Mario64 does have kind of a creepy liminal vibe to it.
Long ass empty hallways, rooms with just a giant mirror, no sound except kind of haunting/enchanting music and the echo of your footsteps.
It is objectively a pretty creepy / empty vibe to it, because in the game bowser has taken over the castle, so its supposed to be a bit spooky/creepy in a bunch of spots.
They aren't wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
I don't think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There's a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It's low tech, but the environments don't feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
Doesn't liminal specifically mean a transitory space that you are intended to move through and not linger in, like a hallway? OoT (and Mario 64) have those, but obviously not exclusively. I guess were referring to a sort of sparse aesthetic. I wish we had a better word for that.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn't in Mario 64 is that they couldn't afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It's not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
Mmm. The source I found probably got megabytes and megabits mixed up. Cartridges often seemed to have their capacity listed in megabits for some reason.
Yeah possibly, if they converted in the wrong direction.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8MB cartridges like Mario 64 were generally advertised as 64 Megabit. But if someone got mixed up they could’ve assumed the 8MB figure was actually 8Mbit and then divided by 8 to reach the wrong conclusion of 1MB.
As to why they advertised things using megabits back in the day, that’s pretty easy: bigger numbers seem more impressive in marketing!
The “every copy of Mario 64 is personalised” is a really old creepypasta / meme that was definitely a thing before most zoomers were active on the internet.
When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
I thought every new generation of games looked "photorealistic" on release. Every time I thought it couldn't get more realistic, they got more realistic.
Honestly I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of photo-realism but moreso that 3d games from even later into the generation were more cluttered visually. Funny enough I've played some PS2 games that emulate the open sparseness style of the N64/PS1 era to invoke horror vibes.
... I did kind of have my own creepy experience with an actual Majora's Mask cart I picked up at a used game store like a decade ago.
Had one single save file.
Only had the couples mask.
Had completely forgone basically the entire rest of the the main actual game, only focused on the couple, saved maybe 3 ish 'hours' before the impact.
Had focused the entire playthrough on ensuring that a relationship would work out... in a world left utterly doomed by the hero not being the hero.
And of course they ultimately abadoned the entire game, leading eventually to me buying it, being utterly baffled by this ... unconvential play through, the kind of person who would do that playthrough.
Second quote sounds like a huge strawman. Did anyone acutally say anything remotely similar that anon heard or read about?
That said, I can kinda see it. SM64 looks super weird if you're not used to the style, and it adds that "early 3d graphics" weirdness to it that younger people might only know from horror games. And TBH Mario games have always been kinda trippy.
Kids today will never understand what it's like when dealing with hard limits on computer and console was the default.
I remember when I was a kid, and we got our first two PCs (as opposed to the standard Apple IIe and occasional black& white Macintosh) in the computer room in highschool school and those machines struggled just so hard to run 90s Photoshop at all. Or having to install the memory expansion in that N64 just so it could play most games. Oh, or disk swapping (floppy or CD).
In grade school you played green-on-black Math Muncher and Oregon Trail or you got bullied up by the shithead kids who played sports.
In general it wasn't too bad but there were some times playing late at night, deep underground when the ambient noise that plays when you're near caves or whatever would spook me.
Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.
I kept expecting something to... catch me, felt like I was being watched, that there was some lurking enemy, or that the robot buddy dude would suddenly decide I was a threat, and turn on me, or like, accidentally explode or something.
I preferred TIE Fighter. At least I knew I was fighting something.
I have an old-ass "Trust" joystick from the game port era that just sucks. All axes have different issues, yet all of them have issues. The throttle slider is long gone, the hat mini-joystick never worked (or, if you got it to work, you lost most of the actual buttons), and the stick center is in different places on different days.
While yes, planned obsolescence is a thing, there is also lots of survivorship bias.
On the one hand, yeah, Mario 64 is ... kind of hauntingly sparse in places.
It is kind of especially weird that when you get dropped into the world, after the very sonically and visually engaging start screen and menus... you get dropped outside of the castle, which has no soundtrack, beyond like occasional birds chirping.
Its a massive tonal shift. Its meant to be just literally quickly skipped through, but if you... don't play the game as much as explore the game... its dissonant.
Then you go into the castle, uplifting music, but... its empty. Echoey. Camera angles / Sight lines emphasize empty space... its meant to maximize your ability to to be acrobatic, but... if you just walk, slowly... very large empty space, full of huge rooms that seemingly only exist to have huge paintings in them.
Which you are... alone, in.
An entire empty castle... where is everyone?
Yeah, thats all weird.
On the other hand...
What's wrong with Zoomers? Alphas?
Oh, constant over stimulation and external judgement.
The absence of those things thus feels like a graveyard, where... you suspect those things somehow are there, they're just hiding... because normally, those things always are there.
Simplicity, minimalism and a lack of obvious direction and feedback thus = absence... a suspicious, meancing lack of engagement.
It leaves you alone.
With your own thoughts.
Your own unguided, undirected thoughts.
You could say the brainrotted are haunted by their own conditioned expectations.
Also, we're there as Mario because Peach has been kidnapped (again) and Bowser has taken over the castle so... it's a miracle there are actually any Toads, and not Koopatroopas.
What do you mean you people? I'll have you know I belong to a fringe group so specific, it consists of only me! And the offense taken scales inversely to group size! Also, what you said doesn't even apply to us!
Any Austin on Youtube has a channel that is somewhat dedicated to exploring luminal spaces in games. His videos on SM64 give a good impression about how this applies there.
Well... Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and Markiplier are all millenials and they're the ones that pioneered such reactions to the most mundane shit in videogames.
Zoomers didn't start talking like that in isolation.
It is like that though. A lot of indie horror games imitate early 3d graphics, either because it's cheap and easy, or to have emotional impact by evoking nostalgia. If you haven't actually played 3d games of early 90s, those horror games/videos will be your only exposure to these kind of visuals, so that uneasy liminal feeling will be the first one you'll get. So it's a bit of inversion going on there.
B3313 comes to mind when you want liminal space vibes. It literally feels like dreams a ROM-hacker would have. I've had similar dreams when I was ROM-Hacking Luigi's Mansion.
Anyway, I am as old as Mario 64 and I do agree on the spook vibes. Mainly the graphics at that era have this horrifying vibe to them. Mainly Super Mario RPG comes to mind for horrifying graphics.
I love this romhack, but it gets really creepy a lot of the time. Also no N64 emulators on Android can play the current version which is... fun. Would've loved to just pull the game out at any time of the day.
by definition it's a between space, like going from one place to another. in practice it's a space that should have people in it but doesn't. think an empty mall or indoor swimming pool.
the backrooms are probably the most popular example of a liminal space
No, not really: a liminal space is a space that is in between spaces that we want to use.
Quote Wikipedia:
In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next." Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets.
What you're describing is the new popular and also wrong use of this great and useful and specific word which fills a legitimate lexical gap. I'm not hating on you. I'm just very passionate about this. Liminality is a great concept, great term, very useful. Turning it into "le creepy empty room with le slenderman" as is popularly becoming is very irritating to me because we already have words to more or less accurately describe that.
In the basic definition, it's a space between spaces. A space that only exists for you to move from one space to another. Like a corridor or stairway. Somewhere you're not meant to stay.
An empty walkway between the gallery and the auditorium at a theatre generally could be considered one. The emptyness being key here. With lots of people around it's fine.
You watched Severance? Many of the areas in the show are liminal spaces. Always a bit creepy and odd and something just feels off when you're in them. You can't put your finger on what it is but it's not quite right.
I think I just don't have the liminal space gene. I've watched Severance and have seen a ton of other spaces people call liminal but I've never felt anything creepy or unsettling about them at all.
It’s a space that has no purpose except transit. Therefore there is no thought of comfort in its design. When you see these spaces your brain has a reaction of “getting through it as soon as possible”. There is probably also something in our ancient survival instinct that lingering in open space like that could be fatal.
Have you frequently moved house, moved to new homes, apartments, lived in a car, anything like that? Hiked a long ways, for a long while?
I was homeless for some years... and yeah... almost everywhere you are is a liminal space, and eventually... it all becomes just another space, it loses that kind of strangeness, as you spend more and more time in places you're not really meant to be in, and the places you think you can stay in, well, they turn out to be hostile and temporary too.
