Liminal Spaces in Disturbing Old Games | Nostalgia Nerd

i'm here at my local storage company storage companies have lots of doors and behind each of them could be anything could be stock for a shop could be junk it could be furniture mostly junk so behind this door you might think it holds all my future retro treasures and it might do or it might lead here a new place a portal to somewhere else which seems like a good point to tell you that this video is sponsored by squarespace so from the moment i entered the storage company i was in a place of transition i could have picked any doors but i picked this one and i ended up here i left something behind and gained something new of course this door could lead somewhere else as well it's a concept often used in films who can forget the key maker in the matrix and the disconnected back corridors he roams unconnected from time from space but with the ability to go somewhere new somewhere unknown the concept of the backroom's creepypasta is in a similar vein a place you clip into when leaving reality a disconnected area that feels familiar and seemingly incites deja vu but how and where you go from there is unknowable of course in reality my door actually just does lead to a cupboard full of future retro projects please don't hire storage thinking you can use it as a portal but that's not the only definition of what makes this space feel oddly liminal more often than not rather than a literal transition a liminal space gives a niggling familiar feeling of transition perhaps a distant hazy memory a place that you feel you recognize but can't quite define the absence of people the absence of features or individual character the buzzing of an incandescent bulb [Music] these all add to the feeling of the surreal transitional space their syntheticness stands out it may be tied to a nostalgia you can't quite place but a cold disconnected nostalgia rather than a warm fuzzy memory maybe you woke up from a hazy dream in the back of a car and recalls seeing a petrol station on a journey maybe it was a school corridor at a new school the start of a new chapter of your life maybe a doctor's waiting room alien yet familiar what was going to happen perhaps that's why these places often feel lonely this is your experience an isolated inner experience getting metaphysical we could suggest that this is the source we actually return to between lives or a representation of it or maybe because we traverse through spaces like this so often they just all feel familiar like a dream maybe it was a dream after all dreams are often less detailed than real life you might see some objects in a vague roomed context but it's hard to make out hard to define and hard to remember dreams are often also devoid of control which is perhaps why liminal spaces have a floaty uncomfortable feeling you're just a visitor the liminal space is happening through you not to you some people find the liminal space unsettling and isolated and anxiety of change others will find it liberating even comforting after all a place disconnected from reality is disconnected from people and all the anxieties they bring it's very much dependent on your mind state and your link to this place it's hard to define what makes a space liminal whatever the connection these visceral pangs of disconnected anxiety these are the hallmarks of the liminal space and it's why places that lack features that lack natural elements feel liminal interestingly it's for those exact reasons that many old games have the same kind of visceral feeling [Applause] poorly implemented controls a single inevitable but yet unknowable outcome amalgamated with low resolutions plain textures false colors low fidelity sounds and basic in-game characters who have a very real disconnect from other players and the real world everything is an impersonation but it still offers a model of reality that we recognize or we think we recognize and then there's the undeniable feeling that for many of us playing these early games actually felt like a transition we felt like it was a huge part of our life that was changing the very basic fabric of what it meant to be alive and often it really was now the world of pac-man might not feel conventionally like a liminal space the world is unfamiliar from a real-life perspective but in its abstract form it conjures a feeling a feeling that perhaps made it so famous in the first place you begin in a maze the walls are narrow and there's mess everywhere but yet you move you move continuously collecting this mess you don't know why you don't know to what end but you collect regardless leaving the screen edge simply returns you to the opposite edge you can't escape the world is claustrophobic and worse you're continually chased by four foes intent on causing you harm your only respite is a drug that allows you to become the dominant force for a brief few seconds then you're back to collecting level after level confined trapped that feeling that confined feeling the world folding back on itself the paranoia of being chased these are the liminal healing elements you're transitioning somewhere surely you have to be but not to what's out there in the bleakness you can't get to that maybe you're transitioning internally through these pills you're collecting why can't we get outside i mean this can't just be life but it turns out your only real transition is to corruption or to power off [Music] the first game i experienced that really wrapped me in liminality was driller ombre commodore 64. you find yourself in the far future in a vessel on a planet a planet that is humanity's only hope of salvation and you have to get it ready for them this bleak image of distance of loneliness is only compounded by the abstract undetailed spaces which you slowly move around this is a jagged world very much devoid of life you can make out doors towers shelters even some of these places feel familiar in their construction but what are they there for what can you do well drill that's what you're there for but for most of us just diving into this game to experience a true first person perspective it was a new world we were swept into and instructions were superfluous to this feeling of being somewhere new yet familiar [Music] and here's another space that's new but familiar a square space new because each ad i make is slightly different from the last but familiar because you've seen so many of them but don't let that distract you from the fact that if you want to get your passion project on the web then nothing is going to help you achieve that faster than squarespace you don't need to hire a custom designer html coder integration manager you can do all that yourself in a few clicks set up a shop a blog a space to show off your photos or anything you like plus by going to squarespace.com nostalgianerd you can get 10 off your first website or custom domain purchase in a similar vein to driller hard driving seem to do the miraculous thing of making you feel free yet utterly confined trying to navigate the short and looping tracks with twitchy controls and the odd ominous landmark felt comparable to being in a car seeing building shapes late at night perhaps but not knowing what they were it's a game where you have time to look at the scenery but not for too long with the constant threat of destruction looming sometimes a faceless bland void of a vehicle will pass you by sometimes it will try to race you but these vehicles felt utterly lifeless like robots just doing the rounds keeping you in check for a fate that you don't quite realize if only there was a way out of this place out of this car maybe then you could make for freedom [Music] this is my favorite scene in the terminator because this nightclub