#jonathan basile

At this time I was also writing an essay about Borges’ Library of Babel, the website libraryofbabel.info, and procedurally generated video game worlds. As a short summary, “The Library of Babel” is a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges which depicts a library containing every book that was, is, or ever will be. It does so by containing every possible combination of letters in books "of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.“. The consequence is that most of these books are nonsensical compositions of random letters. The dream of the perfect library with all books inside turns into a nightmare of them books drowning in nonsense, never to be found. 

To say I quite liked the Library of Babel would be an understatement. I was obsessed. I saw the Library everywhere because, of course, the Library is everything. Of course it would be a huge overstatement to claim that I aimed for an adaptation of the Library into a game, because that’s simply not possible (Jonathan Basile, the maker of libraryofbabel.info starts his book Tar for Mortar by stating “I came to realize, after facing several difficulties in the construction of libraryofbabel.info, that I was attempting to make a faithful recreation of an impossible dream).

The concept of this game was said single choice space where one could choose to enter another room of the library, or take a book and read it. Though that shouldn’t be the only gameplay mechanic so additional to the loop and the obligatory randomness of letters in the books, I added a path by which the player would eventually find a book containing the first paragraph of The Library of Babel and scripted insanity into the game—an inevitable consequence of being in the Library over time which is depicted by everything turning slowly into gibberish as the Library and its books soak into the text of the very game.

Guide to playing the game

One could endlessly wander the library and never read a single book, in which case the game will just loop. Reading a book however opens up the core gameplay, which is the search for a book which actually makes sense. The books that can be read will always show randomly arranged letters but they will as well show a single sentence, which will lead you to the search for the book. All in all there are 15 books which will have the following hints:

Once upon a time. | There is a book. | A book that explains everything. | Some say it is a lie. | But it has to be there. | If all books are here, this one book that explains everything is here as well. | It has to be. | There are instructions. | Instructions on how to find this book. The book. | Go seven rooms further. | Then go five staircases up. | Then go three rooms into the other direction. | In this room, rumour says, there is the book of books. | Second to the left. | Now go.

Afterwards, the search for the book has started. The mentioned book of the books will then show the first paragraph of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. Alas, after you found such a text in this vast space full of senselessness you can’t possibly hope to find anything like it again. Which also means that wandering the library is hopeless and meaningless. Now a counter of an insanity variable will go up, which will cause the letters in the game to rearrange, matching the books of randomised letters. After wandering the library for some time, all the answers are changed to “Leave the Library” which was—after all—always possible by stepping in one of the endless airshafts.