By Monica Evans
Imagine fighting your way across dangerous terrain to finally enter The Library, a vast stronghold containing thousands upon thousands of priceless arcane tomes, each one filled with the world’s most valuable knowledge… and then imagine that you can’t look at any of the books. Most of them have no titles on their spines, the majority are identical copies of each other, and the only one you can read opens to a single page, containing a single paragraph of text that immediately sends you away on yet another quest.
The above description applies to any number of digital games, in which impressively beautiful libraries are common but functional ones are rare. Most in-game libraries exist as graphically interesting settings with little-to-no interactivity, and those with readable books or bookcases present only snippets of information, often limited to minor world lore, game hints, or easter eggs. Players rarely interact with an in-game library in a meaningful way, and more rarely still take any game actions that mimic or simulate the way libraries are used in real life. In short, libraries as a concept are underused by speculative game developers.
Fortunately, a small but growing sub-genre of games center on library-like mechanics, in which players spend most of their time collecting, organizing, and distributing or protecting information about the game world. In these games, players are not using an in-game library as much as they are creating and maintaining one, and can even be seen as embodying the library itself. Two recent examples are In Other Waters (2020), in which the player helps a xenobiologist explore, catalogue, and understand an alien ecosystem; and The Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), in which the player must extrapolate the names, positions, and ultimate fates of the crew and passengers of a missing merchant vessel, information they are responsible for reporting, or choosing not to report. These examples and others suggest the existence of a “library game,” in which the player’s interactive experience focuses on collecting, organizing, and distributing in-game information, regardless of whether a traditional library appears in the game at all. The library game makes use of the naturally archival structure of digital games, in which massive amounts of in-game information and content is organized and efficiently presented to players, and allows for game experiences focused on the aggregation and understanding of knowledge, as well as the player’s ethical responsibility as the curator of that knowledge. Ultimately, the library game is an appealing new direction for speculative game design, and is particularly effective when it positions the player not as a patron but as the librarian, or the library itself.
Libraries in Speculative Digital Games
The relationship between libraries and games is less straightforward than it seems. An online search for the term “library games” often turns up libraries looking to add digital and analog games to their collections (Snyder Broussard 2012; Forsythe 2021; Haasio, Madge, and Harviainen 2021), or discussions about the difficulties of archiving and cataloging games for reference (Kaltman, Mason, and Wardrip-Fruin 2021; Sköld 2018; McDonald et al. 2021). In game development, a “game library” is a collection of code or assets intended for reuse, often as part of a larger framework or game engine (“GameDev Glossary: Library Vs Framework Vs Engine” 2015; Unity Technologies 2022). Additionally, game engines can be used as platforms for large-scale projects in citizen science such as Foldit (2008), an experimental puzzle game in which thousands of users folded protein structures and catalogued their results; or for the curation and dissemination of real-world information. The most famous of these is the Uncensored Library, a collection of banned reporting from countries without press freedoms that exists in a free-to-access Minecraft server (Maher 2020; Gerken 2020). Libraries also make for popular content for analog and other non-digital games, including Biblios (2007), Ex Libris (2017), Gutenberg (2021), and The Big Book of Madness (2015).
In addition to the above, there are a remarkable number of fictional libraries in digital games, especially those with speculative content. Libraries appear in games as varied as the action-horror game Bloodborne (2015), indie games Night in the Woods (2017) and Undertale (2015), classic platformers like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997), action games like Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018), adventure games like The Longest Journey (1999) and Darkside Detective (2017), numerous role-playing games from Chronotrigger (1995) to Octopath Traveler (2018), nearly every game in the Final Fantasy series, most games in the Legend of Zelda series, and most major ongoing massively multiplayer role-playing games from World of Warcraft (2004) to Final Fantasy XIV (2014). Dungeons & Dragons’ Candlekeep Library appears in multiple digital games, mostly notably Baldur’s Gate (1998). An accurate recreation of the Boston Public Library appears in the post apocalyptic Fallout 4 (2015). Even Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), best known as a fast-paced multiplayer shooter, includes the infuriatingly difficult and famously reviled level “The Library” in its single-player campaign (Burford 2016). In short, libraries are so common in digital games that they are arguably harder to avoid than to seek out.
