Games Set in Nowhere

The Backrooms helped inspire this video game. Consider it and other games that take players into eerie landscapes, abandoned buildings, and foggy nowheres—such as Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley Parable (2013). What aspects of liminal spaces make them effective settings for these games?

A game with no score, no enemy and no way to lose hands you a controller and a building. What is left to do is look at the building.

Key concepts

The Walking Simulator: A game whose only verbs are walking and looking: no combat, no score, sometimes no way to lose. With nothing else to do, the setting has to carry the whole experience, which is why the genre keeps choosing liminal spaces: a place built for people and empty of them turns every room into the event.

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Every work — at a glance

Pools — Tensori (video)

A first-person game with no interface, no dialogue, no music and no goal — you wade through over-lit, empty swimming pools and water corridors that should not connect and do. Strip out everything that normally tells a player what to want, and only the space is left to want anything from.

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What to know

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What aspects of liminal spaces make them good settings for these games? Three things a designer usually has to manufacture come free. The place already promises an elsewhere, so the player moves without being handed a quest; it was built for people and has none, so every room reads as a question; and with no task to perform, attention has nowhere to go except the architecture.

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Across subjects

Your brain maps space with dedicated hardware: John O'Keefe's place cells and the Mosers' grid cells, work that took the 2014 Nobel Prize. That machinery needs

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

A game hands you the controller and lets you walk an in-between place. So what still counts as a game? With no objective, no score and no way to lose, Pools may be closer to architecture than to play — and The Stanley Parable is already laughing at the idea that the destination was ever yours.

Practice — a sample

SPCIn The Stanley Parable you may disobey the narrator, and he has a reply ready either way. That MOST undermines —

A The designer's intent
B The narrator's authority
C The player's choice
D The corridor's dullness
E The office's emptiness

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