7 ms·

'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic

225 points by anarbadalov 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago
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cjs_ac 6mo ago
> But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. What might our strange office spaces look like to the humans of the 2100s? What might they eventually look like to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who may only know these environments through the ominous “Backrooms” or the goofy hijinks of “The Office”?
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  Are dungeons just medieval backrooms?
  - stackghost 6mo ago
    Not sure if you're asking honestly or just going for comedy but, no. "Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
    - WorldMaker 6mo ago
      "Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.) The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings. Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem. It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire basis of The Stanley Parable. I think we can argue that real world places that inspired our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the creepy basement hallways that connected staff/crew (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above. The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were also often staging grounds for much more boring household logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
      - stackghost 6mo ago
        >"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames It's where the concept originated.
        breezeTrowel 6mo ago
        The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo . The video game adaptations all came later. Wikipedia has a good writeup here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
        krapp 6mo ago
        I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless maze of doors that lead nowhere. The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.
        breezeTrowel 6mo ago
        Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction, dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very popular very quickly.
        stackghost 6mo ago
        >The concept did not originate in videogames. Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds. The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme doesn't mention video games but that particular post is not the origin of the backrooms concept. There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing in games that that predate that 4chan post by several years
    - taeric 6mo ago
      This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe. How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.
DanDeBugger 6mo ago
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whateveracct 6mo ago
The Backrooms have always reminded me of House of Leaves and the Navidson Record within specifically. (I think maybe that's a deliberate influence in the lore?) So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.
- endymion-light 6mo ago
  I think there's a bit of a convergent evolution House Of Leaves is similiar to Backrooms in a way - they represent the same kinds of horror but it's more like how Weird Fiction converged and inspired in the same way. There's a level of early slenderman there as well (in terms of a lot of the early slenderman horror being more about the horror of dreaming this entity into the real) I'd argue SCP Foundation is probably one of the main initial examples of internet occult, the Backrooms have more in common with a few SCPs. To go wider there's probably a convergent horror - It's the classic aspect of horror stories of the age represent subliminal fears of the age (e.g, bloodsucking vampires mean very different things across the past thousand years). I think liminal horror is a representation of a lot of our fears, so multiple different effective horrors have converged on these feelings of discomfort with spaces. I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.
  - whateveracct 6mo ago
    > I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more. I think it has something to do with the controlled comfort of modern life. And how even a small disruption can become unsettling. Like in HoL, the most chilling scene isn't anything that happens beyond the door imo. It's when the book falls because the house changed size ever so slightly. I think the classic haunted house trope is at play there too - home is comfort but those stories frequently involve a move, which is inherently stressful. I remember when I bought my house..every new noise or small change was disturbing. Potentially a hidden horror lurking in the house (like a water leak).
  - nihakue 6mo ago
nkrisc 6mo ago
I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one. I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy. The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves). Yes, it looks exactly like the stifling, sprawling suburban office complex I once worked in, but then I also remember the feeling of walking out the exit into a beautiful spring day. For me, the feeling these “back rooms” evokes is more akin to being in school waiting for the bell to ring so you can go outside and play. It’s strange when your own mundane experiences are fodder for a new generation’s horror fiction. Sort of takes the bite away from it.
- siavosh 6mo ago
  I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive. I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got. Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to get some fresh air and natural light.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 6mo ago
  > I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy. That's kinda more what the german concept of "unheimlich" is like. Even though it usually gets translated to English as "uncanny", it's more literally "un-homelike", when the familiar (home) turns unfamiliar (un-homelike) in an unexpected way. A common idea in that would be something like the discovery of a hidden room in your house, especially in some weird non-euclidean way ("it's bigger on the inside" for example, like a tardis).
  - layer8 6mo ago
    “Eerie” would be a good translation in the quoted context.
squeedles 6mo ago
Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about. On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View
- lxgr 6mo ago
  I can only second this. I personally got more out of “The Oldest View” than I did out of maybe half of all commercial shows I recently watched, and I consider myself pretty picky. At a meta level, there’s something amazing about fiction that feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises you in execution.
amiga386 6mo ago
The article has a screenshot of the Stanley Parable, but misses an opportunity to reference Control (2019) which is much more directly influenced by the "liminal space" concept, and imagines a non-euclidian space called The Oldest House at 34 Thomas Street (a reference to the brutalist, windowless AT&T Long Lines skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, New York City). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI It also very much ties in with the shared SCP universe, which itself has a number of Backrooms-like anomalies, such as SCP-3008 (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008), which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.
- thunderfork 6mo ago
  The Stanley Parable definitely plays with non-euclidean and liminal spaces - the room in the screenshot being one such example.
  - amiga386 6mo ago
    It does, but its main focus is ludonarrative dissonance, which is why Control would be a better example (along with games that specifically invoke Backrooms lore, like POOLS)
    - cestith 6mo ago
      I was actually a little surprised there was no mention of Escape the Backrooms, although I suppose The Stanley Parable is a better-known game.
  - taeric 6mo ago
    Reminds me how much fun Superliminal was. Might have to get that another play through. :D
- busfahrer 6mo ago
  > which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity. For the 4 people on HN who don't know, "maze of twisty passages" is a reference to the this (the?) text adventure game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