In-game libraries vary widely in both content and use. Games with fantasy settings often include a traditional book-and-scroll-laden library inhabited by scholars or spellcasters who provide information, share secrets, and send players on quests. In these non-technological spaces, books are valued as physical objects that can be retrieved, collected, or stolen, as with the lost tome that begins Cyrus’ story in Octopath Traveler (2018) or the numerous books that can be collected, read, and organized in the player’s home in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). In addition to physical libraries, science fiction games often also feature a digital archive that serves as either an extension of the player’s user interface or a technological macguffin that must be found, hidden, repaired, or destroyed. All three are present in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), in which heroine Aloy uses a Focus, an information-gathering augmented reality device, to uncover the Zero Dawn project, both a digital archive and physical library space that originally protected the core knowledge of human civilization from an extinction-level event. Horror games commonly present libraries as ruined or abandoned spaces in which the player’s only goal is to survive, as with the Duke’s Archive in Dark Souls (2011). As with much popular media, games rarely make a distinction between libraries and archives (Buckley 2008), but both are prevalent in speculative digital games, regardless of whether they are appropriately labeled.
Despite their prevalence, most in-game libraries exist more as graphical backgrounds than truly interactable spaces. Generally, players can interact with only one or two plot-important books or with bookcases that provide a single relevant paragraph of information, as in Garregh Mach Library in Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019). It is also common for a game’s books to be represented by a few duplicate art assets, as with the beautiful but heavily replicated piles of books in What Remains of Edith Finch (2017). Few games present libraries of a specific type: exceptions include the explicitly academic library that serves the students of the College of Winterhold in Skyrim (Lai 2022) and the rural, small-town library in Stardew Valley (Lai 2021). Even fewer games allow players to take library-like actions, such as checking out books or searching through the stacks for specific pieces of information.
Apart from moving through the space and talking to non-player characters (NPCs), there are two kinds of substantive interactions players can take in in-game libraries: library-as-tutorial, in which the library provides hints and tips about gameplay; and library-as-easter-egg, in which books can be read but are irrelevant to the game world. The first can be seen in the remastered version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019), in which Mabe Village’s library includes eight or so readable books with helpful tips like “If you hold R, you can defend yourself from enemy attacks” and “You can warp only to a point you have stood on with your own two feet” (2019). The second is exemplified by the two extensive libraries in the adventure game Thimbleweed Park (2017), which together include over a thousand readable books that were written primarily by the game’s Kickstarter backers, including “How To Know What Dog Are,” “MAKE Him Love You,” “Failed Novelist v. 895227,” and “Encyclopedia of *Beep*” (2017) – entertaining to read, but in no way connected to the game’s world or story. Neither the library-as-tutorial or library-as-easter-egg structure allows players to take full advantage of an in-game library, or to use it in a way that approaches how libraries function in the real world.
One additional structure to consider is the library-as-compendium, in which an information repository is generated or completed over the course of the game, often without direct input from the player. Early in Hades (2020), players are given the Codex of the Underworld, which gradually fills with information about monsters, areas, and game characters as the player progresses. Similarly, the Pokédex appears in numerous games in the Pokémon series and auto-fills with information about hundreds of Pokémon as the player encounters and captures each one. This feature is so beloved that when the developers announced that Pokédexes from previous games could not be imported into Pokémon Sword/Shield (2019), players were outraged (Hernandez 2019). The library-as-compendium structure is an excellent way to provide large amounts of game information that the player can access at any time, but rarely requires direct, meaningful interaction. Instead, the structure suggests that the full potential of library-like mechanics has yet to be explored in digital games.
Why Are In-Game Libraries Underused?
While libraries appear commonly in digital games, few give players any sense of agency, often defined in games as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray 1997). In other words, players want to feel that their actions are recognized by the game system and have value. When considering player agency and control, the library as a game space has huge potential but is consistently underused, both because game developers spend the majority of their resources on core game systems rather than non-critical features, and because library-like mechanics are structurally quite different than most traditional game mechanics.
