Why I love notebooks in video games

We use notebooks to give form to the intangible, jotting down half-formed ideas and strategies with the aim of corralling them into coherence. We record and reflect on events in our lives, a ritual that narrativises our experiences and makes them comprehensible. Notebooks are a technology, the most ordinary and unspectacular instance of cyborg enhancement – an extension of our memories. And all this makes them a fascinating motif in video games. In Discworld Noir, a little-known adventure game from 1999, you play as a private detective named Lewton, plodding the streets of a hardboiled version of Terry Pratchett's fictional city-state Ankh-Morpork and investigating murders and disappearances that pay homage to classic noir fiction.