Interactive Liminal Spaces, or, The Backrooms in Text-Only

Authoring General Design Discussions
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One of the things that’s always struck me about interactive fiction is that it has a sort of ghostly double: the room you’re reading about, and the room you’re imagining. The game says, “You are in a room with peeling wallpaper and a humming fluorescent light,” and suddenly, in your head, you’re there. Not literally, but in a way that feels oddly present. The visual novel might show you a carefully composed background image; the parser game trusts you to conjure your own, down to the way the air smells.

So let’s talk about liminality. Not in the academic sense, but in the internet-popular-culture sense: abandoned offices with carpeting from 1986, fluorescent lights that buzz just a bit too loud, suburban neighborhoods where it’s always 3pm on a cloudless afternoon and no one is home.

Now, the question: can you build this sort of space—textually? Can you, in IF, do the equivalent of walking through the Dreampools or wandering the endless cul-de-sacs of Eternal Suburbia?

What makes a liminal space liminal isn’t just its physical characteristics. It’s about evoking a sense of dislocation, of being somewhere that is both familiar and not, safe but eerie, mundane yet soaked in unreality. And crucially, it’s about stillness. About potential without fulfillment. A place waiting for something to happen that never quite does.

This makes it perfect for interactive fiction, because what is IF if not a long string of delays and hesitations? You press a key. The story waits. You choose a direction. The hallway stretches on. The parser blinks at you expectantly. In a world built of text, the uncanny silence of a liminal space isn’t a limitation—it’s a feature.

Imagine this: you wake up in a public restroom. The tiles are off-white and ever so slightly misaligned. There’s no signage, no sound. You open the door and find yourself in a carpeted hallway that seems like it belongs in a doctor’s office. Every few rooms, the architecture shifts subtly: crown molding appears where it shouldn’t, ceiling tiles go from square to hexagonal. None of it matters. You’re still alone.

What you’d need isn’t just a room-by-room recreation of the aesthetic—you’d need to lean into the feeling. Sparse descriptions. Details that clash subtly with one another. A map that’s too large to easily memorize but too repetitive to be exciting. Maybe a vending machine that doesn’t work. Maybe a swimming pool full of clean water that no one has ever swum in.

And don’t make it about puzzles. Don’t make it about story. Make it about presence. The act of wandering is the experience. Maybe the only interactivity is the slow realization that there’s no goal. That the game never ends. That you’ve wandered for a hundred rooms and the carpet never changes, and somehow that’s exactly what you wanted.

Words let the player fill in the spaces. And in a game about liminal spaces, what matters most is what’s not there.

That’s my 10p anyway. :slight_smile:

Adam

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Question: would you count the apartment in Shade as a liminal space in this sense? It’s the piece of IF that most closely matches what you’re describing, in my mind.

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** Possible Spoilers Ahead for Shade **

I played Shade again for the first time in a long time, just last week! It’s such a great game, I love the experience, it feels very Lynchian to me! Maybe it planted a subconscious seed (that kept changing the type of plant it was :wink: ). Actually, for the apartment, i’m not sure, because we have a very specific location and we understand (or at least we think we understand) the scale and boundaries, we also have a very definite story playing out, and I don’t know that I felt lost or alone - at least at the start.

But then the latter part, yes, definitely, that does feel liminal, beautiful and terrifying, I get the sense that even if we could walk out into that desert that, because of where it really is, it’s endless.

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have you played any of porpentine’s stuff? or my father’s long long legs? there’s lots of surreal sparse stuff out there.

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No, I haven’t! Thank you for letting me know about them! I’ll take a look.

Adam :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

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Shade is the first thing to came to mind for me too, probably because of its emptiness.

One key thing is that liminal spaces are usually human-made — a large natural forest is probably a different sort of surrealism or horror, depending on the case.

And another thing is that, unlike Shade, liminal spaces are usually large spaces by definition, even before you even begin making a map. Things like abandoned malls, schools, and apartment complexes, or, as you noted, suburbia, are necessarily large. A hospital is probably a better fit for the genre than the doctor’s office you described.

