I’ll be webcasting my Drunk Design talk with O’Reilly tomorrow. Check it out here.

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We usually think of game design as a process of creation where a designer conceives a game in their mind and projects it into the world. In this article, I propose an alternative metaphor. What if design isn’t a process of creation at all? What if it is a process of exploration?

The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story The Library of Babel describes a universe that consists of nothing but a gigantic library. This library contains all possible 410-page books. This means that somewhere in its near-infinite stacks one can find a book holding every combination of characters that can fill a 410 pages. It holds a book that is 410 pages of nothing but the letter a. It also contains a book that is all a’s except the last letter, which is b. And so on through every combination of letters. Continue reading →