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

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.

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Beyond the Library as Utopia

Beyond the Library as Utopia: Conditional Belonging, Representative Collections and Science Fiction Librarianship

Gina Bastone and Adriana Cásarez

Introduction

When we tell strangers or new acquaintances that we are librarians, we hear reactions like “Oh, how wonderful that you get to read books all day!” Sometimes, we might get the response, “You’re doing such important work. The public library changed my life as a kid!”

While we much prefer the latter response, both reflect a stereotype of libraries as utopian institutions necessary for a healthy democracy and immune from criticism. Some people even hold libraries in holy regard, comparing librarians to clergy with a vocational calling, as Fobazi Ettarh notes in her groundbreaking article on vocational awe.^[1] For many readers and SF fans, the library is a sacred place where knowledge is preserved and where they have treasured memories of encountering their favorite books for the first time or discovering their favorite SF authors.

We share a love for books, particularly SF stories, but we have a realistic view of libraries beyond these utopian visions. Margaret Atwood discusses the paradoxical nature of a similar utopia/dystopia binary in her book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. She says, “[W]ithin each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia a concealed utopia. …”^[2] It is from this tension that we draw similarities in libraries. Our idealized values of unfettered, egalitarian access to information and strong nostalgia for the love of books have a shadow side, especially when interrogated around white supremacy and patriarchy.

In her article “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work”, Michele R. Santamaria describes “The Library” as “a fantasy space that denies its role in white supremacy.”^[3] Santamaria builds on Gina Schlesselman-Tarango’s work on the concept of cuteness and how it insidiously reinforces the status quo in libraries. Schlesselman-Tarango says,

“By promising safety through gesturing to a pre-technological past, books preclude exposure to and engagement with the nasty realities of contemporary society. Inasmuch as they are associated with books, libraries too might be understood to provide an outlet for this sentimental yearning. …”^[4]

We see library nostalgia as a crucial underpinning to the romanticized utopian stereotype of libraries, yet Santamaria, Schlessleman-Tarango, and Ettarh all point to the dystopian shadow side of our shared profession. We will explore this further as we unpack our collecting philosophy.

Additionally, Santamaria’s use of “The Library” denotes a sense of institutional authority and is a direct reference to librarian, writer, and poet Jorge Luis Borges’ concept of the “library as a universe”.^[5] In particular, Borges’ famous short story The Library of Babel comes to mind. The Library of Babel has dystopian elements, such as meaningless books that are never accessed, used, or even seen by the librarians doomed to wander its endless halls.^[6] This Borgesian “library as universe” may seem the product of a dark fantasy far from the reality of working in libraries, but it is a helpful metaphor for challenging the equally unrealistic stereotypes underpinning library nostalgia and vocational awe.

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“Finding Nothing Can Be Finding Something”: Medievalism, Book History, and Accessing the Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle

By Grace Catherine Greiner

This story begins with a book that was given, and then taken away. It was Christmas Eve, the night my family and I traditionally exchange gifts. My youngest sister took her turn doling out packages, many of them small, rectangular—the size of books. My brother and I were recipients of two such similarly-sized, book-shaped packages. We were instructed to open them simultaneously (with the caveat that they might be mixed up, that I might be holding his, and vice versa). I tore off the wrapping paper from my book and behold: it was the wrong book.

This is how Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind (NW) first made its way into my hands:^[1] briefly, and only to be snatched away and swapped with another mainstay of contemporary fantasy writing—Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. This first encounter, however, is hardly inappropriate given the particular place of books—the ways they circulate, the value they hold, the physical spaces in which they’re stored—in Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle, a trilogy whose third installment has yet to appear on shelves (though an off-shoot novella, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, has offered readers an interlude while they wait for no. 3).

The Chronicle is, from its earliest chapters, exactly what it says on the box: a chronicle—events which are being written down by the appropriately-monikered Chronicler, who records, by hand, the life events of the narrator, Kvothe—musician, student, and would-be arcanist-turned-innkeeper by the time we meet him in the outer narrative frame of The Name of the Wind. Kvothe’s life story, as told in The Name of the Wind and its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear,^[2] follows his development as a young boy who grows up among an itinerant troupe of performers (thespians, musicians, and magicians) and is singled out, at a young age, as a prime candidate for education at the (apparently singular) University and instruction in the arcane (read: magical, but also scientific and plastic) arts. Before the troupe’s massacre by the mysterious Chandrian (a traumatic event which kindles his desire to enter the University in order to gain access to its famous Archives and learn more about his family’s killers), Kvothe begins his training in the art of sympathy with the skilled arcanist who travels with the troupe. From this arcanist, he inherits a book—a book that he later hocks to fund his first term’s tuition at the University, where he undertakes study in a variety of subjects, quickly passing from one rank of the Arcanum to the next whilst also facing an inordinate number of extracurricular trials and adventures along the way.

As the title of the trilogy and its first installment suggest, names, stories, and storytelling should be at the forefront of our minds as we read the Chronicle—stories which we witness literally coming into being as stories as we listen to Kvothe tell them and watch Chronicler write them down on one broad sheet of paper after another. But it’s not only stories themselves which fascinate Rothfuss and his characters in the Chronicle. It is also the physical forms through which stories and histories are transmitted that matter. That is, for Rothfuss and his characters, books matter.

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Call for Submissions: SFF and Libraries

Vector invites invites proposals for articles for a #298, a special issue on speculative fiction and libraries, as well as adjacent themes, e.g. speculative angles on archives, collections, repositories, simulations, antilibraries, catalogues, metadata, preservation, curation, media archaeology, literary publics, open access, search, big data, taxonomies, folksonomies, epistemes, architectures of knowledge, hypomnemata, the history and future of print, oral traditions, embodied knowledge, book stores, index cards, bibliographic management, scholarly apparatuses, indexes, performance archiving, back-ups, more-than-human knowledge systems, data futures, code libraries, toy libraries, tool libraries, etc.

See the full call here for more information.

Abstracts due 30 April 2022. Guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander.