A few years back, browsing on Instagram, I was delighted to see a book I knew.
Shake Shack and Shopsin made a lot of sense.
I’ve always been a bit of a bookshelf snooper.
Not in friends' houses, necessarily, which always feels like a bit of a step too far.
But the bookshelves of people I don’t know feel like fair game.
In movies, I always lean forward trying to see what the heroes and villains have on their shelves.
On CNN I can’t help but scan what the people being interviewed on Zoom have stacked behind them.
Games are great for this too, but in quite unusual ways.
So, let’s go.
Let’s go bookshelf snooping in games.
First stop,Life is Strange.
Weirdly, Max’s Expedit was a 2x3, a form that did not exist in the real world.
Recognition had made it visible to me all of a sudden.
It was like having a very dull superpower.
There it was in the principal’s office in a break-in scene.
There it was in a classroom.
The set dressers for this game were ingenious, and they were thrifty.
It was one of the fundamental atoms of the Life is Strange cosmos.
Bookshelves can be evocative!
What a beautiful thing!
I think of this library often - along with a library in Solar Ash, from the same team.
The Hyper Light Drifter library is so special I think because its order is giving way to entropy.
And here’s the other thing - I couldn’t make use of it in the game.
It was set dressing, so I couldn’t pull books down or even read their titles.
And all of the family’s books are here.
And you might look at the spines of these books and read the names!
I can only remember one off-hand, because it’s a favourite.
Gravity’s Rainbow, a proper classic that I should probably read again.
(No idea personally.)
Here’s the thing.
Being a bookcase spotter in games is a lovely passtime, because bookcases are everywhere in games.
They’re useful ways to fill a space and make it lived in.
Games need bookcases just like we need bookcases on this side of the screen.
They are a neat artifact of being human and having a personal history.
The last bookcases I really looked at were in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, I think.
The game was using bookcases to give me a bit of distance from my character, it felt.