Digital games are difficult to make. From small one-person projects to triple-A games with hundreds of developers, it is “a miracle any game gets made,” as the grueling work of game development takes place in a constantly shifting technological landscape in which no two games have the same structure or are created the same way (Schreier 2017). There are multiple reasons game development is challenging, but one of the most insidious is feature creep, defined by game designer Richard Lemarchand as “the age-old game development problem where developers get excited about new ideas and add them into the game’s design during full production,” a problem that “extends a project in an uncontrolled way and can sometimes prevent it from ever being finished” (Lemarchand 2021). For many digital games, creating a fully interactive library would take a substantial amount of time but add little value to the core game experience, which for mainstream digital games is often centered around combat, puzzle-solving, exploration, or survival. For example, in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild (2017) players explore a vast open world, solve environmental and physics-based puzzles, complete narrative side-quests, engage in combat with various enemies, and eventually find and rescue Princess Zelda from the corrupted ruins of Hyrule Castle. The game includes a few scattered books, which usually hint at a quest or hidden treasure; the Hyrule Compendium, which automatically fills with information about various creatures and items as the player records them with a camera; and the Royal Library in Hyrule Castle, a ruined space which contains two readable books with quest-related cooking recipes. None of these library-like mechanics or spaces are required parts of the game experience, and the game can be completed without encountering any of them. Likewise, the rogue-lite Hades (2020) involves increasingly difficult high-speed combat through a gauntlet of monster-filled chambers until the player dies – at which point they are returned to the House of Hades, where the core gameplay loop switches to conversing with NPCs, decorating the House, and tinkering with various combat skills before returning to the gauntlet. The Codex of the Underworld is a useful reference but in no way critical, and players can complete the game without opening it at all. For both games, as well as many others, it was prudent to spend the bulk of development time on refining combat or enriching an explorable world, rather than creating an interactive library that added little to the core loop, particularly when non-critical features are so often scaled down or cut during the development process (O’Donnell 2014).
Including a complete in-game library would make more sense in a game whose core loop centered on library-like mechanics, such as research or data organization. Games in which players read substantial amounts of text, such as visual novels and text adventures, tend to have minimal mechanics and rarely allow players to walk through a graphical space. One exception is the puzzle-adventure The Talos Principle (2014), which includes a text-based information program, the Milton Library Interface, that gradually reveals itself as a character with biases and an agenda. Another exception, noted by librarian Alvina Lai, is LUNA: The Shadow Dust (2020), an animated point-and-click adventure game in which a magical library level includes reference services and information retrieval, such that the characters are “essentially doing the work of librarians” (Lai 2020). While both games used libraries in a unique way, neither is centered on the library as a core game experience, once again suggesting unrealized potential.
Even without full interactivity, libraries make for a standout game setting: beautiful, complex spaces that present opportunities for environmental artists and worldbuilders to shine, whether the library serves as the flourishing heart of a city or the abandoned ruins of a forgotten civilization. While libraries have little in common with traditional game mechanics like combat or movement, they have a great deal in common with the structure of digital games themselves. The fascination of the library isn’t in retrieving one item or talking to an NPC, but in exploring a knowledge base, making discoveries, and connecting disparate pieces of information. These library-like mechanics are similar to actions already common in digital games, particularly collection and organization mechanics used for items, weapons, and treasure. This suggests that the ideal library game is one in which the player creates, organizes, and maintains a library or archive as the game’s core loop. From the standpoint of player agency, giving players control of library-like systems and mechanics implies that players will be most engaged with the game means that players will be most engaged by playing not a patron but a librarian, or the library itself.
Defining the Library Game
Genres in digital games are notoriously imperfect (Clark, Lee, and Clark 2017; Vargas-Iglesias 2020). Some genres are named for core game mechanics, like the first person shooter; others for underlying systems, like the simulation game; and others for the feeling the game inspires in the player, as with horror games. Terms like “open world” or “resource management” are sometimes considered genres, and sometimes design structures that appear across multiple genres. The term “library game” is not intended to situate it among existing genres, but serves as a shorthand for games focused on library-like mechanics that may also belong to one or more traditional genres. I propose the library game as an addition to two other similar shorthand terms: the mystery game and the archaeological game.
In mystery games, sometimes called detective games, the player character is tasked with solving a mystery or series of mysteries through logic, deduction, and reasoning. Mysteries commonly appear in digital games of various other genres: for example, in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the player can take a break from combat and exploration to pursue the “Blood on the Ice” questline, in which they solve a series of supernatural killings by interviewing suspects, finding clues, and shadowing potential victims. Many non-mystery games include a mystery as a central part of their narrative, such as what happened to Zagreus’ mother in Hades or the nature of Queen Marika’s relationship with Radagon in Elden Ring (2022). Mystery games, on the other hand, focus entirely on solving mysteries through game mechanics. Players are expected to gather information from locations and NPCs, then use that information to explain a series of events, often with the goal of solving a case, unmasking a killer, or preventing additional crimes from being committed.
