Transcribing and Coding my Gaming Journals

November 2025

I've just about finished line by line and incident with incident coding. All interview transcripts, journal entries, images and memos have been scoured for units of meaning, and now all that's left is a large chunk of autoethnographic content; namely my gaming journals. 

Before making a start on coding these journals, I needed to transfer them from handwritten scrawls to NVivo-ready text. And yes, I should have kept the journals electronically so I didn't have to type them up (and it has taken a fair few hours to do this), but I needed to write them by hand because it's quicker (and feels more immediate), and because there's a deeper connection between thought and word when writing by hand. And that's my excuse.

What I didn't realise as I cheerfully opened my 2024 'Return of the Jedi' diary and a fresh new Word document, was the emotional impact this activity would have. So if you wish to carry on reading this post, be aware that there's some raw, emotional stuff here. And as a result, it's quite a difficult post to write.

Bad Stuff

Let's get the tough stuff out of the way. I have always been someone who runs on nervous energy, has social anxiety, and as a result, gets really nervous at the thought of being around masses of people. But I just put that down to being a bit introverted and inheriting anxiety from my mum, and got on with it. However, according to my journal entries, I was feeling anxious enough to make a note of how I was feeling as far back as January 2024. I ignored this, yet went on to mention anxiety repeatedly in journal entries, carefully noting how I played games to take my mind off my racing thoughts, and to gain some peace and perspective. This strategy usually worked, and for a long time I was assuming this increased anxiety was still something I'd have to put up with, and manage as best as I could with another mammoth Starfield session. Of course, all I was doing was sticking a plaster over a broken arm. Reflecting on my journal entries and looking back over decades of life experience, I see that anxiety.exe has been running in the background, taking up a fair bit of CPU space since I was in my 20s, but because it had never been pervasive or permanent; indeed, it often remains hidden and at arm's length for months at a time, I just put it down to being part of life. However, I can see now that what became crippling anxiety has been building over the past 3 or 4 years, and this summer, like a particularly insidious cyst, it exploded. 

Transcribing those handwritten journal entries that mentioned anxiety affected me profoundly. I had been ignoring something, not believing it (or I) was important enough to warrant sorting out, but there it was in dozens of journal entries, like a plea for help I'd written to myself and chosen to ignore. That's not self care, or even 'self-tolerance'. It feels tantamount to self abuse, and that upsets me. I'm not ashamed to say that writing up content that mentioned anxiety became more traumatic the more it appeared in my journals, and I shed a few tears after a couple of transcription sessions because I felt so guilty picturing my neglected inner child, and even more guilty for ignoring my own quiet, desperate cries for help.

Those tears made me realise that I was worth helping and I just could not go on as I was anymore. I was waking up at 5.00 in the morning, feeling a punch of anxiety to my gut as soon as I was conscious, spending entire days lying in bed fighting panic attacks, unable to breathe, heart pounding arrhythmically, and feeling absolutely paralysed by fear, and so I finally called my GP and was prescribed a low dose of Sertraline. When this didn't do anything and I found myself having another crisis a few months later, the doseage was increased and I was prescribed HRT.

I have been 'raw dogging' perimenopause for over a decade, because my symptoms weren't (according to me, anyway) severe enough to warrant seeking help. I had one hot flush every few days, had learned to tolerate night sweats, and wasn't experiencing any other symptoms. Indeed, I lost weight, my adult acne cleared up and my migraines disappeared, so I considered perimenopause to be as much of a boon as an inconvenience. I was totally unaware that changes to hormone levels in perimenopause can aggravate anxiety. And so began the slow process of finding the right medication to address hormonal imbalances, while seeking counselling to talk about the underlying factors that were causing me to feel too scared to even leave the house, and learn strategies to manage anxiety. It's an ongoing process, and I still have days where I really have to push through the fear to do anything, but I also have days where I feel totally anxiety-free. It's just about making sure the good days outweigh the bad. 

Good Stuff

It's not all bad news. Something else kept cropping up in my journal entries that gave me cause to feel proud. I have improved considerably as a gamer. I no longer assume that I have to play ALL games on the easiest possible setting, with the strength and vitality stats of a mammoth, but to the detriment of the personality and charisma of a pair of slippers. My participants encouraged me, shared their own tips around approaches and playstyles, pointed me in the direction of YouTube streamers they followed for hints, tips, and guidance, recalled their own experiences of improving as gamers, and ultimately helped me to find the courage to experiment a bit more, move out of my decades-long comfort zone, and believe that I am actually, technically, a better gamer than I give myself credit for. Words such as 'perseverance' and 'patience' kept cropping up in participants' transcripts,  making me realise that these were two qualities I was sadly lacking. Can't get through that tough boss fight or complete that timed puzzle? Give up immediately and play something else! Need to sneak past someone or use a gun? No thank you! I'll play something else because I'm rubbish at stealth and using guns, and I'll clearly never get better! But now I keep trying until I succeed, because if my participants can repeat that boss battle 37 times until they succeed, then so can I. And when I do persevere, and then find I've progressed further than I imagined I could, I feel proud and accomplished. 

I'm braver too. I'm starting to play games that are out of my comfort zone, adapting my playstyle and pushing myself to complete side-quests and mini-games that I'd usually avoid (I'm looking at you, stealth missions). 

I'm pretty certain my reaction time and fine motor skills have improved too. I'll likely never be able to play the sort of games that require perfect timing, precise button-mashing and the reaction time of a snake on amphetamines (i.e: Elden Ring), but I'm getting better at parrying, blocking, and dodging; three combat-based actions I'd never used before, relying instead on brute force and massive weapons to replace any combat skills. 

Returning to the concept of patience once more, I've noticed that I'm more inclined to follow a game's narrative too, no longer impatiently skipping through cut scenes. The need to be immersed in a good story was something that cropped up repeatedly in my interviews, and in retrospect it seems almost disrespectful to admit that I skip the story because I just want to play the game - it means that there are so many epic games I've completed where I've not really had much sense of what is happening. And, while I am still guilty of skipping cutscenes on occasion, I find myself getting ever more immersed in storylines that affect me profoundly.