It came from a 4chan creepypasta about noclipping out of reality
My personal guess was the writer was a philosophy of mind student or psychiatry student - the most likely place a young person would encounter the term.
A liminal space is some sort of locale that we usually only experience in states of transience, where staying is strange. Something that represents a border or state that you simply pass through between two more permanent states. Waiting for the bus at night. Your residence just before dawn. An empty mall or office building where there are only remanent signs of human presence. The in-dev version of a video game where characters are either absent or just placeholders. gm_bigcity. All the Kane Pixels shit. A place where reality feels slightly altered, and your subconscious is ringing all of the alarm bells because existing there is just wrong.
The ultimate liminal space that only exists to represent a place that is transitted through, yet is also infinite in space and time if you do not essentially possess the key to actually leave.
I guess arguably, any repeated timeloop type of movie essentially turns most of the world into a defacto liminal space.
But yeah, most literally, a liminal space is a space designed to be moved through, not inhabited.
A doorway or hallway vs a room.
A waiting room at a doctor's office, a queue at an airport.
A highway, bridge, or train tracks, vs wherever they are leading you to.
In your case its that empty space within your brain that should be filled with thoughts and imagination but is just a long gray hallway with a few abandoned preshool desks and offsetting green fluorescent lighting flickering.
I grew up with the Sega Genesis, PS1 and then PS2. The PS1 side had games that were more lively, less lonely than SM64. Compare the game to something like even the first Spyro the Dragon, and SM64 immediately feels empty. Add to that the overtly creepy level Big Boo's Mansion, or the less creepy Hazy Maze Cave, or the surreal Wet Dry Town with the creepy cave music, the infinite stairs at the top of the castle, rooms that are huge but sport almost nothing except paintings, only a single big clock, a population of only one or two servants to the princess, levels like Lethal Lava Land which is just otherwise inhabitable platforms on top of a lava ocean - the game ends up feeling creepy whether the programmers lawyers at Ninten intended or not. How about the room with the Tiny Big Island paintings, one side is huge while the other side's wall is within arm's reach? Also Mario is always being recorded by the Lakitu cameraman, and you're watching him through that lens.
Besides, creepypastas were all the rage during the 2010s, and the 3D Mario had just enough ingredients to make them work - the ultimate culmination of all this being the B31133 romhack. (Correct me if I got the numbers wrong).
Generational divide is a tool of capital to divide the working class. You have more in common with your parents and grandparents than with a billionaire.
I also have more in common with a child slave toiling away under horrible working conditions than with a billionaire. It's really not hard, if you have even the slightest shred of worry about your livelihood and obligations. Even by orders of magnitude, my four-digit bank balance is closer to zero than to ten digits.
My point, in agreement with yours: so many divisions are arbitrary bullshit. Watch the children develop their own culture, shake your head in wonder, but save the division for the cunts that would see their joy and seethe with rage that they invented something for free instead of spending their free time producing even more fake wealth.
Nobody can have a net worth of over 1 million dollars. Rest goes to taxes. Govt. can do free healthcare, free education, even universal income and though there still will be small differences in net worth, they will be small enough not to matter
Most importantly: nobody will be rich enough to fuck over the world for their own benefit
My friends all had SM64, but for some reason I never actually played it until it came out on the Switch. I can get why people like it nostalgically, but it plays awfully. The camera is basically impossible to control so you spend most of the game guessing what's going on around you
I frequently compare Elden ring’s camera to Mario 64. It’s just good enough until you’re in an enclosed space. Plenty of romhacks have solved the issue with fixed camera angles or fully outdoor level design.
I think the camera is amazing for being one of the first 3D action platformers, but you're absolutely right to say that it's frustrating as hell when compared to modern games.
Yes your generation did so much better at making the world a better place a list including. Raising and educating the generation who brought nazi back. At least you can vacation at buc ees!
Mario64 does have kind of a creepy liminal vibe to it.
Long ass empty hallways, rooms with just a giant mirror, no sound except kind of haunting/enchanting music and the echo of your footsteps.