Importantly, the mystery game’s core mechanics must be focused on the nuts and bolts of detection. As game scholar Clara Fernandez-Vara notes, “just because the game tells us we are a detective, it does not mean that we are one—if all the player actions involve opening doors, we are a locksmith” (Fernández-Vara 2013). Mystery games often follow their literary and cinematic counterparts in crime fiction by including hard-boiled detectives, femme fatales, colorful suspects, chase scenes, parlor room reveals, and last-minute twists. They can also subvert these tropes as with Overboard! (2021), in which the player first commits a murder, then uses logic and reasoning to cover it up. Well-known mystery games include Heavy Rain (2010), in which the player controls four characters attempting to unmask (or hide their true identity as) a serial killer; L.A. Noire (2011), a neo-noir crime game set in the 1940s; and Disco Elysium (2021), in which a drug-addled, amnesiac detective must solve a murder despite his personal demons; as well as games in the Ace Attorney and Darkside Detective series, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014), Paradise Killer (2020), and Pentiment (2022).
Where mystery games focus on recent or ongoing events, archaeological games are focused on events of long ago. Many games include archeological worldbuilding, particularly those in which players explore the ruins of long-dead civilizations, such as the Uncharted and Tomb Raider series, and those that use environmental storytelling for in-game lore, such as Hollow Knight (2017) and the Dark Souls series. Like detectives, archaeologists are rarely represented with accuracy in-game: anyone playing as Lara Croft should know that her platforming, combat skills, and hardened survivalism are “definitely not representative of archaeology or how archaeologists behave,” never mind the prevalence of excavation and looting as game mechanics (Reinhard 2018). Instead, an archaeology game needs archaeological mechanics, such as uncovering the past by collecting and analyzing physical objects, exploring abandoned spaces, and interpreting written or pictorial records. Myst (1993) and its many sequels can be defined as archaeological games, in that the player’s primary goal is to understand the people, buildings, and culture of the lost D’Ni civilization. More recent archaeological games include the whimsical I Am Dead (2020), focused on collecting objects and memories of the recently deceased in order to speak with their ghosts; and Heaven’s Vault (2019), in which players decipher and translate the language of a lost alien civilization. Outer Wilds (2019) is an excellent example of an archaeological game with mystery game elements, in that deciphering the written records of the ancient Nomai civilization is key to understanding modern-day events, specifically why the main character’s galaxy is caught in a twenty-two minute time-loop that ends with the explosion of the sun.
Both mystery games and archaeological games take advantage of the fundamental structure of digital games, which encourages the collection and organization of in-game information. But neither focuses on data organization as more than a means to an end: all in-game information leads to a single right answer, whether it’s the name of the Origami Killer or the location of the Eye of the Universe. A library game, on the other hand, focuses less on revealing an answer and more on collecting and preserving information for its own sake. This game type also grants players the kinds of choices common to working libraries, such as choosing what objects or information to collect, how to organize that collection, and how to protect or distribute it to a community. While not as common as mystery or archaeological games, there are a few recent games in which players collect, organize, and choose to distribute or protect information, which suggests that the library game as a sub-type is already taking form.
In Other Waters: Player as Cataloguer
From its first moments, Gareth Damian Martin’s In Other Waters (2020) is concerned with the cataloguing of information. Players control an artificial intelligence that exists solely within the dive suit of Dr. Ellery Vas, a xenobiologist exploring an underwater ecosystem on the planet Gliese 667Cc. While In Other Waters’ plot focuses on a missing scientist and covered-up environmental crimes, the game’s mechanics center on discovering new life forms, studying their structure and behavior, taking tissue samples, and recording information and theories about each one in Dr. Vas’ digital archive, a taxonomy of the planet’s ecosystem that includes detailed descriptions of behaviors, observations, theories, and eventually a pencil sketch for each of Gliese 667Cc’s creatures. Additionally, some samples change the game environment, temporarily blocking ocean currents or encouraging some kinds of fungal growth, which means players must pay attention to changes in both the interactive ecology and Dr. Vas’ written notes.