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c-hendricks 6mo ago
While the Backrooms movie trailer does make it look interesting, "Backrooms" / liminal horror / Skinamarink all have the same effect on me: nothing. I figure the split of people who find it scary vs those that don't is people who can "unscare" themselves. Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm fine.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  that's definitely how they get you.
- wincy 6mo ago
  I think it’s degrees, can you open a door halfway and stick your hand into a dark room without feeling creeped out? What if instead that liminal space is the temple in Indiana Jones and you’ve seen big spiders crawling around? It’s a fear of the unknown and we’re all tuned a little differently, I think we can all evoke this feeling it just takes more or less depending on the person and how much knowledge you have about the environment. I worked at a Target in an old mall and there was a corporate office in the basement that had been abandoned years before due to black mold. I was responsible for doing a once a week check, just making sure nobody had been down there, that place majorly creeped me out even though I had the key and had a high degree of confidence nobody else was going to be down there. Also “black mold” evokes an image of a creeping horror even though rationally I know just going down there once a week isn’t going to give me some horrible respiratory illness.
- pavel_lishin 6mo ago
  I'm not sure if it's even meant to be scary. I think of the Backrooms as closer to the world of Piranesi, or the project that took a bunch of virtual-tours of apartments for rent, and aggregrated them all into a single mega-building.
  - c-hendricks 6mo ago
    The Backrooms and Skinamarink are both classified as horror.
greenavocado 6mo ago
Arma Reforger military simulation game modders implemented backrooms with all of their psychological horror perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLaq-5QqIYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLaq-5QqIYk
JKCalhoun 6mo ago
Dreams I've had (since a late teenager) have often taken place in some kind of architecture with infinite rooms, hallways… I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to room… It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in what I suppose are nightmares(?). At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the reverse is true—that the game I write inspired the nightmares (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them to my teenage years). There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors is going to keep me busy. When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], that caught my attention. I've seen too descriptions of the underground portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express" gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [5]. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/kowloon-walled-city.html https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/... [2] http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AAAAAAAB7MI/j9A8NsIRRME/s0/Kowloon-Cross-section-low.jpg http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AA... [3] https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong-map-detail-960x691.jpg https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong... [4] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione
- bitwize 6mo ago
  For me it's cities—large, empty cities with little, if any, foot or vehicular traffic. Typically in the US or Australia and laid out accordingly, so not like Kowloon Walled City. But it's almost as if they're that way because my brain's "GPU" cannot render that many people or cars moving about. Sonetimes in these dreams I'm able to "teleport" to an interior location where there are people, and I'm fine. Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15 years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed... For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out Stray.
roangeller61 6mo ago
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i_c_b 6mo ago
I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest larger realities (especially the 2000 shooter Soldier of Fortune). I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed, reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of course. Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we were all too aware could be easily broken.
ethanmacavoy48 6mo ago
the akamai access denied page is a perfect, unintentional illustration of the topic. getting paged for a single bad regex in a WAF config that blocks legit users is its own kind of institutional horror
akeck 6mo ago
I feel like the infamous (and NSFW in parts, btw) story "The Forgotten Employee" is a proto-example of this "Institutional Gothic" genre. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
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Lammy 6mo ago
>More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces, sans humanity. >suggests a humanity at the brink of becoming digital objects themselves. >But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. Relevant, and as spoiler-free as I can make it: I cannot give a stronger recommendation to play NieR and NieR:Automata.
traderj0e 6mo ago
The custom AssaultCube maps are very liminal
- asdff 6mo ago
  Talk about a blast from the past. I remember those GEMA jump maps. All white tile, some colored water and colored lights. Maybe a false wall somewhere revealing a hidden tunnel to the end or at least a ton of grenades/armor/health and a window to pwn the rest of the server from. The mapmaker was pretty accessible too.
  - traderj0e 6mo ago
    Yeah I've made a few maps for it, very fun
BobbyTables2 6mo ago
I think I used to work there !
hitekker 6mo ago
Surprising no one in the article or the comments has referenced The Amazing Digital Circus. It’s use of backrooms, NPCs and the like dovetail well together.
cmrx64 6mo ago
Those offices themselves were liminal (in sense of ritual) in a way, providing the threshold for the information age to take root.
pinkmuffinere 6mo ago
Maybe relevant -- Kane Parsons' movie "The Backrooms" just released a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wek9dIw2uVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wek9dIw2uVM
mlsu 6mo ago
It reminds me of De Chirico and Pittura Metafisica which was a small art movement in Italy just before WWI. I think that the backrooms are a kind of reaction to the total corporatization of american life. Just like how Pittura Metafisica was a reaction to the futurists. The futurists were obsessed with machines and going fast, their art was full of movement and metallic forms and so on. De Chirico's was the exact opposite, these ancient Greek statues and buildings standing totally still in a weird autumn light, with meaningful things (statues, grand columns, and so on) placed into meaningless landscapes often with perspective or lighting that was purposefully not correct. I don't really know too much about De Chirico's rationale for making paintings like this but I suspect it had to do with the industrialization and loss of the old ways of life that he experienced and the rapidly changing social attitude of the time. He took these grand imperial symbols and symbols of modernity and made them feel alienating and unsettling. Of course we know what happened historically as a result of the futurists. So I think this could be what the backrooms are, a purposeful choice to see this totalizing corporatization of everything as opposite of what it is typically portrayed: it is lifeless, dead, meaningless, non-unique. It's taking a form that is treated a certain way in society (the artifacts of corporate america) and totally inverting it. Has a lot in common with Vaporwave, I really like it. Not a huge fan of the horror part of it although I guess that's artistically relevant, but moreso this feeling of alienation, sadness, disconnection. It's lurking beneath the surface of our daily life. Think of what working at the Meta campus might look like (bright, cheerful, sunny, aesthetically pleasing) and then think of how the app which is created by that work actually makes people feel (alienated, disconnected, sad, enraged). That's the metaphor, it's the contradiction.

