I took part in Ludum Dare 37 “One Room”. I’d just recently received my oculus touch controllers, so thought I’d give VR development a whirl. I created a simple VR game based on the short story “Library of Babel” by Luis Borges.

In theory, it features 2,147,483,647 books spread out across a huge network of hexagonal rooms, although in practice I think the generation is probably off in some way. The effect works well enough for my liking though, an near-infinite library of gibberish which potentially contains works of some meaning, squirrelled away on a non-descript shelf somewhere.

Being a VR project with specialist controllers, it’s one of the first times I’ve created a game jam project with the full expectation that probably, nobody will ever play it. So I made a quick youtube trailer:

There are a couple of other library of babel projects up on itch.io, and there is a much more rigorous interpretation of the idea on the web. But adding VR does add something to it, I think. You’re able to pick books off the shelf, throw them around, and tear them in half. There is something I like about spending a few minutes trashing a room, knowing that you’ve really made no serious impact in that vast library. Also due to hardware constraints, it all gets cleared up when you leave the room anyway 🙂