It is objectively a pretty creepy / empty vibe to it, because in the game bowser has taken over the castle, so its supposed to be a bit spooky/creepy in a bunch of spots.
Til I'm a zoomer lol
They aren't wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
I don't think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There's a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It's low tech, but the environments don't feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
Doesn't liminal specifically mean a transitory space that you are intended to move through and not linger in, like a hallway? OoT (and Mario 64) have those, but obviously not exclusively. I guess were referring to a sort of sparse aesthetic. I wish we had a better word for that.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn't in Mario 64 is that they couldn't afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It's not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
Small correction - Mario 64 was on an 8MB cartridge.
There were some 4MB games, but a 1MB cartridge never existed.
Mmm. The source I found probably got megabytes and megabits mixed up. Cartridges often seemed to have their capacity listed in megabits for some reason.
Yeah possibly, if they converted in the wrong direction.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8MB cartridges like Mario 64 were generally advertised as 64 Megabit. But if someone got mixed up they could’ve assumed the 8MB figure was actually 8Mbit and then divided by 8 to reach the wrong conclusion of 1MB.
As to why they advertised things using megabits back in the day, that’s pretty easy: bigger numbers seem more impressive in marketing!
Also the reason why everything on N64 were just shaded polygons (to save space) and in the PlayStation it was all texture mapped
Luigi isn't, but Yoshi is =P
Ok zoomer
The “every copy of Mario 64 is personalised” is a really old creepypasta / meme that was definitely a thing before most zoomers were active on the internet.
And the PTSD thing is just stupid, sorry.
When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
I think this is exactly what's happening.
I thought every new generation of games looked "photorealistic" on release. Every time I thought it couldn't get more realistic, they got more realistic.
To be fair, now I can't unsee it anymore, after seeing it in that light.
Honestly I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of photo-realism but moreso that 3d games from even later into the generation were more cluttered visually. Funny enough I've played some PS2 games that emulate the open sparseness style of the N64/PS1 era to invoke horror vibes.
Blatant historical revisionism.
Millenials were cooking up horrifically bad videogame creepypasta before any zoomer ever touched a keyboard.
lol.
BEN DROWNED
... I did kind of have my own creepy experience with an actual Majora's Mask cart I picked up at a used game store like a decade ago.
Had one single save file.
Only had the couples mask.
Had completely forgone basically the entire rest of the the main actual game, only focused on the couple, saved maybe 3 ish 'hours' before the impact.
Had focused the entire playthrough on ensuring that a relationship would work out... in a world left utterly doomed by the hero not being the hero.
And of course they ultimately abadoned the entire game, leading eventually to me buying it, being utterly baffled by this ... unconvential play through, the kind of person who would do that playthrough.
Early 2010s millennials were all about this shit and the popularization of horror game reaction videos.
Second quote sounds like a huge strawman. Did anyone acutally say anything remotely similar that anon heard or read about?
That said, I can kinda see it. SM64 looks super weird if you're not used to the style, and it adds that "early 3d graphics" weirdness to it that younger people might only know from horror games. And TBH Mario games have always been kinda trippy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Iuh3w-MmU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SybPxb_DjZ4
Any Austin is great though.
Kids today will never understand what it's like when dealing with hard limits on computer and console was the default.
I remember when I was a kid, and we got our first two PCs (as opposed to the standard Apple IIe and occasional black& white Macintosh) in the computer room in highschool school and those machines struggled just so hard to run 90s Photoshop at all. Or having to install the memory expansion in that N64 just so it could play most games. Oh, or disk swapping (floppy or CD).
In grade school you played green-on-black Math Muncher and Oregon Trail or you got bullied up by the shithead kids who played sports.
There are only two games that require the expansion pack...
I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.
In general it wasn't too bad but there were some times playing late at night, deep underground when the ambient noise that plays when you're near caves or whatever would spook me.
Youre not supposed to dig straight down
Luanti player here, have similar feelings when mining.
Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.
Museum Madness had that effect on me.
I kept expecting something to... catch me, felt like I was being watched, that there was some lurking enemy, or that the robot buddy dude would suddenly decide I was a threat, and turn on me, or like, accidentally explode or something.