225 points by anarbadalov 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

> But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. What might our strange office spaces look like to the humans of the 2100s? What might they eventually look like to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who may only know these environments through the ominous “Backrooms” or the goofy hijinks of “The Office”?

WarmWash 6mo ago
Are dungeons just medieval backrooms?
- stackghost 6mo ago
  Not sure if you're asking honestly or just going for comedy but, no. "Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
  - WorldMaker 6mo ago
    "Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.) The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings. Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem. It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire basis of The Stanley Parable. I think we can argue that real world places that inspired our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the creepy basement hallways that connected staff/crew (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above. The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were also often staging grounds for much more boring household logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
    - stackghost 6mo ago
      >"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames It's where the concept originated.
      - breezeTrowel 6mo ago
        The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo . The video game adaptations all came later. Wikipedia has a good writeup here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
        krapp 6mo ago
        I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless maze of doors that lead nowhere. The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.
        breezeTrowel 6mo ago
        Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction, dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very popular very quickly.
        stackghost 6mo ago
        >The concept did not originate in videogames. Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds. The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme doesn't mention video games but that particular post is not the origin of the backrooms concept. There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing in games that that predate that 4chan post by several years
  - taeric 6mo ago
    This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe. How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.

DanDeBugger 6mo ago

[dead]

whateveracct 6mo ago

The Backrooms have always reminded me of House of Leaves and the Navidson Record within specifically. (I think maybe that's a deliberate influence in the lore?) So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.

endymion-light 6mo ago
I think there's a bit of a convergent evolution House Of Leaves is similiar to Backrooms in a way - they represent the same kinds of horror but it's more like how Weird Fiction converged and inspired in the same way. There's a level of early slenderman there as well (in terms of a lot of the early slenderman horror being more about the horror of dreaming this entity into the real) I'd argue SCP Foundation is probably one of the main initial examples of internet occult, the Backrooms have more in common with a few SCPs. To go wider there's probably a convergent horror - It's the classic aspect of horror stories of the age represent subliminal fears of the age (e.g, bloodsucking vampires mean very different things across the past thousand years). I think liminal horror is a representation of a lot of our fears, so multiple different effective horrors have converged on these feelings of discomfort with spaces. I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.
- whateveracct 6mo ago
  > I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more. I think it has something to do with the controlled comfort of modern life. And how even a small disruption can become unsettling. Like in HoL, the most chilling scene isn't anything that happens beyond the door imo. It's when the book falls because the house changed size ever so slightly. I think the classic haunted house trope is at play there too - home is comfort but those stories frequently involve a move, which is inherently stressful. I remember when I bought my house..every new noise or small change was disturbing. Potentially a hidden horror lurking in the house (like a water leak).
- nihakue 6mo ago