is the transitional space the moment sarah enters her ultimate fate is either death or the realization of a new life and that fate is decided by accidentally knocking over a beer this film captures the very essence of liminality throughout the feeling of loneliness of disconnection from your fellow human despite them being everywhere because they're unable to help unable to understand [Music] the dos game then manages to do the same but in a very different way you see early dos games were somewhat devoid of well graphical finesse and as you drive around as kyle reese you feel disconnected from reality those buildings they look like buildings are they buildings well yes they are and the street layout is fairly accurate to the included map even down to significant landmarks which gives the world a very real feeling but it doesn't look very real the whole game manages to capture that eerie mood even when you enter shops and are confronted with more detailed scenes this could well be a shop you visited when you were younger but here it is the void of life in a context you're somewhat unfamiliar with it may not look like the terminator but the spirit of the terminator is well and truly captured another world gave you the gift of a name lester and a job you're a physicist apparently your life is all in order as you arrive in your ferrari 288 gto but a short lightning strike later and your current particle accelerator experiment throws you into a completely different world another world out of this world even universe you're very much transitioned to a space which feels familiar but is very different the trick was we'd never seen graphics like this before another world through its rotoscoped feeling graphics drenched alien atmosphere and few but carefully placed sounds and musical accompaniments actually brought us along on the journey as much as it did leicester it's a different approach to two-dimensional platforming and for that we experienced something that felt like a new era it was a reward that disconnected us from our real surroundings and gave us an absolute connection with this new strange world that was somewhat less detailed and alien than our own much like another world death mask feels at home on the amiga in fact running on a seven megahertz motorola 68 000 with one megabyte of ram and 16 colors definitely adds to the disconsolated feeling the game isn't really 3d it's more like an fps dungeon master as you step slowly around corridors passages and other areas that could easily be from your friend tom's basement you have no idea what's around each corner it could be exactly the same featureless there could be a skull or sometimes you enter a room with an opponent these encounters are always brief fleeting and honestly a bit confusing the controls of death mask make the whole ordeal feel like it's being played in a room filled with starch and that adds to the uneasy yet familiar feeling you've surely been here before you were struggling trying to get away but all you found was another corridor that you remember maybe i just had an odd childhood so how about a screen saver the windows 3d maze this is a process you truly have no control over you can exit of course with just a wiggle of the mouse but why do you want to do that what if you miss something important around the corner what if the next corner finally leads to freedom there is a new version on its io called screen saver subterfuge and it does allow you to move about you take control in a bizarre world of international espionage and it feels like more of a fever dream than it ever did [Music] before the rugrats games come up frequently when discussing liminality and that's because well the worlds you inhabit are just so bizarrely uncoupled from the strange devoid child play areas from search for reptile in 1998 to the oddly abandoned theme park from rugrats in paris from 2000 it's all very ominous and it really shouldn't be these are games designed to entertain children but all they do for me is send a deadly cold chill down my spine i thought being locked in a theme park would be a childhood dream but it's not it's filled with dreamlike anxiety i feel like i'm being chased by your brimmer you know from westworld these places look familiar or at least they look like a fake version of something familiar but the lack of people especially when you're roaming about as a small child is disconcerting mirror's edge is another game that although isn't devoid of life certainly has less of it than you might expect controlling faith connors you bundle from place to place building to building in a world that looks graphically pleasing but at the same time lacks any real detail of course most of the time you're too busy trying to pull off a sequence of acrobatic maneuvers to stop and look but if you do then the whole place gets very strange and almost ominous this is the story of a man named stanley stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was employee number 427 perhaps the game which conveys liminality best is the stanley parable which is odd because you're almost never alone throughout the game you have a companion the narrator he guides you or doesn't guide you from place to place trying to describe what's unfolding or what perhaps should unfold this was not the correct way to the meeting room and stanley knew it perfectly well strangely though this narration if anything makes you feel more alone especially when it stops and you're left to your own devices what what do you do where'd you go you could spend all day just turning computers off if you wanted or try actually working after all you are in your office or you could go back to making choices just like the storage company we're here deciding which door to choose which ending we'll get to and this world is the vessel for that transition of course by the end of it we start again and go through every ending perhaps a choice we don't have in real life and perhaps why the stanley parable is so compelling and liminal in the first place we're intelligent people right why can't we make up our own story something exciting daring mysterious oh this all sounds perfectly doable why don't we simply start wandering in well i don't know how about this direction which brings us to the back rooms of which there are several namesakes these games are all really based around the creepypasta and have a solid foundation in ideas and elements of old of clipping out of real game worlds or real worlds and finding yourself here in a place that you may or may not be able to escape from in a way you do feel like you've clipped through walls of an actual gaming experience from the past sometimes you'd find yourself in a whole new location you'd never seen before and that was fun interesting although also a bit scary in a way maybe it's playing those games in the first place that has given us recent feelings of liminality and it's also the reason why we have games like the stanley parable and baldi's basics they're built on this eerie ominous framework of the past creating something familiar but at the same time terrifyingly unknown of course my list here is far from definitive it's based on my own personal experiences and in many games you're more than likely to find at least one liminal segment one part which gives you that slight feeling of unconfirmed dread but let's be honest it's that feeling which keeps us coming back for more do you have any experiences of liminality in games if so please let me know in the comments until next time i've been nostalgia nerd [Music] toodaloo [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 144,990

Keywords: liminal spaces, liminal space

Id: OEtTpkzv50c

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021