I preferred TIE Fighter. At least I knew I was fighting something.
Logitech 3D Pro.
TIE Fighter, G Police, Sim Copter... all the way through the Battlefields up to 4, Arma 1-3, various flight sims.
I genuinely have no idea how that thing has lasted an actual 20 years with minimal drift.
I have an old-ass "Trust" joystick from the game port era that just sucks. All axes have different issues, yet all of them have issues. The throttle slider is long gone, the hat mini-joystick never worked (or, if you got it to work, you lost most of the actual buttons), and the stick center is in different places on different days.
While yes, planned obsolescence is a thing, there is also lots of survivorship bias.
I still kind of can't believe no one else has done that.
Its legitimately baffling to me.
Oh, yeah, our one game just is a level editor for our other game.
... I can't think of another example of anybody ever doing that.
They'd work in Streets of Sim City as well.
Name one creepy thing about Zork?
Wait a minute, I'm being told there's a Grue at the door that needs to speak to me
On the one hand, yeah, Mario 64 is ... kind of hauntingly sparse in places.
It is kind of especially weird that when you get dropped into the world, after the very sonically and visually engaging start screen and menus... you get dropped outside of the castle, which has no soundtrack, beyond like occasional birds chirping.
Its a massive tonal shift. Its meant to be just literally quickly skipped through, but if you... don't play the game as much as explore the game... its dissonant.
Then you go into the castle, uplifting music, but... its empty. Echoey. Camera angles / Sight lines emphasize empty space... its meant to maximize your ability to to be acrobatic, but... if you just walk, slowly... very large empty space, full of huge rooms that seemingly only exist to have huge paintings in them.
Which you are... alone, in.
An entire empty castle... where is everyone?
Yeah, thats all weird.
On the other hand...
What's wrong with Zoomers? Alphas?
Oh, constant over stimulation and external judgement.
The absence of those things thus feels like a graveyard, where... you suspect those things somehow are there, they're just hiding... because normally, those things always are there.
Simplicity, minimalism and a lack of obvious direction and feedback thus = absence... a suspicious, meancing lack of engagement.
It leaves you alone.
With your own thoughts.
Your own unguided, undirected thoughts.
You could say the brainrotted are haunted by their own conditioned expectations.
Wdym alone the toads are there for you
Aren't there like... 2, 3 of them, in this huge fucking castle?
And they never move...?
I don't know.
Its been like 25 years since I last played that game lol.
The castle really isn't that big, my man.
Also, we're there as Mario because Peach has been kidnapped (again) and Bowser has taken over the castle so... it's a miracle there are actually any Toads, and not Koopatroopas.
They're ghostly lol
Fade away when you're not nearby.
Millennials invented Creepypasta for old Nintendo games. You'll find old video game horror stories smeared across everything from Pseudopod to SCP.
I swear to fucking God, you people have zero perspective. Who do you think wrote the Secret Level episode for Pacman?
What do you mean you people? I'll have you know I belong to a fringe group so specific, it consists of only me! And the offense taken scales inversely to group size! Also, what you said doesn't even apply to us!
As a gen z-er.. can't say I ever felt like mario64 was liminal or heard it describes that way lol
Some of the bits in the castle feel kinda weird from what I can remember as a kid
I think that probably has something to do with the castle being mostly empty. There's the ghost of Toad(?), but not much else.
Nah all n64 games are spooky
An especially haunted copy of Hey You Pikachu
'Pikachu! Speak'
'Pika, your mother sucks cocks in hell, piii.'
Tell me a single spooky thing in the Pokemon games. Stadium or Snap either one.
You 2 having this conversation
Conkers bad fur day seemed alright to.me
Conker's Bad Fur Day was fire. Played the remaster (Live & Reloaded) on Xbox, still one of my favorite games of all time.
Any Austin on Youtube has a channel that is somewhat dedicated to exploring luminal spaces in games. His videos on SM64 give a good impression about how this applies there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV_ZN-8uy4w&t=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SybPxb_DjZ4&t=0
Well... Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and Markiplier are all millenials and they're the ones that pioneered such reactions to the most mundane shit in videogames.
Zoomers didn't start talking like that in isolation.
