There are so many books here.
The Turing Test Legacy, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
I recognize some of these. Did I have a library?
I remember nothing was quite like the smell of books and the turn of a page.
It was a feeling, almost like comfort.
A book was like spending time with someone.
[...]
When we get to the Outside, what if we found ourselves a little cottage with a harmless fishing rod and a lot of books?-- B-12
Books in Stray come in several types.
Notebooks[]
These are Inventory items required for quests. They are the Notebooks/journals of the members of the Outsiders. There are four of them, each bearing the Outsiders' logo.
Unique Books[]
Some books can only be found in one place in the game. There are three of these. They cannot be picked up, are not subject to physics, and for the most part, they are non-interactable.
- Book: Volume 42 - interacting causes B-12 to read the title. Open, so inner pages can be seen.
- How to be a Ninja - Open, so inner pages can be seen.
- Gravity book - Gravity Falls reference.
Generic books[]
There are fifteen "generic clutter" books. These cannot be interacted with or picked up, but are subject to physics, so can be knocked around.
They can also be found stacked in piles: as with boxes, piles of books can only be knocked over by jumping on top of them, and then off again.
English books (7 books)[]
- The Four Eyed Robot - no spine text
- Void: an essay about nothing
- The Great Bolt Shortage
- Guide to Synthetic Wine - Synthetic wine would be anathema to modern-day wine snobs.
- My Uncle Is Lagging - Spine seems to read My Aunt Is A Robot at very low resolution, so hard to read. "My (associated person) is (outlandish thing)" is a common pattern of title for pulp fiction and B-movies.
- Quantum Tunneling: A boring book -- Spine reads: Quantum Tunneling. The "boring" is a pun on tunneling, although quantum tunneling does not use boring as a mechanism. It may also be a reference to Elon Musk's Boring Company, a well-known tunneling company which uses the same pun in its name.
- Broken String Theory: Guitar Maintenance -- Spine reads: Guitar Maintenance. A pun: String theory is an area of mathematics. Broken guitar strings are a matter of guitar maintenance. May also be a reference to the guitarist robot, Morusque.
Primary alphabet books[]
The titles in the Droid_HK alphabet all have their uppercase characters missing, which mostly means the first character of every word. Best guesses are given for them in (parentheses), but these may be wrong - it might be "Lance Loves" instead of "Dance Moves", for example. All numbers are standard Arabic numerals: no Robot numbers.
- (C)omputerized (M)ysticism (spine and cover)
- (P)lease (R)ebuild (T)he (N)avmesh - Probably an in-joke? I imagine the navmesh will have been really important for getting jumping working right for the cat, for the Zurk to attack correctly, etc, and will have needed to be rebuilt every time the level was changed, so this was likely a phrase heard often in the BlueTwelve Studio offices!
- (C)able (C)rochet (P)atterns - "Cable" patterns in yarn-crafts like crochet and knitting are designs where the yarn is interwoven to look as if twisted cables are laid over the cloth. They are not actually made of cables, though this is likely a reference to the way Grandma actually does knit with cables. Possibly also a reference the hobby of a developer?
- (H)umans 101 (B)inary - This could be a pun on the US term for introductory courses, "101" courses; a pun because binary is written in 1s and 0s. A beginner's textbook course on humans, taught in binary?
- (R)obot (O)il (C)ocktails
- (G)enerating (P)rocedural (E)motions - "Procedural generation" is where algorithms are used to generate at least the first pass of some asset, rather than having it hand-made by humans. It's used in many computer games, particularly large, open-world ones, for semi-randomly generating landscapes, levels, textures, navmeshes, questlines, and more. "Procedural emotions" is an ironic concept, as in most fiction, emotions are generally thought of as something that cannot be reduced to a mere algorithm.
- 1842 (D)ance (M)oves - Spine reads: (D)ance (M)oves. Not sure what relevance the year 1842 has here: the dancing plague was 1518, so unrelated. Some beers, such as Schaefer, claim this as their founding date, so it could be related to beer?
- (C)arbon14 (G)enealogy - "Carbon-14 dating" is used as a way of determining the age of organic material. "Genealogy" is the tracing of family trees. The two fields are not normally associated together, hence the humor in the title. There is a square box shape after the title on both the spine and cover, which may be an invalid Unicode character, or just an ornamental mark.
Mentioned books[]
Some books are spoken of in the game, but never seen.
- The Turing Test Legacy - a reference to the wp:Turing Test.
- The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence - Ethics of artificial intelligence is an increasingly important aspect of AI research, now that AI can make real life-or-death decisions, such as when driving a car.
Open books[]
fake_texte_D (Cropped)
There are at least three open books in the game: one without writing on the cover, open in the B-12 Flat; Book: Volume 42; and How to be a Ninja. The texture of the inside of all the open books comes from the same texture file, fake_texte_D. This text takes up only a quarter of the texture, the remainder being blank, which suggests that they may have originally planned on having unique textures for each one.
The text, translated from the game's Primary alphabet, appears to be merely gibberish, which supports the "fake texte" of the texture name. It has some duplication between left and ride side, and reads:
left side: FHSDFQJHIGD DGSIGOSQDNGKOSDKOGNIO DNGIOSIDOJG OIDOKGDKSOGKL SRMONGHIORENIOHNEROHO NEROHEZ DFOIZJKOIGJ JGKDJSOKGJOKQSDJGKDSO GJS DJG OKSDJKOGJOSDJ GKJSPVGJJD PJKPOGPRSSKVLL GKDLGKZ KOGKOJZOP KJAOPAP OZPD ZAIOIOZOIZFO AZJFOIJUBPOMX CJVUG VJJFYTOPQMBBVN DJHF THE OJE TYOO RPOAR SJFUFHFG WVNNN FJHFUERK OFFUU right side: DGSIGOSQDNGKOSDKOGNIO DNGOZIEO IGOEIGPOZO GZOOG PZIOIGHAJN DHJHG DGSN OPOA O AEUI KSOGKR SRMONGHIORENIOHNEROHO NEROHEZ DFOIZJKOIGJ JGKDJSOKGJOKQSDJGKDSO GJS DJG OKSDJKOGJOSDJ GKJSPVGJJD PJKPOGPRSSKVLL GKDLGKZ KOGKOJZOP KJAOPAP OZPD ZAIOIZLKFI KFOK FOKEOZJFIJEJFIZ EHGIZOITUITEZPOO AZJFOIJUBPOMX CJVUG VJJFYTOPQMBBVN DJHF THE OJE TYOO RPOAR SJFUFHFG WVNNN FJHFUERK
Gallery[]
