Say any word often enough and it will lose all meaning. Go on, try it.

I like to use ‘blancmange’. Let’s face it, if any word is going to lose all meaning after saying it more than a couple of times, ‘blancmange’ is a pretty good candidate. Blancmange. Blancmange.

Blancmange.

Tonight I’ve been thinking about words, and there’s a very good reason for that. This evening, thanks to developer Ivan Notaros I’ve been wandering the corridors of the Library of Blabber, a seemingly infinite library created for Procjam 2015, an annual event wherein developers are challenged to ‘make something that makes something’.

Ivan was a little bit late with his submission to the Jam, but considering he was busy creating the largest repository of procedurally generated texts I’ve ever encountered, I think we can cut him a little slack. The halls of the Library stretch on and on, each hall containing dozens of books neatly stacked, but unlike every single RPG I’ve ever played, these books are actually readable.

Admittedly, there is a slight problem. Given the procedural nature of the books on offer, you’re fairly likely to pick one up that doesn’t make any sense. I say ‘fairly likely’, by which I mean they’re all gibberish. To make matters even worse for readers of the Daily Mail, some of the text looks suspiciously like ‘foreign’ gibberish, with accents and weird letters that are probably over here to take our jobs.

But the thing is, I don’t care. Wandering a gigantic silent library alone is about as far from shooting bad-guys in the face as it’s possible to get in a game, and there’s something extremely relaxing about browsing its endless shelves and titles, with no quest objectives, enemies or loot cluttering up the hallways.

What’s the point of it all though? Well, I’ll let the Library speak for itself…