Since I mentioned The Backrooms (in citing a weird thread about a supposedly real experience that has now been made protected so maybe it was just made up, or maybe They Don't Want Us To Know The Truth™), a few remarks about this Internet legend. ⤵️ •1/10
https://twitter.com/gro_tsen/status/1492917985350238214
Since just about forever, I've been fascinated and terrified at once with the idea of huge labyrinthine spaces taking the form of more or less benign empty / abandoned places. I often have dreams about such places that aren't really nightmares but are still disquieting. •2/10
This seems to relate to another fear-with-fascination of mine (or is it just a variation of the same?), that of abandoned places, especially industrial ones, and urban exploration. •3/10
https://twitter.com/gro_tsen/status/1491492896335400961
Young me played the computer games ‘Ultima Underworld’ I & II with fear and trepidation as they tapped into this fascination. In real life, I also learned with fascination about catacombs below Paris (and the more impressive ones in Odessa), but I wouldn't dare enter them. •4/10
I wrote a number of games (well, not so much games as amusements) simulating vast, procedurally generated, labyrinthine worlds on the computer. I was fascinated as a kid by the idea of generating essentially endless spaces by a few lines of code. •5/10
This toy (essentially proof-of-concept) game that I wrote, not so long ago, in order to learn about WebGL, despite its trivial simplicity, has a definite flavor of “The Backrooms”, doesn't it: madore.org/~david/misc/we… •6/10
(In a more mathematical flavor, I also wrote this other JavaScript game, which takes place in the hyperbolic plane to illustrate how intrinsically mazelike it is: madore.org/~david/math/hy… — but if you like this sort of things, try playing HyperRogue instead!) •7/10
Anyway, I find it funny that this sort of fascination should have become an Internet meme / legend. For some reason, I thought I was the only one with this particular mixture of fear and fascination (not so much with mazes, but with this particular flavor of them). •8/10
I disagree with one thing regarding the ‘Backrooms’ fad, however: the idea that they are inhabited by “entities” (in essence, monster that try to kill you), in my mind, spoils the whole idea. The danger in the labyrinth is not the Minotaur in the center: … •9/10
… the true foe is the labyrinth itself. The purest form of labyrinth game (or horror story), I think, needs no monsters, for the labyrinth itself is the monster. The Backrooms, I think, are empty of life, and that makes them all the more frightening. •10/10
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