Transcribing and Coding my Gaming Journals

November 2025

I've just about finished phase one of initial coding: line by line coding. All interview transcripts, journal entries, and images have been scoured for units of meaning, and now all that's left to code before phase 2 of initial coding - incident with incident coding - is a large chunk of autoethnographic content; namely my gaming journals. Having said that, I also need to code my memos. 

Before I can make a start on coding my journals, I need to transfer them from handwritten scrawls to NVivo-ready text. And yes, I should have kept these 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.

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 introverted and finding people, in general, to be a pain in the proverbial. 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 works, and so for a long time I was assuming anxiety was just something I'd have to put up with, and manage as best as I could with another 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 30s, but because it has 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.

BUT...those tears made me realise that I was worth helping, and so I finally called my GP in September of this year, and was immediately prescribed HRT; anxiety being a common symptom of perimenopause and ADHD. More about both of those next! 

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. It was only in the past few months that I discovered perimenopause can aggravate anxiety.

It's not all bad news. I have improved considerably as a gamer. I no longer assume that I have to play ALL OWRPGs on the easiest possible level, with the strength and vitality stats of a mammoth, but to the detriment of the personality and charisma stats 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.