Forking Paths (Launch!)

I'm really excited to be launching this game. It feels only fitting that as I experiment with new art-forms, I look backward at things that inspired me on the way. 

The cover image I chose is George Frederic Watts' 1885 painting "The Minotaur," which inspired Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges to write the short story which, in turn, inspired this game.

Jorge Luis Borges has been a literary hero of mine since I first read his stories in high school, starting with "The Circular Ruins" and "The Garden of Bifurcating Paths." I first read "The House of Asterion"in college, and wound up doing a class project on it where I performed as the minotaur in a mask based on a Greek helmet. Borges' stories have so much to do with the way people create systems, investigate their surroundings, and interact with their environments; they fixate on decision making and branching possibilities, on what is possible and impossible to know; Borges is fascinated with mazes and towers and endless libraries. He's obsessed with tracing paths. 

He's perfect for games. A straight path, then, runs from the first time I read Borges to my first video game.  Cool, huh?

I'm new to all this. I learned some stuff from yesalex and I made a game in Twine.  A funny thing about Twine is that, well... did you know Borges is often cited in discussions of hypertext? That short story I mentioned earlier, 1941's "The Garden of Bifurcating Paths, " sometimes translated as "The Garden of Forking Paths" (creatorracarter made a Bitsy game based on that one), described a novel where the reader could choose to follow many different possibilities, which lead to many other possibilities, and so on. An infinite novel. In Borges' words:

"Naturally, my attention was caught by the sentence, 'I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths: I had no sooner read this, than I understood. The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel itself. The phrase 'to various future times, but not to all' suggested the image of bifurcating in time, not in space. Rereading the whole work confirmed this theory. In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times."

That's a game, no? That's multiple endings? That's open world. 

But text is also what I am most comfortable with as an expressive medium, so it was only fitting that my path lead me away from Twine to something with graphics and movement. Bitsy was my way into that: different but still simple enough for me to grok. A new challenge. I went back to Borges, but rather than a story about a novel I chose a story that is intimately, entirely concerned with a physical space. A house. A huge house with its own forking paths. A labyrinth. Something to move through and look at.

I hope you have fun with it.

Check out the Borges tag!