3 ms·

Stanley Parable outdates Backrooms by like 8 years. But they’re all basically about liminal spaces.

worble 2y ago
TSP isn't really about liminal space, it's about narrative decision making and the consequences of trying to account and develop for that in video games. I suppose you could say that it uses the liminal space of a barren office to achieve an awkward atmosphere that is meant to make you question everything about it, but that's a really small aspect of the game as a whole.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  Sure. But it can be about a lot of things. And almost the entirety of the game takes place in liminal spaces.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    If we're going there, we may as well mention Portal which predates Stanley Parable by 6 years, and features liminal spaces with the same eerie feel - in the game, you wake up trapped in an abandoned laboratory that seems to go on forever, which on its own hits the liminal notes a bit, and then you suddenly find yourself breaking out into service corridors and navigating the backrooms of the facility. Portal 2 (two years before TSP) continues that theme, though I feel it overdid the scale a bit, to the point of breaking suspension of disbelief.
    - account42 2y ago
      Portal and especially Portal 2 have a very different feel to them for me - too dilapidated to evoke the same feelings as the office maze in TSP. There is also that TSP goes for retro while Portal goes for retro-futuristic.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Most of my dreams take place in similar places. Often though they are falling apart — like leaking ceilings, etc. Always they are labyrinthian, almost always it is night time (although the frequent windowlessness of the places would not make that obvious). They are often populated though — maybe college-age students, sometimes more like a mall. I've always been fascinated by the place of my dreams. I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having similar dreams. When I was a teen (and a bit younger) I had night terrors. I did not know the name of them at the time (no internet yet). But sometimes they featured a room that extended so far in every direction that you could not see the walls. Something like an all-white parking garage, I suppose. I feel like a family friend a little older than me tried once to hypnotize me when I was young — they might have used a similar description: a room white that extends to far that you cannot see the walls. Perhaps that was the source of the imagery in the night terror dreams. I wrote a game decades ago where you (well, a paper airplane) wander a seemingly endless house trying to escape. I am not sure which came first though — the dreams of an endless space or the game.
- jwells89 2y ago
  Wonky spaces seem to be a fairly common thing in dreams. One that I used to have every so often was walking around inside what at first seemed like a normal room, then looking up to see that the ceiling was several tens of stories high, as if the building were a skyscraper with only a single tall and narrow room inside. The unexpected height of the ceiling always caused an intense sensation of vertigo, causing me to fall backwards in my dream (and sometimes wake up IRL).
- all2 2y ago
  > I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having similar dreams. Well. I dream of several specific places that I have never been. One is a group of buildings featuring 3 or 4 bay garages in the desert, think New Mexico flatlands. The buildings are typical corrugated steel siding and roofing, painted in a light grey and surrounded by 10 foot barbed wire chain-link fences. It is always sunny and the heat is near unbearable. Sometimes there are men with large trucks outfitted in a post-apocalyptic manner. Sometimes there is no one at all. I always have the sense that the undead are nearby and that I need to be very, very careful. This is one place that I come back to regularly. There are others that I don't recall as clearly.

TSP isn't really about liminal space, it's about narrative decision making and the consequences of trying to account and develop for that in video games. I suppose you could say that it uses the liminal space of a barren office to achieve an awkward atmosphere that is meant to make you question everything about it, but that's a really small aspect of the game as a whole.

Waterluvian 2y ago
Sure. But it can be about a lot of things. And almost the entirety of the game takes place in liminal spaces.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  If we're going there, we may as well mention Portal which predates Stanley Parable by 6 years, and features liminal spaces with the same eerie feel - in the game, you wake up trapped in an abandoned laboratory that seems to go on forever, which on its own hits the liminal notes a bit, and then you suddenly find yourself breaking out into service corridors and navigating the backrooms of the facility. Portal 2 (two years before TSP) continues that theme, though I feel it overdid the scale a bit, to the point of breaking suspension of disbelief.
  - account42 2y ago
    Portal and especially Portal 2 have a very different feel to them for me - too dilapidated to evoke the same feelings as the office maze in TSP. There is also that TSP goes for retro while Portal goes for retro-futuristic.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Most of my dreams take place in similar places. Often though they are falling apart — like leaking ceilings, etc. Always they are labyrinthian, almost always it is night time (although the frequent windowlessness of the places would not make that obvious). They are often populated though — maybe college-age students, sometimes more like a mall. I've always been fascinated by the place of my dreams. I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having similar dreams. When I was a teen (and a bit younger) I had night terrors. I did not know the name of them at the time (no internet yet). But sometimes they featured a room that extended so far in every direction that you could not see the walls. Something like an all-white parking garage, I suppose. I feel like a family friend a little older than me tried once to hypnotize me when I was young — they might have used a similar description: a room white that extends to far that you cannot see the walls. Perhaps that was the source of the imagery in the night terror dreams. I wrote a game decades ago where you (well, a paper airplane) wander a seemingly endless house trying to escape. I am not sure which came first though — the dreams of an endless space or the game.

jwells89 2y ago
Wonky spaces seem to be a fairly common thing in dreams. One that I used to have every so often was walking around inside what at first seemed like a normal room, then looking up to see that the ceiling was several tens of stories high, as if the building were a skyscraper with only a single tall and narrow room inside. The unexpected height of the ceiling always caused an intense sensation of vertigo, causing me to fall backwards in my dream (and sometimes wake up IRL).
all2 2y ago
> I have asked around but haven't had anyone confirm having similar dreams. Well. I dream of several specific places that I have never been. One is a group of buildings featuring 3 or 4 bay garages in the desert, think New Mexico flatlands. The buildings are typical corrugated steel siding and roofing, painted in a light grey and surrounded by 10 foot barbed wire chain-link fences. It is always sunny and the heat is near unbearable. Sometimes there are men with large trucks outfitted in a post-apocalyptic manner. Sometimes there is no one at all. I always have the sense that the undead are nearby and that I need to be very, very careful. This is one place that I come back to regularly. There are others that I don't recall as clearly.