The Game Journal
Sum: Faceless story-game streams on YouTube. Watch the stream. Play the movie. Keep the tape.
I am getting back into story-based games and plan to stream them with my running commentary.
The second half of 2026 shall be a rundown of games for my journal, both replays & first-time plays:
May 2026 = Clive Barker’s Undying (2001)
June 2026 = Control (2019) & Vampire: The Masquerade (2004)
July 2026 = Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) & ???
YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@zsoro9300) is a platform I want to tap into more. I started last year when making pitch podcasts for each of my books, and now I am trying to upkeep a running progress diary on my creative work in the form of my Author Diaries.
The other series now I am developing will be Game Journals, live-play stream series on my favorite or most anticipated-to-play games, old and new.
Thesis: Live-Play Cinema
The aesthetic goal with the Game Journals: no face, just the game, plus my voice from the driver seat.
You are in the passenger seat, co-experiencing the gameplay and the entertainment and the overarching meaning of the experience.
My approach to streaming is to ‘ride along’ in this way. A little commentary here and there, and otherwise I let the game play itself, especially through the cutscenes and the cinematics. Plenty of my old playthroughs ran silent, mic off, because I came to play, not to talk over the thing I showed up to experience. My voice also tends to carry. So that means when I do speak — I mean it wholeheartedly.
There’s a reason for the restraint. Playing well and narrating well pull from the same reservoir of attention, and when you split it, one side starts to slip. The Game Journal aims to maximize the quality of both channels, of raw gameplay and reactive live-talk.
The game leads while I ride with a shotgun of double-barrel commentary, and the camera keeps rolling.
Why Journal Your Games?
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about games and playing them — and almost none of it *making* them. That gap is why great design floors me. I may not be able reverse-engineer how a brilliant level or a clever mechanic works, but I know it when I see it. Like many other gamers, I enjoy critiquing a game as I go through it.
But I try to do so from an amateur game designer’s point-of-view, or a scientist who wishes to discover the inner causes of those stupendous outer effects. I am a scholar at heart and so my discourse reflects that.
I find that setting up a stream around the playing of a game {especially one that is story-based that you are experiencing in distinct chapters} will make your experience that much more memorable and thought-provoking.
Of course, live-streaming is also another way to practice your articulation and sense of humor.
These are all my motives, along with the continuous building of my creative brand.
The Game Journal, in sum, is where I pay attention out loud. Here I cultivate a serious appreciation for the design, the level work, the writing most players walk past. I read games the way I read books, and some of that reading is honest theft for my own future fictions. I believe novelists should study how the other arts move people.
Every art form delivers you somewhere. Literature carries you psychically, into the interior life. Film carries you emotionally, through image and sound. Games carry you in avatar form, where you become the one who acts. You are the athlete. You are the warrior. You are the explorer. When a game comes together, with its own systems, score, and visual language, the effect is hard to match anywhere else.
My baseline goal: Find what is useful, what you love, and identify it, talk about it {and maybe put it to work within your own creations}.
On the Docket
▶ NOW PLAYING — Clive Barker’s Undying (2001) ⏭ UP NEXT — Control (2019) 🔜
I opened with Clive Barker’s Undying. I’ve been deep in Barker again, writing more horror this year for an anthology called ANTHOLOGEE, and Undying had been scratching at the back of my skull for a while now. My brother and I found a copy of the game at Fry’s when we were young and played it through. I hardly remember the game now. It is past time for my return.
I found Undying on GOG for about two dollars and went in. It’s a first-person horror adventure with a gun in one hand and a spell in the other, the lineage that runs through System Shock and lands later in BioShock. Fantastic world-building and storycraft, as well as some incredible magic powers and weaponry including a Golden Dragon-Mouth Ice Gun. A couple of boss fights tested my patience, the final one most of all, but the game is a pleasure from front to back. Here’s a literary and cinematic mind who walked into game development and built his vision in playable form, which carries its own kind of awe. Jericho, his other game, is next once I hunt down a copy {or find the proper emulation software}.
Now comes Control. I am replaying this one, played once back in 2022. Picture SCP turned into a video game. You move through an institute that has become an entity, a building whose map won’t obey physics, thick with escaped phenomena you have to discover by their effects. My first time through, I rode the gameplay and let the story slide past me, because the story was, in plain terms, challenging for me to follow. It’s short, around eleven hours with the DLC. This replay is the experiment: can I hold the thread this time, or do I surrender again to the pure pleasure of the gameplay? We’ll find out the truth together.
The Plan & Purpose
My aim as an artist is to deliver a full suite of effects to whoever opens my books. My favorite art lands somewhere under the skin, a place you can’t reach by any other route. That’s what a Barker novel does to me. You read him and you know you’re holding something nobody else would have written, because of what he does with language and imagination, and his willingness to go further into his worlds than most can dream {or dare}. The goal is to write like that. The Game Journal is one of the ways I study how.
I shall be streaming week-to-week live on YouTube somewhat haphazardly {I am not a strict schedule person}, so you can catch my Game Journals whenever or however you mayest on my channel.
Please like, subscribe, and comment on my videos if you will. All that jazz helps the channel grow.
Pull up a chair, fellow traveler. Get ready to press start with me.
Godspeed,
Dylan
Thresholds of Transformation 