Honestly I felt the same when the game came out.
I thought this was about gen Z’s obsession with backrooms/horror games at first lmao
Who seriously thinks SM64 is creepy?
It is like that though. A lot of indie horror games imitate early 3d graphics, either because it's cheap and easy, or to have emotional impact by evoking nostalgia. If you haven't actually played 3d games of early 90s, those horror games/videos will be your only exposure to these kind of visuals, so that uneasy liminal feeling will be the first one you'll get. So it's a bit of inversion going on there.
People who were not indoctrinated by 20 plus years of mario?
B3313 comes to mind when you want liminal space vibes. It literally feels like dreams a ROM-hacker would have. I've had similar dreams when I was ROM-Hacking Luigi's Mansion.
Anyway, I am as old as Mario 64 and I do agree on the spook vibes. Mainly the graphics at that era have this horrifying vibe to them. Mainly Super Mario RPG comes to mind for horrifying graphics.
I'm guessing the ‘LSD: Dream Emulator’ PS1 game might evoke some familiar feelings.
I love this romhack, but it gets really creepy a lot of the time.
Also no N64 emulators on Android can play the current version which is... fun. Would've loved to just pull the game out at any time of the day.What even is a liminal space? Seriously, I looked up the definition and still don’t know.
by definition it's a between space, like going from one place to another. in practice it's a space that should have people in it but doesn't. think an empty mall or indoor swimming pool.
the backrooms are probably the most popular example of a liminal space
I think it also has to be a bit off. Like an empty mall, but evety store is a Gap, or an empty swimming pool, but there are no ladders, or exit doors.
Something like that.
No, not really: a liminal space is a space that is in between spaces that we want to use.
Quote Wikipedia:
But it appears that current speak has changed the word to give it this meaning of eerieness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space/_(aesthetic)
What you're describing is the new popular and also wrong use of this great and useful and specific word which fills a legitimate lexical gap. I'm not hating on you. I'm just very passionate about this. Liminality is a great concept, great term, very useful. Turning it into "le creepy empty room with le slenderman" as is popularly becoming is very irritating to me because we already have words to more or less accurately describe that.
In the basic definition, it's a space between spaces. A space that only exists for you to move from one space to another. Like a corridor or stairway. Somewhere you're not meant to stay.
It's definitely been co-opted to mean "a creepy place".
An empty walkway between the gallery and the auditorium at a theatre generally could be considered one. The emptyness being key here. With lots of people around it's fine.
I wonder what cleaners feel in these places.
https://lemmy.world/c/liminalspace
You watched Severance? Many of the areas in the show are liminal spaces. Always a bit creepy and odd and something just feels off when you're in them. You can't put your finger on what it is but it's not quite right.
I think I just don't have the liminal space gene. I've watched Severance and have seen a ton of other spaces people call liminal but I've never felt anything creepy or unsettling about them at all.
It’s a space that has no purpose except transit. Therefore there is no thought of comfort in its design. When you see these spaces your brain has a reaction of “getting through it as soon as possible”. There is probably also something in our ancient survival instinct that lingering in open space like that could be fatal.
I know what they are. They still don't work on me.
Have you frequently moved house, moved to new homes, apartments, lived in a car, anything like that? Hiked a long ways, for a long while?
I was homeless for some years... and yeah... almost everywhere you are is a liminal space, and eventually... it all becomes just another space, it loses that kind of strangeness, as you spend more and more time in places you're not really meant to be in, and the places you think you can stay in, well, they turn out to be hostile and temporary too.
limen was the Latin term for "threshold"
It came from a 4chan creepypasta about noclipping out of reality
My personal guess was the writer was a philosophy of mind student or psychiatry student - the most likely place a young person would encounter the term.
This should help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp-2M_3HwFU
A liminal space is some sort of locale that we usually only experience in states of transience, where staying is strange. Something that represents a border or state that you simply pass through between two more permanent states. Waiting for the bus at night. Your residence just before dawn. An empty mall or office building where there are only remanent signs of human presence. The in-dev version of a video game where characters are either absent or just placeholders.
gm_bigcity. All the Kane Pixels shit. A place where reality feels slightly altered, and your subconscious is ringing all of the alarm bells because existing there is just wrong.The subway station in the Matrix 3.
