, this upcoming one) are all on Gamebryo derivatives, which makes them hilariously glitch/bug-prone. I don't so much take notes to remind myself of narrative points, as my brain is perfectly capable of handling that. I have always had a particular fascination with History and literature, which I attribute to my ability to store things involving narratives in a relatively precise manner. When I take notes, I do so to remember exactly where, when and how certain reported bugs and glitches occur, so that I can avoid them for my next playthrough. The only area where the game still manages to defeat my notes on this matter is with New Vegas' challenges: some simply refuse to complete no matter how I do them. I have, for example, found every single one of Randall Clark's cave stashes in Honest Hearts, on every single playthrough I've done, and yet have never, ever completed the challenge related to doing so. I cannot figure out why it won't complete; none of the wikis or discussion boards seem to have ever encountered this problem.

Oh, and Steam still refuses to give me the achievement for the Come Fly With Me quest. That's annoying.

I did do some drawings and stuff for FEZ but nothing too major. Sometimes I just take out my phone and write shit down in my memos like door codes if I'm not sure the game keeps logs of them. From time to time some tidbit of information may need jotting down too. The most recent thing I have in my memos atm are some Binding of Isaac seeds. I also know I have the code for unlocking all songs in GH 2 written down because you have to enter it every time you play the game, which admittedly I only do once every year or so.

Only for Fallout 3. I have a spreadsheet of the mods I downloaded where the add item console command numbers have been provided. I'll probably do the same when I finally get around to playing New Vegas.

I always have a notepad for grid cords and radio channels when I'm playing ARMA online, sometimes I'll write notes when I'm learning a new aircraft in DCS but that's it.

New games rarely seem to need it - not a comment on how they're dumbed-down or anything like that, they've just got better about tracking that kind of stuff if it's actually important, and it's usually easier to use the internet for the rest.

If I'm going back to the era of handwriting alongside, I filled up most of a pad with maps and statistics and economy notes and sometimes even the plot while playing X: Beyond The Frontier.

I still make notes, but mostly for the wiki pages here or when I'm trying to break games, and rarely on my first playthrough. And they're always in OneNote.

I used to all the time. I had dozens of sheets of printer paper and a few notebooks filled with notes. I would mostly do it with puzzles in survival horror games. That was actually one of the primary draws of those games for me. Back then, however, the driving incentive was that the Internet was young and slow, and often didn't have the solutions I needed. Most games don't usually have complicated enough sections that even require anything like that anymore, sadly. I think the last game I had to do it with was Silent Hill Downpour. That game had such great puzzles. I took a good amount of notes for Fallout 3 and New Vegas, too.

I haven't played Her Story yet, but as soon as I found out what kind of game it was and that it would probably encourage note-taking, I was all in. I've gone out of my way to stay in the dark on the story. Hopefully I'll get to it soon.

I made a bunch of paper notes for Myst and Fez.

As for digital notes, I probably have like 20 different notepad .txt files named '[whatever game] notes' if I need to jot some stuff down or aggregate some stuff I pull from a wiki/forum/whatever so I don't forget it (gear/stats for Diablo/WoW, drop locations for Warframe, quest requirements for Runescape, building dimensions for Terraria, etc.).

I used to take notes a lot more back in the day when games didn't have in game maps. For example, to this day I still have IMPECCABLE notes on the final dungeon for the Original NES Zelda. I also have some pretty good ones for the old Kings Quest games. I very rarely take them anymore though. I think that the last time I busted out the pen and paper was my first time through Dark Souls

I did this for La Mulana since its even though that games lets you save lines of text. It helped a tiny bit. I took some notes for Fez but it dint help too much. Blazblue is the only fighting game where I wrote down combos but that didn't help me stick to that game.

My phone is filled with match up notes for USF4.

I can tell you a basic game plan for any of Rose's match-ups.

Only back in the day when some games had level codes instead of save slots.

Not since FEZ have I taken notes. Well, that's a lie, I took notes when I was learning the Pokemon Gold Any% route.