I guess there are exceptions. Gas stations are small but seem to be a liminal space touchstone. Maybe because they are paired with endless highways?

As for how to actually implement any of things … one thing that IF games are very good for are looping and disjointed Lost Woods-style mazes. I personally find these frustrating, but it’s something that would certainly get the effect across.

You might also be interested in this game, which has Pac-Man style mazes and some soft horror. It’s fairly heavy on detail so maybe it doesn’t get the emptiness across, and it has definite goals, but it could be a template in some ways.

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That’s a fascinating concept. It’s like how everyone who reads a specific novel has actually read a “different novel.”

I also really like the idea of a liminal space parser game. Shade is a great example, absolutely! And I see your point about Shade having a specific environment with liminal elements as time goes on, but that’s kind of what’s needed to make an impactful liminal space. There has to be something to compare it to. That’s why liminal space video games like Going Home or Layers of Fear have the goal of putting together some kind of story, even if it’s in fragments with gaps the player has to fill in themselves.

Pools is a great liminal space video game that does exactly what you’re describing, but the compelling thing about it is how realistically the environments are rendered. It’s basically an immersive tech demo. And if you tried to make a parser version of Pools, you’d lose the one thing that makes it interesting, and it would probably feel like a mediocre procedural room generator—a tool created to help make a game, rather than a game in itself.

For some reason this all makes me think of Harold and the Purple Crayon, which is a children’s book about liminal space, and one kid’s effort to make it habitable! I’ve loved that book since I was a kid, and I’ve read it a lot to my two-year-old, but my wife finds it terrifying.

spoilers for *Harold and the Purple Crayon* Harold finds himself (and his purple crayon) in a void, and goes on a long walk, drawing things to see and do on the way, and eventually decides to go home to his bed. He draws lots of stuff trying to find *his room* and *his bed*, eventually drawing a window around the moon similar to how his own bedroom window frames the moon. Then he draws a bed, gets in, and falls asleep.

…which means he never gets home; he’s sleeping in a room that only looks like his room, surrounded by infinite nothingness.

My wife has a point, and while I still love the story, it now also gives me pangs of sadness and dread.

Harold exists in and explores a liminal space the whole time, but he adds familiar facsimiles for contrast to the emptiness.

This is why a lot of video games using liminal space to evoke horror, melancholy, etc. aren’t simply “exploration of empty rooms,” liminal space is used as a metaphor for a feeling or to disorient the player on their way to an ultimate goal (that isn’t walking through empty room after empty room).

The movie Vivarium does a cool job of using the “endless suburban” liminal space you describe. But again, the characters have a goal—to visit a house to buy, and then to escape it.

For an enveloping liminal space to make us feel anything, there has to be at least a little bit of room for our non-liminal humanity to exist within it—something has to make us want to explore or escape.

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I’d never heard of that, but that’s spooky because one idea I did have, which was based on my childhood imagination, was to have a character, a young kid, who was able to access a Backrooms style liminal space at will, and began moulding it to their likes - which is freakishly close to your childhood book! :sweat_smile:

I have to say, I agree with your wife though, my brain immediately goes to “what of the parents, losing their child!”

I used to have dreams of my local swimming pool, which, to a small 5 year old, seemed huge with maze like corridors, and it was the early 80s so very much the white tiles of the Pool Rooms. In my dream version it was infinitely bigger of course, and for some reason I could breathe under water(!) but that has always stayed with me.

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Another one to check out, thank you!

You make a good point about the man-made aspect, I might have the Kane Pixels version of “experiment gone wrong” in mind meaning a Desert could be artifical and endless.

What I like about the whole subject, particularly blending liminal spaces and the Backrooms concept, is that it’s really fluid and available to interpret and reinvent. The one challenge I think I would have, and this is a personal skill problem, is the temptation to quickly burn out the thesaurus for words typically used when describing these spaces! I had that problem with Iyashikei: The Fountain.

