Expedition 12
The Bathysphere
Hello and welcome aboard the 12th expedition of the Bathysphere! This week, Floss is looking at fake books, Keith is wandering a digital cemetery and Christian is reading the latest Jennifer Higgie masterwork. As ever, the essay is only available to paying subscribers, who can also check out our online archive of previous expeditions. Now, please step inside (mind your head) and enjoy the trip.
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
As someone who enjoys wandering around graveyards (shout out to Bath Abbey Cemetery and St Andrew’s Church, Mells), I was always going to play Seasonala Cemetery, the latest project from Gabby DaRienzo (A Mortician’s Tale). It’s a peaceful sim that allows you to read grave stones, listen to bird song and enjoy the flora and fauna of a rustic cemetery; the game takes the time and date from your PC when you play and the visuals change accordingly. A lovely shot of relaxation, especially for goths and consumptive romantic poets. KS
On the theme of fake books in video games, here’s a pretty exceptional example of the exact opposite. The Shaman, the Outsider and the Diet of Worms is an epistolary fantasy game as told through a wiki about the eponymous academic book. The thing is, developer Stanley W. Baxton has also actually written the text the wiki is based on as a 90 page manuscript. I love the crunchiness of the PDF - it looks like a scanned copy of a textbook that your university lecturer would share. FSN
The theme of this week is clearly books, and so I’m reminded of a fascinating game made by one of my favourite development teams, Santa Ragione. The Dustjacket’s a game about the feel of books - how it feels to turn them over in your hands, flip through them, and live around stacks of them. All that and a lovely score that puts me in mind of Twin Peaks. Do check it out. CD
Interesting things
Again, on the topic of books: I’m completely smitten with Janelle Rebel’s Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings, which delves into the history and imaginative potential of subject bibliographies. In a way, maybe Bathysphere is a kind of subject bibliography, a list of recommendations on a theme. FSN
I love this Polygon article from Patricia Hernandez about tracking down the rare game TRIPITAKA. Games preservation is a vitally important area rife with frustrations – I know as I have spent five years trying to track down Paul Stephenson, the creator of 1982 Rogue-like platformer, Aztec. I’ve got as far as arranging an interview with the game’s publisher, but this didn’t pan out. There are rumours on various ancient gaming message boards that he became a lecturer, but nothing concrete. He has no social media presence, no digital footprint, and yet there must be someone out there who knows or knew him. It’s a lesson that no matter how big the games industry becomes, some of its formative creators (and creations) may well remain lost or unknown forever. KS
If you happen to be in Toronto, the city’s Games Week is still going on, with some interesting events coming up, including a Pico-8 jam with Adam Saltsman and a talk by documentary filmmaker Min Sook Lee exploring video games as autoethnographic and autofictive practice. KS
At the moment I’m reading The Other Side, by Jennifer Higgie. The subtitle is “A journey into women, art and the spirit world,” and Higgie’s examining the neglected history of women artists whose work tried to communicate with and learn from other dimensions. It’s a wonderful mixture of memoir and analysis, and the kind of book you can only write if you’ve spent your life immersed in art and are driven to bring wrongly-ignored artists back into the light. Revelations on every page. CD
Essay: Real stories of fake books
Ever since the recent online kerfuffle over the non-existent AI generated titles published in a “Summer Reading List” by the Chicago Sun-Times, I can’t stop thinking about fake books, and how the “hallucinated” kind are absolutely the least interesting. After all, fake books have been carefully, and deliberately, designed as visual gags or worldbuilding props in film, TV and video games. They’re also not new, with a renowned example of a list of fake books in a novel dating back to 1532.
Indeed, the seventh chapter of François Rabelais’ Pantagruel concludes with a list of books supposedly seen in the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. This list includes such classics as La savette de humilité (“The Gym Shoe of Humility”), Pantoufla decretorum ("The Codpiece of the Law") and a reworking of the common Latin title Ars praedicandi ("The Art of Preaching") into Ars pettandi ("The Art of Farting"). This list is considered to be a satirical take on scholasticism, which was the predominant philosophy of education in medieval Europe, with a strong emphasis on tradition and dogma. Funnily enough, the real Abbey of Saint-Victor no longer exists, having been destroyed during the French revolution, its former location now occupied by the campuses of several universities.
The irreverent titles in Pantagruel reminded me of another book shelf: Nina Pasadena’s collection in the immersive sim Skin Deep. Much of Skin Deep is about saving cats from space pirates using anything you can get your hands on, but in between missions you go back to Nina’s ship. Nina has a bed, plants, and an array of books with zany titles. Some of my favourites include Effect and Cause and Head Reattachment Trauma, the latter being a reference to the bizarre “skull saver” tech that the pirates have in the game, allowing them to detach their head from their body if they are mortally wounded. I think the best one, though, is The You You Aren’t by “Mark,” a reworking of another book in a fictional universe, the self-help book The You You Are in the TV series Severance.
There are also cases of games taking a page out of the fictional books in literature. For example, Library of Blabber by Ivan Notaros allows you to explore a library filled with randomly generated books, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel. It was created for the Procedural Generation Jam back in 2015, and uses algorithms to create an infinite library (a great example of how AI has been used to generate content in games without LLMs for a long time). Blabber spawns you straight into a deliciously low poly library and allows you to explore the stacks with only the sound of your own footsteps for company. With no guide, I decided to walk aimlessly through thirty-three rooms, until I found a book that just had the word “Funeral” ominously written on it.
In the original Borges tale, the narrator describes how his universe consists of huge hexagonal rooms containing bookshelves. The inhabitants of this place believe that the books contain every possible combination of 25 basic characters, so while the majority are gibberish, statistically the library must contain every book ever written. The discovery of coherent works by chance leads to the formation of a strange sort of organized religion that believes that there is a mythic “Crimson Hexagon” full of magic books. The cult beliefs out of the garbled books in Borge’s story can’t help but remind me of the discourse around “consciousness” and generative AI.
François Rabelais, the author of Pantagruel, also wrote another novel containing fake books called Gargantua. In the prologue to this, he urges readers to look for a more serious meaning in the titles beyond the jokes. Whatever that meaning could be, it sure is easy to read into a deeper, infinite world of possibilities with fake books. FSN
Retrospective adventures
The vintage American computer magazine Byte always featured beautiful illustrated covers that sought to visualise the emerging world of the micro computer in interesting ways. This is the cover to the November 1979 edition, which focused on games. It includes a program listing for a spacecraft launch simulator, and features on how to create a Baseball sim using real-life stats or a Reversi game using minimax theory. You can have a read courtesy of the Internet Archive. KS