Unusually, the world of In Other Waters is presented entirely through a minimalist user interface “inspired by Japanese industrial design and anime interfaces of the 1980s and 90s” (Couture 2021), so players must navigate the game without ever seeing the underwater environment itself. Dr. Vas’ textual entries are strikingly evocative, one reviewer noting that the text has “the same clarity and brevity as if someone had shown you a photograph” (Bell 2020) and another saying they “couldn’t help but read them with [nature documentarian] David Attenborough’s voice in my head” (Byrd 2020). This emphasis on the textual keeps the player focused on the structure and organization of the ecosystem, as well as encouraging them to feel more like an AI. Martin, who has previous experience with procedural poetry and other non-traditional narrative forms, describes the game as “reader-centric,” in which players are intended to fill in informational gaps: “The whole of [In Other Waters] is built around these gaps (between the description of a creature, a drawing of it, and a little dot moving on screen for example) and they are what creates the immersive experience of playing the game” (Byrnes 2020).
While the data in In Other Waters is neatly organized and beautifully written, the player has little to no control over it: once a sample has been collected and organized, the database updates with Dr. Vas’ writings. Unlike the automatic library-as-compendium structure, Dr. Vas only adds information when the player uploads a sample, and much of the game is spent chasing after and collecting samples that are needed to complete entries in the archive. While the game’s alien taxonomy is fictional, Martin consulted with biologists during development to ensure that the game “represented biological science with some level of accuracy and that the alien creatures of the planet made sense as living entities” (Couture 2021). The player may not be responsible for inventing the categorization system, but they are responsible for completing its entries, which requires paying close attention to the game environment, despite seeing it only at arms-length. According to Martin, players should “study the world and its lifeforms with care and attention… Studying the ocean’s creatures [is] as important to the game’s overall focus as the narrative journey” (Gelbart 2022).
Arguably, In Other Waters falls into the mystery game category: something horrible happened on Gliese 667Cc, and Dr. Vas and the player work together to discover and ultimately expose it to the world. But the game is equally focused on making the player feel like a scientist by constructing a written record of the planet’s ecosystem. Even though the player is Dr. Vas’ AI assistant, rather than a scientist themself, the work of discovering, logging, and expanding entries about new creatures is up to the player’s discretion, and arguably pulls the player forward through the game more than the central mystery. Once the game’s narrative is complete, players can continue to explore and finish filling out the archive, as well as choose whether or not to send the complete taxonomy to Earth, given that Gliese 667Cc is widely thought to be devoid of life. Dr. Vas herself chooses to stay indefinitely, rather than return home: “Someone needs to swim these waters. To catalogue this world…. I want to log everything we can, every species, every sample. I want a wealth of data to show to the inhabited systems, to the off-world colonies, to Earth” (Jump Over The Age 2020). Even the game’s downloadable content (DLC) is unusual: not additional gameplay or expanded mechanics, but a coffee table-style book of wildlife paintings titled “A Study of Gliese 667Cc: The Painting and Sketches of Dr. Ellery Vas,” presented as being written in 2254 by Dr. Gareth Damian Martin of the Tokyo Institute of Xenobiology (Martin 2020), which further reinforces the game’s emphasis on biological study and categorization.
As a library game, In Other Waters succeeds in focusing the player’s attention on the careful study, organization, record-keeping, and ultimate preservation of an alien ecosystem. The need to understand Gliese 667Cc’s inner workings drives In Other Waters’ core gameplay loop, making it the rare game “where observation becomes an end in itself. Its simple gameplay mechanics are supported by a quiet, vibrant narrative that works to put players into the mind of a working scientist” (Byrd 2020). While the player doesn’t directly organize the archive’s information, they are responsible for collecting and completing every entry, as well as indirectly choosing to make the completed record public, which will ideally protect Gliese 667Cc from other invasive private corporations but also open the planet up to other visitors, not all of whom may be interested in keeping it protected and pristine. Dr. Vas herself is conflicted when finally broadcasting the data: she comments that “we don’t own this place” and that “there’s too much beauty, too much hope” in the data to keep it secret, but also initially describes the choice to broadcast as “I’m about to do something stupid…” (Jump Over The Age 2020), which neatly highlights the tension between libraries as providers of public information or storehouses of private knowledge. The slow process of discovering new life, studying its behavior, and using samples to fill out a textual archive makes up the bulk of gameplay in In Other Waters, making it an excellent example of a game using library-like mechanics to put the player in the mind of a cataloging xenobiologist, and to focus its game experience on understanding the full informational system of a functioning ecology and living world.
