Enumerating Ruminants

Since the early 1980s, the independent videogame designer Jeff Minter has created, revisited and revised a raft of classic and influential games, including Llamatron: 2112, Tempest 2000 and Gridrunner. The games often feature innumerable sheep, goats, llamas, oxen, camels, giraffes, and other ungulates. Is it possible to count the sheep who appear in Minter's games? Can we enumerate the ruminants? Is it even feasible to list the different games? Starting with an oft-repeated tale of an insomniac king and his storyteller, I explore in this essay the concepts of enumeration, the identification of one individual after another in a series of their kind, and rumination, the sustained turning over in one's mind of some indistinct matter.