This is the second in a series of posts that attempt to deconstruct the humble computer RPG journal. Other posts in the series are:

RPGs are about a story, a world and your place within that world. In such a non-linear environment, the entire user experience of the story centres around two things - 1) the journal, and 2) the way people treat your character. This post is about the importance of journal structure.

Categorise Everything

Gamers have jobs. Gamers have kids. A lot of us just don’t have the time or inclination to work through pages of chronologically-ordered diary entries hunting for that elusive clue that we overlooked the first time.

That’s what computers are for.

As I said previously, keep the journal entries for finished quests separately from the unfinished ones. Keep the entries for ongoing quest A away from the entries for quest B. Make it easy for the player to find the entry they’re looking for.

This can all be done in a fairly small and simple interface, thanks to the worldwide familiarity of hypertext. It’s handy, that Internet. Failing that, use tabs. Click on headers. I don’t care. Just keep it simple.

The Three Essential Categories

The following three categories should be in every computer RPG journal.

• Quests in progress - scannable executive summaries only, please.
• Completed quests - as I said in Part I, I still want to see them.
• Selected quest - every historical entry for the selected quest, be it current or complete.

Bethesda’s Oblivion did the journal well even though the size of the font and layout made it annoying to navigate. Have a good look at the Oblivion journal for a good real-world example of what I’m talking about.

Extra Categories That I Would Like

The following categories would be nice, but most games will be perfectly fine without them.

• Ignored quests - Sometimes I just want to get on with the main plot arc. Late in the game, it’s so annoying to see all those ignored Chapter One trailheads flapping around the bottom of my To-Do list. They’re just reminders of my failure to save everyone and everything. Let me put them on the backburner for now. You can pop them back into ‘Quests in progress’ if I accidentally stumble across something pertinent
• Zones - RPGs are heavily area-based. Instead of hunting through my list it would be so convenient to filter my list down to what’s available in the current area. I know I just said that Oblivion’s journal was good but it was pretty annoying to walk all halfway around the Imperial City only to find out that the other quest in my journal required me to do it all over again.

Guild Wars would let you ‘abandon’ a quest and pick it up at a later date. That’s fine for the kind of game that Guild Wars is but it’s a real immersion-killer. I wouldn’t recommend it for offline RPGs. IIRC, Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic used area filters in the journal.

Anyway, there you have it. Three-to-five categories. Shouldn’t be too complicated to implement, right?

Part III coming up in a few days - I’ll talk more about the information that needs to be in the journal.

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