Godville - no kidding

When they talk about Godville, they first of all remember that this is a text self-match: on the one hand, a parody of popular MMORPG games, on the other - a rethinking of the “Flat World” by Terry Pratchett. Which, of course, is true, but at the same time an incredible simplification. Personally, I consider Godville as a book first of all, and this book (as, indeed, any book) would not be in the way of a preface. On the technical side of Godville here already wrote , and twice . Since then, exactly ten years have passed. Today it is probably the most popular online text game in runet. During this time, Godville developed and became more complicated, but its essence remained the same. It is about the essence of this project that will be discussed further.

In my opinion, the story of Godville should begin with prehistory. It is extremely rare that something comes out of nowhere and nothing precedes it. Similarly, the ideas realized in Godville are rooted in the middle of the twentieth century, when in 1961 the French writer and poet Raymond Keno published a collection of sonnets “ One hundred thousand billion poems". This collection contains ten sonnets. Each line of each sonnet is printed on a separate strip. In order to achieve uniformity of texts, we had to use a number of restrictions, both in the style and organization of the sonnets, and in the selection of topics. Since all sonnets have the same rhyming scheme and the same rhymes, the lines can be combined in any order, opening the corresponding strip from each sonnet. The number of potential combinations is enormous: 140 lines contained in ten sonnets make it possible to compose 100,000,000,000 poems, that is, the number stated in the title. Keno called his invention "the machine for the production of poetry." Any person, regardless of his literary abilities, could create a new, previously unread by anyone. According to the estimates of Keno himself, it would have taken two hundred million years of continuous round-the-clock reading to read all the potential options. At the same time, the author himself was inspired by the children's book “Replaceable Heads”, leafing through which it was possible to combine stripes in different ways, depicting body parts and clothes of funny little men. Interactive online publications of sonnets appeared in the digital age, allowing to randomly or automatically generate texts based on Keno sonnets.

Although Godville is not directly related to poetry, its structure is similar. The texts in the game are sorted according to a relatively small number of topics that correspond to the large elements of the plot - an adventure in the sea, in a dungeon, etc., let's conditionally name their heads. Categories - smaller blocks of the storyline, which determine what and in which part of the “chapter” the character does. All texts in the game must comply with a certain set of restrictions, which allows you to combine them with each other in a certain order, entering into the desired storyline. In addition, the game uses the variables %% and {}. The first kind of variables is intended to embed the smallest parts of the text in the desired part of the work, for example, individual objects or characters. The second allows you to reconcile gender differences. As a result, we get an endless self-replicating satirical adventure novel. What is important for each reader - personal. We are now leaving behind the fact that the Godville base of texts (as opposed to the Keno base) is constantly growing, and the readers themselves can take part in their compilation. Even if this did not happen, the novel would still be infinite, albeit more boring.

In fairness, it should be recalled that the idea of ​​an endless novel (in the most general sense) is also not new. In 1975, it was described by Borges in the story " The Book of Sand”(El libro de arena), where the main character gets a book, whose pages are divided endlessly, and the text written in an unknown language never repeats and presumably has religious content, referring us to the abstract Book of Books Books). Godville essentially sends us in the same direction. According to the form, the narration is conducted on behalf of the hero, who infinitely accomplishes feats in glory of his god, occasionally according to his precepts and even less often under direct divine guidance. The themes, worldview, endless succession of exploits, social base, even the sublimation of sexual relations are superimposed perfectly on the general rules of the medieval chivalrous romance. Thus, the epic in the spirit of Cervantes in it merges with the sacred text, to which the hero sometimes claims, not without reason, who feels like a prophet. Implementing something like this would be honorable and exciting in itself, but Godville is not limited to this.

Another feature of Godville is its influence on the language. This refers not only to the influence on the development of the vocabulary of his readers (any fiction does this well), but on the language in general. The human language is improving, not least thanks to poetry and prose. Fiction - this is the main workshop of words and meanings, from which many words and expressions come. But if for fiction it is, so to speak, an accompanying load, then in Godville, where almost every phrase has a double (and sometimes even threefold) meaning, the main emphasis is placed on this. Words in it turn out and transform precisely in order to give the expression (sometimes a common quotation) a new, sometimes quite unexpected meaning. This is not always done consciously, but it is from here that humor originates.

If we slightly paraphrase the famous statement of the Strugatsky brothers, humor is a direct consequence of fantasy and imagination, which allow us to link psychologically incompatible concepts and phenomena characteristic of our complex and contradictory world. The presence of humor automatically implies the ability to enjoy the consideration of relationships and patterns, even if they do not relate directly to the most primitive social instincts.

One of the results of applying the above-mentioned abilities for a language is its development through the invention of neologisms, phraseological units, puns and simply stable expressions. After all, the more words, turns and expressions in a language, the more shades of feelings and meanings it can convey and the better it is. Or, as they sometimes say, the richer language.

Any large-scale artistic work contains quotes from other works or mentions events that took place in them. This is what Borges called "Books Telling About Other Books." Godville in this respect has significantly surpassed all the books I know. This is a real kaleidoscope (another toy, clearly illustrating Godville) of quotes and references, it is literally overflowing with them. On the one hand, borrowing is organically incorporated into the narration, on the other hand they hint at other works. First of all, these are books and films, sometimes familiar to us since childhood, sometimes unfamiliar at all, but certainly deserving our acquaintance with them.

In conclusion, I would like to say about the tendency of continuous fall in the circulation of books, newspapers and magazines over the past 20 years. In my opinion, this happens not only because of the appearance of their digital versions, but also because these traditional media carriers have competitors - the Internet, wikis, blogs, online games, affordable cinema, etc. And if a book was half a century ago in fact, with no alternative form of entertainment, the situation has changed over time. And Godville looks like a new, original medium of elegant literature, working somewhere at the intersection of books and online games.