0020.19.03.2019
>As a student of game design, golly, Borges just keeps on giving.
It's not only possible but easy to tie "The Library of Babel" into a wider
discussion of the procedural nature of computer art as described by Janet
Murray, and particularly videogames as animated directories, and then in the
specific case of tiles and "character data."
"Character data" here refers to the tile-based graphical data stored in
ROM banks on cartridges like those used with the Genesis, NES and MSX. It's
a turn of phrase that goes back to early computers, which stored in similar
fashion letters, numbers, and miscellaneous symbols. That is, characters.
In this sense, you could argue that the tileset you rearrange to assemble
your graphical world is your "alphabet," and that if one possible metric of
videogame beauty is how easily a game's objects, its tiles, its visual
possibility space lends itself to beautiful images, you are really trying to
determine the distance from any position a perfect Babelian book. Works of
literary beauty existed all over the library, but they were lost within an
infinity of noise. What kind of library will you construct, and what is the
alphabet you will use to construct it? <0032---