The Return of the Obra Dinn: Player as Custodian of Information
On its surface, Lucas Pope’s The Return of the Obra Dinn is explicitly a mystery game: you play as an insurance inspector working for the East India Trading Company in 1807, tasked with discovering the fate of nine passengers and fifty-one crew of the vanished merchant vessel Obra Dinn. The game’s structure is focused on observation and deduction, but players have extraordinary freedom in how they approach their deductions. The game presents “a vast, complex, and interconnected mystery to solve, but trusts in your intelligence enough to let you do it yourself” (Kelly 2018), replicates the “laborious if rewarding job of clue-gathering, cross-referencing and extrapolation involved” (Kohler 2019), and “capture[s] the thrill of deduction” by letting the player sink or swim in a sea of interconnected information (Castle 2018). The Return of the Obra Dinn can be considered a logical extension of the literary detective story (Ramos 2021) and an example of epistemic narrative in which the player’s need to know drives the game forward (Rittenhouse et al. 2023).
While Obra Dinn fits neatly into the mystery sub-genre, its mechanical structure defines it as a library game as well. The game begins when the missing merchant vessel Obra Dinn returns to port with none of its passengers or crew aboard. The player traverses the ship armed with two tools: a book containing the crew manifest, ship layout, unlabeled sketches of everyone aboard, and eight blank chapters with titles like “A Bitter Chill” and “The Doom”; and a skull-emblazoned pocket watch that projects the last living moments of any discovered corpse, first as a few seconds of audio, then as a three-dimensional still tableau that the player can explore. It’s apparent that something supernatural befell the Obra Dinn, and that most of the crew brought various dooms upon themselves through greed, fear, ignorance, or plain bad luck. Obra Dinn’s mechanics are remarkably research-oriented, especially in how players collect and organize information. The book provides places and times, but the player must deduce each corpse’s name, cause of death, and responsible party with no guidance other than the visual and audio evidence on the ship. One of the first things players are told is to “Carry on and pay attention” (Pope 2018): identities and deaths are validated in sets of three, definitive information is rare, and there are far too many crew members to guess outright, so much of the game centers on making logical deductions based on small pieces of evidence, everything from one character shouting “You bloody Dane” or “Brennan, get the surgeon’s kit” at another, to figuring out which of the four Chinese topmen sleeps in which berth based on the distinctive patterns on their shoes. To uncover the Obra Dinn’s narrative, players must collect and make connections between pieces of information, then record those connections in the book to progress toward the game’s ending.
The Return of the Obra Dinn is also library-like in how players are expected to organize information. Unlike the Pokédex or Hades’ Codex of the Underworld, the book in The Return of the Obra Dinn doesn’t fill automatically: completing it is the game’s primary objective. And unlike In Other Waters, the book’s informational entries aren’t written and organized by an NPC, but by the player. The book’s chapters are ostensibly laid out by one of the Obra Dinn’s very few survivors, but they are chronological and straightforward, meaning the bulk of organization is in figuring out which fates go where. Additionally, players aren’t required to catalogue every death, nor do they have to be correct. The investigation can be ended at any time, including with entries that are known to be wrong. Learning what happened to the Obra Dinn is its own reward, but the explicit in-game reward for completing the book is access to “Bargain,” a hidden chapter that can only be explored after correctly deducing all available fates. As a final coda, once players complete “Bargain” and uncover the last remaining mystery, the Chief Inspector places the finished book on an office shelf next to hundreds of similar books and artifacts, implying that the story of the Obra Dinn isn’t the only one to be catalogued and protected.
