The unseen story: audio diaries in video game narratives

destructoid.com:

Audio diaries — you’ll find these little nuggets of storytelling scattered all over a game’s world, taking the form of whatever diegetic theming fits best into the narrative. They can be called voxophones, audiographs, audio logs, or straight-up tape recorders, but it’s always the same experience. You walk up to an object, interact with it, and you can hear characters talking to themselves, other characters, or even directly to the player themselves. We’re going to call them audio diaries for simplicity’s sake.

It’s one of those mechanics that’s in almost every single third- or first-person action game that has any semblance of narrative, and based on who I’ve talked to about audio diaries, they’re a pretty polarizing mechanic at that. Some people I talk to hate them because they don’t want to have to go out of their way to get story content and then spend extra time listening to it, while for others, hunting down all of the audio diaries and piecing together the stories they tell can be one of the most enjoyable parts of the game.

I’m somewhere in the middle, I think. It can depend on what the stories are that the diaries are actually telling me, and how difficult it is to find them in the game world.

It’s kind of ironic that I think the series that does audio diaries the best is BioShock, because while it wasn’t the first game to include them, it was certainly the game that popularized them and set the standard for how they’re included in many games today. Yet another reason why BioShock is one of the most influential games ever made, especially when it comes to interactive storytelling.

Before BioShock premiered the classic audio diary setup to the world, other early examples included games like Carmine, Lunar, and