I think about the only time I do is when I know I'll have trouble remembering some pass code I'll need to unlock a door or something or to help me with some achievement/trophy tracking, such as using every one of Claptrap's VaultHunter.exe skills in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, just write which ones I know I've done at least once.

For a lot of old adventure games, definitely. I guess it'd be easier to just take a picture with my phone in many cases, but given that my playing of them is usually nostalgia-driven, it feels wrong to take that kind of shortcut.

Normally no. I do have a small little notebook for that stuff. I took a lot of notes and drawings for Fez, but that was the last one. I sometimes jot things down when I play Elite: Dangerous.

I wrote down how I wanted to rearrange the college football conferences so each one was geographically correct and contained 16 teams. I hate college football in real life, but god damn do I love college football games. BRING IT BACK EA!

Mapping out Dungeon Master as a kid and now I send myself emails if I think of anything during work or on my commute. I’m currently replaying Fallout 3 so yep doing it a lot at the moment.

Playing Morrowind many years back made me take more than a few notes, mostly regarding verbal directions to major landmarks and the names of important characters.

FFXI during the 360 beta era was so intimidating with it's endless sea of important information that I used a cheat sheet to help remember it all. Thinking back it's amazing how much more integrated into my life the internet has become, now letting me simply google whatever I don't understand in place of all those tedious notes.

I honestly can't remember if I even knew those wikis existed.

Sure, I take notes all the time! I use a combination of my Surface and a pen and paper. Some examples from the games I'm currently playing:

• Dragon Age Inquisition - I've got notes about the abilities I want to choose for myself and my companions, notes about what materials and in what quantities I'll need to craft my final set of gear, and notes about where larger quantities of materials can be found. I also tend to write down the choices I've made so that if I play through again at a later date I can look back, see what I did, and perhaps make other choices. I do this for most if not all games with impactful choices and branching storylines, not just Dragon Age.
• Elite: Dangerous - I've got notes about where in the galaxy to find all kinds of things: black markets, where certain commodities/modules are sold, where good mining/bounty hunting/trading opportunities can be found, etc. I have a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of my assets, how much money I need on hand for insurance and trading, and how much cargo I can afford to lose to a pirate before the loss destroys my profit margins. And since you have to be self-motivated to play this game I also keep a to-do list that gives me things to focus on.

not so much for newer games, because usually there is something in game to track that for you. Quest log, stat tracker, completion % etc.

But older games I usually do, I was replaying Front Mission 2 or 3 recently and and was keeping track of passwords with my phone, since I didn't want to play it with a walkthough.

Man, I didn't even write anything down while I was in school. I just keep it all in my mind palace.

Only for annoying teleport mazes. Last time I took physical notes was for a particular area in SMT4, it ended up looking like some elaborate stoichiometry.

I've been wanting to start taking notes for planning things like routes or crafting. With less and less time to play as I get older I just can't spend an hour oogling at recipes or builds anymore, but I still want to enjoy those 40+ hour RPG's.

I do regularly take notes when I play strategy, simulation, and especially RPGs. What kind of notes I write down depends a lot on the game itself, but generally I write down the same sort of notes for games of the same aforementioned genres.

I wrote the most notes while playing Fallout 3, but that was partly because I was part of the user group writing the Wiki Guide here on Giant Bomb. Oh, what great times we had writing that mega guide.

I cleared out my stack of paper notes a while back. Currently remaining is a build order for Fallout 3, locations of interest from Golden Sun 2, building dimensions from Startopia, and a starting equipment/room layout plan for Dwarf Fortress.

In digital form there's quite a few more. Civilization 4, Factorio, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Guildwars 2, Skyrim and... well...

Mainly when learning new fighting games. I'll write down which moves are plus on block, stuff that can or can't be cancelled into other moves, things like that. Figuring it out and writing it down always makes it stick a lot better than reading it in some guide or the move list or whatever.

Eve spreadsheets for ROI stuff for sure. In actual paper form, Elite Dangerous controls I have on a notepad, and I have some League DPS calculations somewhere in my room

Last time I remember doing it was for Fire Emblem: Awakening, I would use the notes app in the 3DS to setup all the marriages between characters.