The Weird Places

We have found them. We have fallen into their soulless demesnes. The fortunate have merely seen them from a distance; the unlucky have perished in their hollow spaces, vanished from view and lost even to memory. Only the scuff marks of unwary boots remain to mark their unnatural thresholds. I am referring to the Weird Places of video game lore. They are haunted, nightmarish places; they are unintentional, forgotten places; they are bleak, dreadful, and above all uncanny.

Sigmund Freud wrote of a special characteristic found in certain poetry and writing, namely that of the “unheimlich“. What is the unheimlich? In brief, it means that which is unhomely, alien, and unfamiliar. It is the uncanny, the strange. When we find ourselves in an unheimlich place, we feel unwelcome. We know instantly that we are intruding upon desecrated ground. A liminal energy tinges the air and alights our skin with nervous bumps. The space we travel through is fraught as if poised to attack. Sometimes they are marked by the simple, and overwhelming, quality of deathly quiet.

Many video games, especially first person shooters, feature secret areas and rooms. In the original 3D Realms’ Wolfenstein these rooms were impossible to detect by normal means and casual observance. They were blended seamlessly with a contiguous wall pattern, and could only be discovered by meticulously testing each wall tile with your space-bar. As gaming sophistication increased, so too did the cleverness of secret rooms. Contemporary “rail” shooters — a term used to describe linear, story-driven first-person shooters that aspire to create an interactive cinematic experience — will place secret rooms at various intervals along the path. These rooms will be disguised or hidden, but in a way that calls attention to itself. A secret might be hidden behind a conspicuously placed bush, or a large weapon stash will require the user to leap off a ledge to an unseen platform below. Countless variations on these devices can be observed in games such as Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Resistance: Fall of Man, and others.

They are unintentional, forgotten places; they are bleak, dreadful, and above all uncanny… When we find ourselves in an unheimlich place, we feel unwelcome.

But there is nothing uncanny about these places. They might exude a slight eeriness in their simply being ‘off the beaten path’, but their presence is nevertheless intentional, and for that reason comforting. The player can observe the omnipotent level designer’s work in the secret room, and trust in the sanity and safety of his guiding plan. The rooms are, in fact, the picture of ‘heimlichkeit’ — homeliness. They are consummately safe and reassuring, for they often bring with them bonuses or powerups that will help in the coming struggle.

Far more interesting are those places that are “off the map”, that defy or ignore the intentions of the designer, and which produce a hideous contravention against the frail illusion of the game. These places are accidents, glitches, or technical oversights. A careless designer might have neglected to give a section of wall a clipping mask, enabling the user to pass through it. Doing so, the user moves from the carefully constructed experience he paid for into a world of disturbing otherness. Everything will suddenly go black, or the colours will invert, or perhaps the character will find himself falling into a global background image of a vast ocean planet, or the deep emptiness of space, while the level he was previously on (be it a space station or castle) will vanish like a speck of dust on the horizon. Sometimes the character will slip into a space reserved for another part of the game, subjecting themselves to a perverse anachronism (as in the above photo from Tomb Raider).

Those who experience these places, and are sensitive to their meaning, cannot help but be haunted by their existence.

In the somewhat obscure 2001 CroTeam release, Serious Sam, there is a level that takes place before the Great Pyramid at Giza. At the beginning of the level you are directed by a long path of stone towards a fateful confrontation: a powerful enemy awaits you at the Great Pyramid in the distance. Your task is clear. But if you decide to turn around, rather than heeding the level designer’s obvious intention, you will see a range of sand dunes. They are low-lying, and clearly mark the horizon, but they are not far away. Begin to set out for them and soon you will reach their base. A small, barely discernible path through them will be visible. Experienced gamers will almost instinctively recognize it, for walls of mountains or hills are commonly used in games to mark the periphery of the world, and they are normally impassible. So how did this tiny path get there? Assume the player, intrepid, decides to climb the mountains, and leap over to the other side? Will he encounter a Pangaea of splendour and delight? Perhaps a secret temple, or the fabled city El Dorado, transposed inexplicably to Egypt? However, he will in fact be greeted by none of these treasures. Only a wide open desert with a single, tiny black mark in the distance to break the monotony of sky and sand. He will set out for it, and in a few minutes of game time will arrive at the object.

The object will resolve itself into a single archway of stone, with hieroglyphs, standing in the middle of a vast desert. Nothing else. No gate or entrance, no secret puzzle or reward. No purpose or intention can be observed in its presence. Was it a mistake? An accident? Did the designer place it there as a joke for overly curious adventurers? Perhaps he unintentionally copied it to his level editor from another part of the map, and forgot to remove it. Any number of conjectures are possible, and in fact any will suffice. It matters not why the strange, purposeless archway exists, but that it exists. It is a Weird Place, full of the haunting, mathematical infinity of a repeated tileset that was never meant to be observed, and the baffling irrelevance of a place that can be occupied and explored, but which exists for no reason whatsoever. It is an intentionless place: a Hell removed from the providence of a designer; a byproduct of other, adjacent creative processes; a mistake.

Consider for example this beautiful footage of the protagonist from Shadow of the Colossus, literally falling through the world. These places are marked by a transition that purifies the viewer of the ground of normalcy, producing experiences and glimpses of worlds that are fundamentally strange, sometimes wonderful, but almost always chilling. On occassion, they are even horrifying.

Those who experience these places, and are sensitive to their meaning, cannot help but be haunted by their existence. It required the technological revolution of gaming to create a medium by which such things could be expressed. They are masterworks of art in their complete artlessness. They embody the crisis of human existence precisely in their maximal distance from our lived experience of reality. They are quintessentially unreal. They are gaming taken to its purest limit: the extremity of perception, the very impossibility of imagination.

And they remind us, by contrasting the stagnant monotony of our existence with an infinite exposure of the uncanny, that life is always undergirded by the proximity of death.