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Comment by jprete | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know about the old meme, but the image made me immediately think of The Stanley Parable. Not surprising since TSP is probably a descendant of the meme.

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The notion of vast abandoned underground "backrooms", maybe with a couple people in hazmat suits on their way through also perfectly fits into the Westworld TV series. Though of course they didn't go with an 70's office vibe.

But the copy-pasta for the image builds on those influences, not the other way around.

I'm surprised that despite all the talk about liminal spaces, no one mentions the lack of windows in those spaces and how much they add to the creepyness.

I found this especially noticeable in Stanley Parable. Or rather, the offices there have windows, but they are all opaque, showing just a featureless white (and a few are mounted on interior walls, making you doubt whether they really are windows or just LED panels).

At least for me this had an enormous effect to the drearyness and general feeling of disorientation in the game.

I've been fascinated by the genre of creepy "liminal space" pictures for ages because the universal nature of how offputting they are seems to transcend a lot of cultural barriers

I think that it actually boils down to a very deep seeded similar animalistic fear all of us have: the agoraphobic open spaces with no place to hide, lack of furniture or shelving to hide behind either, unreliable lighting with stark shadows that could hide danger, no windows or inability to judge the passage of time or ostensibly escape through. They're always desolate with no people around, and what's more, evidence that nobody's been through in ages so you can't even hope to stumble upon anyone. Abandoned places, dangerous decrepit old buildings, places too large to count on passing by another person, places abandoned at night because people have left.

In the end, you feel trapped like a rat in a shoebox with nowhere to go. If something trying to get you appeared, you'd have no options to run or fight back, and nobody to call out to for help.

one of my favourite series of images were of an american suburb, rows of identical houses with fences, far apart from each other so interaction with neighbours was minimal, short little trees, so everything is exposed. Because the construction was so new, nobody had moved in yet, so there were no cars, no lit up windows, absolutely no life. In lieu of walls keeping you trapped, the sheer size was the isolating factor: you could run away for 10 minutes and get nowhere.

You might enjoy Vivarium if you haven't seen it already.

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

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.

Sure. But it can be about a lot of things. And almost the entirety of the game takes place in liminal spaces.

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

I frequently have dreams where buildings from my past have rooms which have doors opening to corridors opening to rooms endlessly like a labyrinth. Also often populated, mostly some sort of school or shelter building. They spark fascination and a sense of infinite exploration rather than terror. I vaguely remember I knew the source of them (some sort of escape fantasy?) in my childhood.

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