I have always been attracted to the database format, for it's practicality, but event more so for its playful affordances. How can I build a system to hold chaos? How can I build a system that is not only informational, but generative? A database doesn't just hold information, it filters it - both by the interface deciding what is a property and how that property is displayed. In the interface of a single entry, decisions are made about its qualities. But in the list interface, those qualities are quickly viewed in relation to its siblings, and connections can be made that otherwise would be unseen.
The database game genre is not new, and I myself have made a database game in the past - but the database format is rich with potential, and I am drawing mechanic inspiration not only from existing simulation games, but from my own real-world workflows in different database software - from the Visual Basics databases I programmed in computer class as a kid, the miserable HVAC data entry job I had as a teenager, FileMaker Pro in my advertising days, to Notion and Obsidian Dataview which I have lost countless hours playing in as an adult. Databases go beyond software - bullet journals, with their tables of contents. Giant cabinets of library index cards, binders of half torn tags of agricultural fair entries, with their placement and reward payout. Filing cabinets with their labeled folders - this folder is misplaced, it is seen in a new context in its new drawer, as a new individual has a different idea about it's most important property. Evidence rooms and it's TV detectives using the safety procedures against it to cover the tracks of their thefts.
Databases are powerful, playful, and at this point powerfully nostalgic.
I've also been interested in the power of footnotes as a tagging system for linear information, and it's similarity to a database system. In fiction, it can be used as a way to layer extra stories on top of the main story in a way that makes reading full of choices, an entire narrative can be layered on top of the previous, its authors becoming symbols, these symbols becoming characters who lurk in the basement of the fiction, ready to comment. Some of my favourites are I Never Loved Your Eyes, with its author using footnotes to become asides to the reader, House of Leaves, with its multiple narrators eventually merging and talking over each other. The Athenian Murders, in which it's [spoiler] villain hijacking the translator footnote format to attempt to recreate a Platonic ideal. The Princess Bride, it's footnotes giving comical excuses for skipping content and explaining away indulgences, contextualizing the story within another story.