Tag: game studies

You Are The Library: Players as Custodians of Information in In Other Waters and The Return Of The Obra Dinn.

By Monica Evans

From our print edition, Vector 298

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. 

Obra Dinn logbook

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. 

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An excerpt from ‘Forceful and Fuzzy Games in the Novels of Iain [M.] Banks’

By Jo Lindsay Walton. This is an excerpt from a chapter published in The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks, eds Nick Hubble, Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Joseph Norman (Gylphi, 2018).

Introduction: What’s in a Game?

On an estate belonging to the Ancraime family, at the edges of Stonemouth, a Scottish coastal town, a group of boys gather to play paintball. They come from a range of economic backgrounds: Stonemouth is not large enough for the boys to be segregated according to class. The poorest member of the group is Wee Malky. As dusk draws in, the boys begin the last game of the day, a hunting scenario in which, in consequence of a “complicated arrangement of scoring across the various [earlier] skirmishes” (Banks 2012: 146), Wee Malky finds himself the quarry, and the rest of the group, hunters.

Eventually, “near the furthest western extent of the house gardens […] [on the edge of] the rest of the estate and the grouse moors and plantation forests beyond,” (ibid. 149), the scattered group begins to converge. Wee Malky is making a perilous crossing along the round-topped, weed-slicked stone of the top lip of a reservoir, which feeds various water features in the gardens. He has the undertow-prone, peaty reservoir water to one side, and the steep, slimy slope of the overflow, dotted with concrete pillars, on the other.

George Ancraime, “the older brother, nearly twenty at this point but with a mental age stuck at about five” (ibid. 142), suddenly appears near the bottom of the slope. He has been back to his parents’ mansion and retrieved a large antique sword, which he brandishes smilingly at Wee Malky. If Wee Malky can make it across, he wins the game. But if he loses his balance, he loses his life. 

The scene, a suitably cruel allegory of class violence, is in many ways typical of how games often appear in Banks’s fiction. It raises the question of what makes a game a game, and at what point it stops being a game. Game studies theorists Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, after a survey of existing definitions, define a game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003: 96). Another good starting point is the philosopher Bernard Suits’s succinct formulation: playing a game is “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (Suits 2005 [1978]: 55). […] Banks’s games resist both definitions. There is a sustained interest in Banks’s work in involuntary games, necessary games, games-within-games, games that burst their boundaries, games that overcome their players, games with hidden purposes, fragmentary games, games that arise spontaneously, games whose rules change, and games whose outcomes are nebulous and defy calculation. More generally, there is a fascination in Banks’s writing with ludic affordance: the capacity of any situation to absorb and be transformed by play.

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