The ultimate liminal space that only exists to represent a place that is transitted through, yet is also infinite in space and time if you do not essentially possess the key to actually leave.
I guess arguably, any repeated timeloop type of movie essentially turns most of the world into a defacto liminal space.
But yeah, most literally, a liminal space is a space designed to be moved through, not inhabited.
A doorway or hallway vs a room.
A waiting room at a doctor's office, a queue at an airport.
A highway, bridge, or train tracks, vs wherever they are leading you to.
In your case its that empty space within your brain that should be filled with thoughts and imagination but is just a long gray hallway with a few abandoned preshool desks and offsetting green fluorescent lighting flickering.
I grew up with the Sega Genesis, PS1 and then PS2. The PS1 side had games that were more lively, less lonely than SM64. Compare the game to something like even the first Spyro the Dragon, and SM64 immediately feels empty. Add to that the overtly creepy level Big Boo's Mansion, or the less creepy Hazy Maze Cave, or the surreal Wet Dry Town with the creepy cave music, the infinite stairs at the top of the castle, rooms that are huge but sport almost nothing except paintings, only a single big clock, a population of only one or two servants to the princess, levels like Lethal Lava Land which is just otherwise inhabitable platforms on top of a lava ocean - the game ends up feeling creepy whether the
programmerslawyers at Ninten intended or not. How about the room with the Tiny Big Island paintings, one side is huge while the other side's wall is within arm's reach? Also Mario is always being recorded by the Lakitu cameraman, and you're watching him through that lens.Besides, creepypastas were all the rage during the 2010s, and the 3D Mario had just enough ingredients to make them work - the ultimate culmination of all this being the B31133 romhack. (Correct me if I got the numbers wrong).
It's B3313. But yes, I agree with your take
Dangnabbit, I knew it! Thanks
Aaaahhhh finally we've arrived at the point where millennials can look back to a next generation and go "....WTF?"
Welcome aboard buddies!
Generational divide is a tool of capital to divide the working class. You have more in common with your parents and grandparents than with a billionaire.
I also have more in common with a child slave toiling away under horrible working conditions than with a billionaire. It's really not hard, if you have even the slightest shred of worry about your livelihood and obligations. Even by orders of magnitude, my four-digit bank balance is closer to zero than to ten digits.
My point, in agreement with yours: so many divisions are arbitrary bullshit. Watch the children develop their own culture, shake your head in wonder, but save the division for the cunts that would see their joy and seethe with rage that they invented something for free instead of spending their free time producing even more fake wealth.
How about wealth caps?
Nobody can have a net worth of over 1 million dollars. Rest goes to taxes. Govt. can do free healthcare, free education, even universal income and though there still will be small differences in net worth, they will be small enough not to matter
Most importantly: nobody will be rich enough to fuck over the world for their own benefit
Zoomers actually like mario64
I've never seen zoomers get scared of this game
My friends all had SM64, but for some reason I never actually played it until it came out on the Switch. I can get why people like it nostalgically, but it plays awfully. The camera is basically impossible to control so you spend most of the game guessing what's going on around you
That seems to be a theme with 90s 3D games: the camera has a mind of its own and can make navigation really annoying.
I frequently compare Elden ring’s camera to Mario 64. It’s just good enough until you’re in an enclosed space. Plenty of romhacks have solved the issue with fixed camera angles or fully outdoor level design.
I think the camera is amazing for being one of the first 3D action platformers, but you're absolutely right to say that it's frustrating as hell when compared to modern games.
Getting old is weird.
My grandma fucking loved Super Mario 64. Silent generation. She didn't play, but loved watching us play.
Boomer ass post
Don't blame us. Blame the horrendous state of the US education system and indoctrination.
Luckily I am not in the US and zoomers here at least don't seem as right leaning.
Why not both?
Nazis were gone?
Yes your generation did so much better at making the world a better place a list including. Raising and educating the generation who brought nazi back. At least you can vacation at buc ees!
My generation is I would throw you off the plateau faster than a tiny blue penguin.
Big mad?