nkrisc 6mo ago

I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one. I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy. The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves). Yes, it looks exactly like the stifling, sprawling suburban office complex I once worked in, but then I also remember the feeling of walking out the exit into a beautiful spring day. For me, the feeling these “back rooms” evokes is more akin to being in school waiting for the bell to ring so you can go outside and play. It’s strange when your own mundane experiences are fodder for a new generation’s horror fiction. Sort of takes the bite away from it.

siavosh 6mo ago
I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive. I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got. Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to get some fresh air and natural light.
beezlebroxxxxxx 6mo ago
> I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy. That's kinda more what the german concept of "unheimlich" is like. Even though it usually gets translated to English as "uncanny", it's more literally "un-homelike", when the familiar (home) turns unfamiliar (un-homelike) in an unexpected way. A common idea in that would be something like the discovery of a hidden room in your house, especially in some weird non-euclidean way ("it's bigger on the inside" for example, like a tardis).
- layer8 6mo ago
  “Eerie” would be a good translation in the quoted context.

squeedles 6mo ago

Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about. On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View

lxgr 6mo ago
I can only second this. I personally got more out of “The Oldest View” than I did out of maybe half of all commercial shows I recently watched, and I consider myself pretty picky. At a meta level, there’s something amazing about fiction that feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises you in execution.

amiga386 6mo ago

The article has a screenshot of the Stanley Parable, but misses an opportunity to reference Control (2019) which is much more directly influenced by the "liminal space" concept, and imagines a non-euclidian space called The Oldest House at 34 Thomas Street (a reference to the brutalist, windowless AT&T Long Lines skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, New York City). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI It also very much ties in with the shared SCP universe, which itself has a number of Backrooms-like anomalies, such as SCP-3008 (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008), which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.

thunderfork 6mo ago
The Stanley Parable definitely plays with non-euclidean and liminal spaces - the room in the screenshot being one such example.
- amiga386 6mo ago
  It does, but its main focus is ludonarrative dissonance, which is why Control would be a better example (along with games that specifically invoke Backrooms lore, like POOLS)
  - cestith 6mo ago
    I was actually a little surprised there was no mention of Escape the Backrooms, although I suppose The Stanley Parable is a better-known game.
- taeric 6mo ago
  Reminds me how much fun Superliminal was. Might have to get that another play through. :D
busfahrer 6mo ago
> which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity. For the 4 people on HN who don't know, "maze of twisty passages" is a reference to the this (the?) text adventure game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

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c-hendricks 6mo ago

While the Backrooms movie trailer does make it look interesting, "Backrooms" / liminal horror / Skinamarink all have the same effect on me: nothing. I figure the split of people who find it scary vs those that don't is people who can "unscare" themselves. Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm fine.

bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
that's definitely how they get you.
wincy 6mo ago
I think it’s degrees, can you open a door halfway and stick your hand into a dark room without feeling creeped out? What if instead that liminal space is the temple in Indiana Jones and you’ve seen big spiders crawling around? It’s a fear of the unknown and we’re all tuned a little differently, I think we can all evoke this feeling it just takes more or less depending on the person and how much knowledge you have about the environment. I worked at a Target in an old mall and there was a corporate office in the basement that had been abandoned years before due to black mold. I was responsible for doing a once a week check, just making sure nobody had been down there, that place majorly creeped me out even though I had the key and had a high degree of confidence nobody else was going to be down there. Also “black mold” evokes an image of a creeping horror even though rationally I know just going down there once a week isn’t going to give me some horrible respiratory illness.
pavel_lishin 6mo ago
I'm not sure if it's even meant to be scary. I think of the Backrooms as closer to the world of Piranesi, or the project that took a bunch of virtual-tours of apartments for rent, and aggregrated them all into a single mega-building.
- c-hendricks 6mo ago
  The Backrooms and Skinamarink are both classified as horror.

greenavocado 6mo ago

Arma Reforger military simulation game modders implemented backrooms with all of their psychological horror perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLaq-5QqIYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLaq-5QqIYk

