When I was in library school, my favorite subject was cataloging: the in-depth and complicated rules that govern the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems. It was deeply satisfying to assign every book under the sun its exact place in the order of things (or, “the order of things” as defined by a white man from the 1800s). Recent game Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library simplifies all this a lot, but it still scratches that essential itch of putting things in their place.
Librarian’s set-up is simple: You’re dropped into a two-storey library that’s a total mess, with books strewn in piles on the floor, and your job is to put them all back on their appropriate shelves in order. There’s a map at the front of the library that tells you where books go–shelf 1A for books about monsters, shelf 2N for books about history, shelf 2K for books about “jurisprudence,” shelf 1G for books about “magical artifacts and enchanting.” All books are part of a series, meaning there’s between three and ten you need to find and put together on a shelf in their correct area.
The entire thing felt overwhelming when I first started to play, and with nothing else for it, I just started loading my arms with books and wandering around putting them away. It’s obvious what category some books belong to, while others had titles that I struggled to interpret. These titles are all a lot of fun–the “management” section has series like Managing Diverse and Cross-Race Adventurer Parties; the “daily magic” section has an Introduction to LifeHack Magic–and the pleasure of discovering new titles, as well as finding parts of a set, does a lot to keep those early moments enjoyable. But it quickly became apparent to me that the task before me was, while not impossible, monumental, especially when some books are in messy piles that require tossing other books aside to unearth, meaning I was just making a new mess I’d have to sort through.
I tried to do things systematically, clearing out all the books on the stairs. That didn’t work; I’d go to put one away across the library, spot a book that belonged in its category nearby, and then get distracted clearing out that area instead. I tried to focus on clearing away all the books that were just piled on incorrect shelves, but that required multiple trips back and forth across the library that felt inefficient. The act of finding and shelving was satisfying in that weird, don’t-think-too-hard-about-how-you’re-spending-your-life way of certain simulation games, but I wondered how I’d keep going for tens to, who knows, hundreds of hours.
Eventually I noticed that all the books in the mathematics section had the same basic design, a cover of one color with a brighter-colored stripe across the top. That’s when things started to click into place; I was able to search around for similar-looking books, and inevitably I got lucky and filled out one three-volume shelf. Completing shelves gives you points you can put into magical powers, and all of them make your task a lot easier. You can choose from the ability to bring the other books in a series into your hand, highlight related books among the mess or the right section for a book you’re holding, or automatically order or even shelve the books you’ve got. Once you’ve unlocked a power you can use your points to level it up, and since the powers you get make completing shelves easier and thus earn you more points quickly, it wasn’t long before I could pick up a book, instantly teleport its nine companions to me, and auto-shelve them, with time in my leveled-up cooldowns to do the same thing with another. Grabbing a book I’d already shelved correctly made this all faster, and I was quickly able to start filling out sections, even if my library itself is still a mess.
It’s an interesting tension: The magical powers essentially make the core challenge of the game moot, since you barely have to find books at all. I went from painstakingly wandering the piles and examining covers, enjoying their design and titles, to just picking up a book at random and spamming my powers, hardly even registering its title or appearance. There’s an achievement for finishing the game without any magic, and I have to say it sounds appealing–it feels like the “true” way to play the game, and the one that makes it most like the cozy sim it professes to be. At the same time, the library is a library for people with magic powers; why wouldn’t you use magic to make your task possible? But the powers can also make the game more about simply completing the library rather than really living in the world of its books, at least the way I found myself treating them. I started wondering what the "right" way to do things was: What's the true essence of this task? Is it to do it fast? Is it to really work for it? I’m not done with the game yet, so I’m not sure if this tension becomes highlighted in any way once all my books are on their shelves.
Librarian came out in late April, and one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to get to is that the game’s Steam page features an AI use disclosure, which reads:
The four assets in this work—one UI component and three landscape paintings used as wall decorations (frames not included)—were produced using additional AI for refinement. None of them were created by AI from the ground up.
AI helped with grammatical corrections for in-game text, which were then carefully reviewed and adjusted by hand.
We only consider AI to be a supportive tool. Every detail is meticulously crafted with human intent, as our creative process is still firmly anchored in manual craftsmanship.
This gave me a lot of pause and put me off the game for a while. I thought about the disclosure as I played with my powers: There’s a way in which I could read my use of them as a certain kind of metaphor for AI, removing the person-power and thinking from a task but also making it far more efficient than it would be unaided. There’s certainly a middle ground here, using your powers to assist you in the manual task instead of deploying them to circumvent it altogether, as the disclosure seems to suggest the developers did with their use of AI. I doubt the developers intended this reading, but it did give me something to mull over. Ultimately I was curious enough about the game, given how well it slots into my interests (and the master’s degree I’m still paying for) and satisfied enough with the disclosure to play it anyway, but I wouldn’t fault anyone who wants nothing to do with a game that uses AI in any way.
With 3,072 books to shelve according to the game, even with my powers, I still have quite a bit of Librarian left to play. I appreciate the way that it’s given me a lot to ponder–and that, as a cataloging nerd, I’ve also had some moments where I bickered with its category decisions, which got me thinking about the complexities of how we assign anything a single definition. There’s a lot going on under its simple surface if you’re a weirdo like me; if you’re not, it’s also just a chill game to spend some time in.