If a library game is one in which players collect, organize, and choose to distribute or protect information, The Return of the Obra Dinn clearly falls into that category for how it handles informational control. The game’s core loop is centered not just on gathering information, but in making sense of that information, then recording it to preserve for various purposes: the collection of insurance money; rewarding or punishing crew members for their actions, fairly or not; and potentially recording the entire story of the Obra Dinn for posterity. Unlike the mystery game, in which uncovering a single truth is a common objective, The Return of the Obra Dinn’s solution is a complete understanding of all sixty people and their relationships with each other during a protracted, complex series of events: an ecology of relationships, much like the alien biosphere in In Other Waters. Matthew Castle of Rock Paper Shotgun calls it a “reverse Agatha Christie,” in that instead of “teasing the circumstances of a death from the polite society around it,” The Return of the Obra Dinn charges its players with “teas[ing] out social lives from a freeze frame of murder” (Castle 2018). By the end of the game, the player is the sole remaining custodian of the true story of the Obra Dinn, as the very few survivors consider it “a distant memory and a dreadful chapter in our lives that we wish to forget” (Pope 2018), positioning the player as chronicler, information repository, and last living record of the events on the ship. Scholar Conor McKeown argues that The Return of the Obra Dinn presents a decentralized, intra-active form of player agency focused on the co-creation of the game world: “without the player, the histories of the characters will not unfold and the entangled web of actions and interactions between them and the world in which the game is set…will not emerge.” By this reading, The Return of the Obra Dinn not only gives the player library-like mechanics, but invites them to “play a co-constitutive role in producing reality” (McKeown 2019), which implies the player is not only the Obra Dinn’s librarian, but ultimately an embodiment of the library itself.
Conclusion: Searching for Library Games
As in speculative fiction, libraries in digital games are magical, transformative, and recursively satisfying places (Croft and Fisher 2022). There is great potential for a game with library-like mechanics, where the process of running, exploring, and maintaining a library is central to the game experience, both narratively and mechanically. Most recent games with library-specific content are educational, providing instruction on library use or otherwise gamifying the library experience (Battles, Glenn, and Shedd 2011; Kretz, Payne, and Reijerkerk 2021; Leach and Sugarman 2005). Likewise, games set in a library may not have library-like interactions, such as The Librarian (2020), a brief meditative horror game centered on uncertainty and ambiguity (Moore 2018). The ideal library game is one that, regardless of content, places the collection, organization, and distribution of information at its mechanical heart.
In discussion with working librarians, there are numerous potential mechanics that warrant further exploration: not just acquiring objects, but choosing which objects to acquire by their relevance, popularity, or importance to a particular field; not just cataloguing information, but determining which aspects of each piece of information are most significant. Even in the digital age, librarians are limited by shelf space, and must follow a culling process that evaluates which items should be discarded to keep the library up-to-date and to make space for new acquisitions (Makowka 2022). Digital games might also address the librarian’s role as it applies to reference: “the right to apply their knowledge, taste, and discrimination to assisting the choice of their patrons” in a way that acknowledges “the reflective process of deliberation, the slow choosing, the eager anticipation” that accompanies finding and providing exactly the right piece of information (Pettegree and Weduwen 2021). Despite the prevalence of digital search engines, libraries still require a human hand, which again implies that a library game is most effective when players have agency over the in-game library’s direction. And if a library can be a character, both figuratively as with Skyrim’s Arcanaeum and literally as in The Talos Principle, it follows that the library can be a player character as well.
In an earlier article, I argued that digital games were an ideal medium for speculative fiction because of their technological structure (Evans 2020); it follows that they are a natural fit for library games as well. Both In Other Waters and The Return of the Obra Dinn are essentially solo projects, with the bulk of game design, programming, art, sound, and narrative created by one person, where games with less interactive libraries were developed by dozens or even hundreds of developers. While innovation can take hold anywhere in the games industry, it is not unusual for a small team to develop new structures, gameplay, or content that are later adopted by larger, more risk-averse development teams. Recent indie games with library-like mechanics include Strange Horticulture (2022), a narrative puzzle game in which the player catalogues and distributes the magical, often dangerous plants of a region, assisted by their librarian friend; Dredge (2023), a Lovecraftian fishing horror game in which the player catches and catalogues aberrant fish, while improving their various skills through adding titles to their shipboard bookshelf; and Book of Hours (2023), a narrative crafting RPG in which the player restores and revitalizes an occult library. Taking full advantage of the possibilities inherent in library-like mechanics is both a worthwhile endeavor and less risky than it seems, in that the structure of digital games is primed for experiences centered on observation, collection, organization, and the ethics of protecting or distributing information. The library game represents yet another nascent direction for speculative digital games, and an appealing structure for a medium that has often been focused on the power and importance of information.
Special thanks to Matt Makowka and the staff of the UT Dallas Library; and to Madeline Blommel, Wesley Frost, and Kyle Skabowski for their input on this article.
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