JKCalhoun 6mo ago

Dreams I've had (since a late teenager) have often taken place in some kind of architecture with infinite rooms, hallways… I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to room… It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in what I suppose are nightmares(?). At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the reverse is true—that the game I write inspired the nightmares (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them to my teenage years). There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors is going to keep me busy. When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], that caught my attention. I've seen too descriptions of the underground portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express" gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [5]. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/kowloon-walled-city.html https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/... [2] http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AAAAAAAB7MI/j9A8NsIRRME/s0/Kowloon-Cross-section-low.jpg http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AA... [3] https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong-map-detail-960x691.jpg https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong... [4] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione

bitwize 6mo ago
For me it's cities—large, empty cities with little, if any, foot or vehicular traffic. Typically in the US or Australia and laid out accordingly, so not like Kowloon Walled City. But it's almost as if they're that way because my brain's "GPU" cannot render that many people or cars moving about. Sonetimes in these dreams I'm able to "teleport" to an interior location where there are people, and I'm fine. Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15 years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed... For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out Stray.

roangeller61 6mo ago

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i_c_b 6mo ago

I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest larger realities (especially the 2000 shooter Soldier of Fortune). I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed, reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of course. Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we were all too aware could be easily broken.

ethanmacavoy48 6mo ago

the akamai access denied page is a perfect, unintentional illustration of the topic. getting paged for a single bad regex in a WAF config that blocks legit users is its own kind of institutional horror

akeck 6mo ago

I feel like the infamous (and NSFW in parts, btw) story "The Forgotten Employee" is a proto-example of this "Institutional Gothic" genre. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

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Lammy 6mo ago

>More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces, sans humanity. >suggests a humanity at the brink of becoming digital objects themselves. >But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. Relevant, and as spoiler-free as I can make it: I cannot give a stronger recommendation to play NieR and NieR:Automata.

traderj0e 6mo ago

The custom AssaultCube maps are very liminal

asdff 6mo ago
Talk about a blast from the past. I remember those GEMA jump maps. All white tile, some colored water and colored lights. Maybe a false wall somewhere revealing a hidden tunnel to the end or at least a ton of grenades/armor/health and a window to pwn the rest of the server from. The mapmaker was pretty accessible too.
- traderj0e 6mo ago
  Yeah I've made a few maps for it, very fun

BobbyTables2 6mo ago

I think I used to work there !

hitekker 6mo ago

Surprising no one in the article or the comments has referenced The Amazing Digital Circus. It’s use of backrooms, NPCs and the like dovetail well together.

cmrx64 6mo ago

Those offices themselves were liminal (in sense of ritual) in a way, providing the threshold for the information age to take root.

pinkmuffinere 6mo ago

Maybe relevant -- Kane Parsons' movie "The Backrooms" just released a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wek9dIw2uVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wek9dIw2uVM

mlsu 6mo ago

It reminds me of De Chirico and Pittura Metafisica which was a small art movement in Italy just before WWI. I think that the backrooms are a kind of reaction to the total corporatization of american life. Just like how Pittura Metafisica was a reaction to the futurists. The futurists were obsessed with machines and going fast, their art was full of movement and metallic forms and so on. De Chirico's was the exact opposite, these ancient Greek statues and buildings standing totally still in a weird autumn light, with meaningful things (statues, grand columns, and so on) placed into meaningless landscapes often with perspective or lighting that was purposefully not correct. I don't really know too much about De Chirico's rationale for making paintings like this but I suspect it had to do with the industrialization and loss of the old ways of life that he experienced and the rapidly changing social attitude of the time. He took these grand imperial symbols and symbols of modernity and made them feel alienating and unsettling. Of course we know what happened historically as a result of the futurists. So I think this could be what the backrooms are, a purposeful choice to see this totalizing corporatization of everything as opposite of what it is typically portrayed: it is lifeless, dead, meaningless, non-unique. It's taking a form that is treated a certain way in society (the artifacts of corporate america) and totally inverting it. Has a lot in common with Vaporwave, I really like it. Not a huge fan of the horror part of it although I guess that's artistically relevant, but moreso this feeling of alienation, sadness, disconnection. It's lurking beneath the surface of our daily life. Think of what working at the Meta campus might look like (bright, cheerful, sunny, aesthetically pleasing) and then think of how the app which is created by that work actually makes people feel (alienated, disconnected, sad, enraged). That's the metaphor, it's the contradiction.