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[/quote]

I can’t hide that Isekai has a certain degree of liminality, esp. in the early game, which is in general, as you say, “somewhere that is both familiar and not, safe but eerie, mundane yet soaked in unreality” (but the last one is more precisely reversed, unreal yet soaked in mundanity)
oh, reading the wikipage on the academic sense of liminality, I discover that Isekai’s narrative follow more or less the structure described by van Gennep. Interesting…

Thanks to everyone for the excellent dish to my thinking !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I just adore the concept of spoilering for a children’s book, genuinely. Hold on one sec, maybe someone doesn’t know the end of The Very Hungry Caterpillar where the caterpillar becomes a butterfly ? I know this sounds sarcastic but I really find it charming. I liked the kid’s tv show Harold and the Purple Crayon a lot too.

I’m not sure I agree with the stillness concept–I think the concept of moving through the space is important. I’d say the crucial part to me is endlessness, moving without destination. I know you specified that it’s not academic liminality, but liminal spaces are liminal cuz in normal reality you pass through them, they’re meant to be temporary, fleeting. The unsettling part to me is that this strange space–this bus stop, this restroom, this gas station, you can’t pass through it.

The Backrooms memes often involve wandering through the hallways, a feeling of no-clipping through reality and being unable to find your way back to it no matter how you wander. Your descriptions of the restroom-hallways also involve movement and exploration. Yes, you wait at the lonely bus stop, but you can still walk along the sidewalk stretching in either direction, you just can’t because what if you miss the bus? In liminal spaces, time stretches unnaturally, and you’re keenly aware of your movement through it as well. You’re not supposed to be here for this long. I feel like a crucial part of meme liminality is “just how long can I wait? how big is this place? how far can I walk?” and the dread of not knowing the answer.

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It’s been ages since I read it, but I’d always thought the void was a dream, and by letting himself fall asleep in the dream he can wake up back in reality.

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I just adore the concept of spoilering for a children’s book, genuinely.

The Little Engine That Could

Spoiler: It could

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You make a good point about the man-made aspect, I might have the Kane Pixels version of “experiment gone wrong” in mind meaning a Desert could be artifical and endless.

I looked it up and don’t quite get it even with the explanation … is the idea that it would be a natural space created through unnatural means? That kind of makes sense.

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Essentially, yes. I’m better acquainted with the Kane Pixels “Backrooms Universe” than the original Backrooms lore, so I can’t really speak to what created those spaces that a person “no-clips” into, but certainly in Kane’s version there are multiple environments, man-made and natural, that were created by A-Sync experiments going wrong (well, they worked, but not as expected). So you could have an endless suburb, forest, desert, or office space etc

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I’m unfamiliar with this sense of the word liminal. I’ve always associated it with being at or near a limit beyond which something becomes imperceptible.

I’ve done a couple dictionary searches to try to get a grasp on what makes these spaces liminal (because it seems to embody some intriguing ideas), but I haven’t found a definition that seems to align with what’s being described here.

There’s a sense of “in transition,” with which I wasn’t aware of before. But I don’t see how that fits with the imagery and feelings being evoked by the descriptions in this thread. “In transition” seems equally applicable to an area undergoing gentrification as it would be to a once-thriving area falling into ruin.

What makes a space liminal? In what sense is a liminal space liminal?

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Liminal spaces, in the online sense, are empty or abandoned, and completely devoid of everyone else. The “transitioning” elements are represented physically as hallways, stairs, etc. and abstractly as states of limbo. Liminality usually revolves around lingering somewhere that would usually be passed by without a second thought. Although they can be eerie, creepy, surreal, nostalgic, etc. they don’t have to be.

If you want more examples, check out the subreddit r/LiminalSpace.

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If we look at it from the online trend perspective, a text based game would need atleast images to put the player in that liminal void. The peeling wallpaper would have to be yellow for the player to associate it with the popular memes and … cultural artifacts.

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Would it though?

I can see it already…

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Well…just liminal. You know… liminal.