Game log recipe: Discord channel + Steam
You already capture gaming moments. You hit the screenshot key when a vista stops you. You fire off a one-line message to a friend when a boss finally goes down. You think “I should remember this build” and then you never write it down. The instinct is there. What is missing is a single place for it to land.
This recipe gives that instinct a home. One Discord channel you post into while you play, and Steam connected to deariary in the background. The channel holds what you saw and how it felt. Steam holds what you played and for how long. deariary folds both into the next morning’s diary entry, so a night of gaming becomes a paragraph you can re-read instead of a screenshot folder you never open.
Two moving parts. Here is how to set them up and what they produce.
The two halves of the recipe
A gaming journal needs two things that no single source provides: the facts of the session and the texture of it.
Steam is the facts, and it is automatic. Once connected, it records every PC session with no input from you: which game, how many minutes, which achievements, when you last launched it. You never open it and never log anything. It just accrues. The Steam integration guide covers exactly what it reads.
A Discord channel is the texture, and it takes a little effort. Steam knows you played for two hours. It does not know the run was infuriating, that the art in the second area floored you, or that a mechanic finally clicked forty hours in. That lives nowhere unless you put it somewhere while it is fresh. A dedicated #game-log channel is that somewhere.
The split is the point. The effortful half is small, and optional in any given moment: skip a night of posting and Steam still logs the session. The automatic half runs no matter what. You are never starting a video game journal from zero.
The #game-log channel: what goes in it
Create a Discord channel that exists for one purpose: things you want to remember from playing. Not a friends server, not a guild. Your own channel, where the only reader is future you.
Post into it the way you would think out loud mid-session:
- Screenshots. The whole reason a screenshot key exists is the moment it caught. Paste or drag the image straight into the channel so it uploads as a real attachment. deariary reads image and video attachments, so the shot becomes part of the entry instead of a file lost in a dated folder.
- One-line reactions. “this soundtrack is unreal.” “stuck on the same jump for twenty minutes.” “did not see that twist coming.” Most posts are one sentence. The bar is meant to be that low.
- Notes to your future self. The build that finally worked, the boss phase you keep dying to, the area someone told you not to miss. If you play to improve, this is where the lesson goes.
- Clips. A short capture of the play that landed. Video attachments are read the same way images are.
One trick worth knowing: deariary picks up emoji reactions and their counts. In a channel with one member, you can react to your own posts. A flame emoji on the message about the final boss is a one-tap way to tell the diary which moment of the night mattered most.
What does not need to go in: anything polished. Posts longer than 500 characters get truncated anyway, and that is fine, because the value is the raw note, not the essay. The channel scrolls away like every Discord channel does (Discord won’t delete your messages covers why that history is effectively unreachable). deariary reads the day’s posts before they disappear into the scroll.
What a stacked entry looks like
A Tuesday evening with the recipe running might leave raw data like this:
20:10 Steam: Outer Wilds (+95 min)
20:14 #game-log: "starting Outer Wilds. on the backlog since it launched."
20:38 #game-log: [screenshot] "the observatory model. ok, I'm in."
21:20 #game-log: "stranded on a planet, oxygen running out, no map, no
tutorial. weirdly the best part so far."
21:45 #game-log: "calling it here." (self-reaction: 🔥)deariary reads the two feeds and weaves something like:
Tuesday evening went entirely to Outer Wilds, a game that had been sitting on your backlog since it launched. About an hour and a half with it, opening at the observatory and ending stranded on a planet with the oxygen running down. No map, no tutorial, and the note you left was that this was somehow the best part so far. The screenshot of the observatory model is there in the entry too.
Steam supplied exactly one line of that: Outer Wilds, ninety-five minutes, Tuesday evening. Everything else, the observatory, the stranding, the screenshot, the fact that you were enjoying being lost, came from five short posts in #game-log. Steam gave the evening its spine. The channel gave it the part you would actually want to read back.
The two feeds are not redundant. Steam by itself leaves you with a playtime number against a date. The channel by itself leaves notes floating free of when they happened or how long the session ran. Only the pair produces an entry worth opening again in six months.
Set up the recipe
Two connections and one habit.
1. Create the channel
The simplest version is a Discord server with one member: you. Create a server, it comes with a default channel, rename that channel #game-log. Because you own the server, you are also its admin, which removes a step in a moment. A private channel inside a server you already control works just as well.
Post the first line. “Trying the game-log thing.” Setup done.
2. Connect Steam
In deariary settings, click Steam and sign in through Steam’s own login page. It uses OpenID, so there are no API keys to copy and nothing to configure. The connection finishes in about thirty seconds, and your sessions start flowing the next morning.
3. Connect Discord
In the same settings panel, authorize your Discord account, copy the bot invite link, and add the deariary bot to your one-member server. Because you are the admin, that is a single click. Back in settings, select the #game-log channel. Only that channel is read; nothing else in the server is touched. The Discord integration guide has the full data scope.
4. Build the posting habit (the only part that takes time)
The connections are done in minutes. The habit takes a couple of weeks. Two things help:
- Anchor it to what you already do. You already hit the screenshot key; pasting that shot into
#game-logis one extra motion. You already alt-tab when you stop playing; that is the moment to drop a one-line “done for tonight, here is where I left it.” - Re-read a week of entries. Once you see what a stray screenshot and a half-sentence become inside a finished diary entry, the next week’s posts sharpen on their own.
What it costs
This recipe runs two integrations at once, Steam and Discord, which puts it on the Basic plan (up to five active integrations). The Free plan allows one integration, which is enough to connect Steam by itself first and read a week of bare playtime entries before deciding the channel habit is worth the upgrade. Current pricing is listed at deariary.com.
The same channel is a backlog tracker
A game backlog tracker tells you which titles you own and have not finished. It is a list of intentions. The #game-log channel records something a list cannot: what playing those games was actually like.
Because you tend to post when you start something (“finally starting this, on the backlog for two years”) and when you stop (“dropped it after two hours, not for me” or “credits, what a finish”), the diary quietly accumulates the real history of your backlog. Six months of entries show which games you meant to get to, which ones you tried for forty minutes and abandoned, and the one that unexpectedly ate a month of evenings. A wishlist says what is unplayed. The diary says what playing it felt like, and which weeks of your life it happened in.
Where the recipe stops
Two limits are worth knowing before you set this up. Steam only sees PC play, so console, Switch, and DRM-free titles never reach the diary on their own; the Steam guide explains the webhook workaround for those. And the #game-log channel only holds what you type and paste, so a voice call with friends leaves no trace unless you note it yourself.
That second limit is a feature here, not a flaw. This recipe is deliberately built for solo play, where the channel is your own notebook and nobody else is in it. If your gaming life is mostly squad nights, the texture lives in a shared server’s chat instead, and the gamer diary stack is the version of this idea built for that, with a group server and a music layer added.
What this recipe replaces
People have tried to keep a gaming journal before. Reddit is full of abandoned spreadsheets with columns for hours, ratings, and notes. They die for the same reason every manual journal dies: logging asks for effort right after a session, when the only thing you want is to start another run or go to bed.
This recipe moves the effort to where it is almost free. You are already at the keyboard. Discord is already open. A screenshot and a half-sentence cost nothing, and Steam costs less than that, because it asks for nothing at all. deariary reads both each morning and writes the evening down for you. The next game that takes over your weeks will not just be a number on a profile. It will be a stretch of entries you can read back.
