How large is the set of every possible video game? What can express the magnitude of that number? Contemplating this for more than a brief moment is humiliating. You must try to articulate what it would mean to step incrementally through every permutation of every genre, every instantiation of every potential design, every variation on every arrangement of art and sound and letters. It is not enough to say a person could go mad attempting to make sense of this. Everyone here is long past that, swimming in signs and symbols, grasping at fragments.

Matthew’s post is not particularly serious. It is turning The Library of Babel towards a different topic. However, the feeling of drowning in possible games is something I experience on a regular basis. Possibilities pour down and flood the earth. How can I choose one thing, one feeling to chase after?

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of incremental games. These are games mostly focused on obtaining a steady drip of resources that you marshal to increase the frequency and quantity of those resources. Eventually, you are producing absurd qualities of whatever. Numbers so large they don’t have names, only notations indicating their incredible scale. I find this steady progression into the incomprehensible relaxing. The universe might be vast, but I can alter and reap material benefits from it on equally vast scales.

Playing these games can also feel empty. They are largely about clicking the same buttons over and over, increasing scale but not increasing your scope. Now I have 1e300 mana (Scientific notation: The “e” means “10 raised to the power of”, so a 1 followed by 3000 zeroes), but there’s nothing I accomplish with 1e300 mana I wasn’t accomplishing with 1e200 mana. Growth for growth’s sake.

Sometimes all games feel empty. Open world games are checklists, multiplayer games are transient, narrative games feel like a worse version of a book I already read. This is normally a sign I need to take a break from gaming and do something else for a few weeks.