Interactive Media Liminal Thoughtspace: TL;DR


Defining "interactive media liminal thoughtspace"

Liminal Thoughtspace is something that I most see reflected in video games/things connected to them, but it can happen in things like DVD menus and even regular television. Materially, things with an interactive element rely on you to move its existence forward, but it seems to exist in its own little bubble outside of you. It requires your involvement, but not your attention. To be immersed in it is to be put in a trancelike state.

So what happens if it suddenly feels like it demands your attention? Not your involvement. Your attention. Attention, like a person would want. To get it, it leaks into your head and makes the floorboards weak. It crawls into your dreams to get to you there. You are no longer involved in a way that renders you “in control”. You're just looking, where you feel like you should be doing. Whatever it is, it does it by itself.

That's the basis for interactive liminality. A really good example is video game glitches or out of bounds incidents, or even cut content. It's the art of the urban legend. You have to REALLY work to get there. You're seeing something that you aren't supposed to see. It lives within rumors, conjecture, theory, colored by personal bias. Inseparable from your psyche, and how it works.



Left - Fun is infinite , Right - Hell Valley Sky Trees

It doesn't matter if the rumors are true. They don't need to be. All it needs to do is get in your head. Now it has your attention. By all accounts, it probably shouldn't be, at all, but it is. When you're a child, it feels specially designed for you. That's your mystery. Your special connection to something that nobody else believes you about.

What does it do in practice?

Not much. Truly, if you don't investigate the phenomenon, it passes you by, especially since it happens most often if you're a child. Sometimes, when you're young, you stare helplessly at a DVD menu that plays voice lines if you linger on it for too long. (This definitely happened to me.)

If you're like me, though, you already know that I truly believe it's a way to prove that reality is more subjective than people think. Am I suggesting that there's a force behind this? Not necessarily. In short, the force that gives it power is you. Your mind is what creates the very small, very fragile pocket of reality in which it could be possible that a rumor is true, or that there are codes to be discovered in the cracks of familiarity. It can only know you as much as you know yourself. It's real to you, and that's what matters.

Reality is not perceived. It's interpreted. Created. Endlessly recontextualized, refreshing, realigning. Once you realize that, everything starts to become easy. Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation describes it as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. [...] The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control–and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore.“

The empty nostalgia of an emotion destructed plays a key part in interactive liminality. You aren't just remembering an event. You're shocked that so much time has passed since then. The rumors are just another way for your mind to warp something you know into something you don't. You have nothing to anchor your familiarity in reality, and so a new one comes forth. Simple. You return to the past, and it's completely different. Why? Because you are the one who is different.

Memory tints reality. Everything tints reality, and as it is, our reality is operated by a hodgepodge of our memories and other people's memories, which have supplanted our own. You are subjective, which makes everything subjective. Without context clues, without the structures we live in, so rigid, what would reality be? If you believe that a fish is a bird so readily, does it become one? I believe that, in a sense, it does. Psychosomatic illnesses are, functionally, just as real as “regular” ones, because the afflicted party genuinely believes that they are experiencing it.

“You never know just how you look through other people's eyes.”

The mind processes itself so as not to overwhelm itself with knowledge. If you remembered everything perfectly, you would be trapped in all of those simultaneous moments forever. “You” are finite. The realities you create are not.

Glitches add to the "new reality" so much because they aren't meant to be, but they always are. There in the background. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't need to make sense. All of this might as well be inexplicable spells. You write it off as a glitch when you don't want to create that pocket of reality. You, an adult, want to stay grounded in reason. That's why “letting your mind fill in the blanks” is such an effective trope in horror. All of the horror genre is rooted in reality, so it would make sense that this would be viewed as scary to some degree. That's part of why I like Petscop so much. I think it gets it right. In order to let your mind fill in the blanks, you descend into the infinite vacuum of what you don't know about yourself consciously. You are preoccupied by synchronicity, numbers, problems, symmetry, almost laid out on purpose, and in your quest to see it all, you lose it. To avoid losing the thread completely, you anchor yourself in rational thought.

But why? Rationality is completely irrational. You write off a subjective truth, the truth that all truth is subjective, in the interest of chasing someone else's truth, that you think is objective. Frankly, you fear yourself. You fear the unknown. Technology allows us to see the unseen. Why would matters of the self be any different?

Identity, too, is subjective. You are at the whims of how others perceive you. This is why animal communication is important. With this, you can create a collective unconscious—a “reality masterlist” where many things, contradictory and chaotic as they are, remain to be true all at once.

An infinite, recursive, ever-shifting web of realities being created, fused, duplicated, and what have you. All born from one thing. Connection. You can't see what a computer is being used for without a display port. You can't interact with it, or change it meaningfully, without a mouse. You can't use it to convey anything without a keyboard.

Connection. Things that must be connected first. The mind is powerful, but ultimately useless on its own. Of course, you can't truly, 100%, “enter” a person’s mind…but you can get close. Other people know things that you don't, sure, but you can find out. All of life is an act of integrating reality. Supplanting your biases with theirs, so that you may create a grey area that applies widely to everyone’s truth.

By making connections to others and their realities, entire worlds become opened up. Things that are meaningless to you suddenly become meaningful. They stand out, because they become part of your reality. Reality is meaningless unless you share it with other people, you know. Individuality is merely persistence of vision with the others that color you. Nobody's reality is truly isolated. So why even try to isolate them at all?

It may sound scary to you. I don't know, because chances are, you may not be part of “my” collective unconscious. But really, it can give way to some really incredible realizations…ones that I can't even begin to list. Why? Because I'm not you, of course.

Okay, but what does that have to do with video games?

Well, your fear of rumors, glitches, urban legends and the whatnot, relies on familiarity. To create the reality in which the “correct” version of the game exists, only for a new and “incorrect” one to exist before you. Why is it incorrect? Well, you didn't account for it in your mind. This is why this phenomenon happens mostly to children. Their worlds are small, and their perceptions are even more limited. Even the smallest disruption can mean everything.

That is what a video game is. It is a reality, created by someone else, that you have a hand in. Damn it all, you have a hand in it. You change it, within the reasonable parameters, and when it seems like you have exited those parameters, you panic. Even if you aren't aware of the exact process of individual realities, you are unconsciously operating on them, too. (Neat!)

That's what makes these rumors so special. For a brief moment, you are all too aware of these individual realities. For a moment, you live in a world where, oh my god, a video game is talking to you. Oh my god, a creepypasta is happening to me in real life. Of course, usually, these realities die out and are merged back into your regular ones. But the presence of them is so important because they prove that there are so many more. More conceptions than you could ever imagine. Infinite subjective realities being raised up and cut down, day by day, minute by minute. Some of them you may even salvage.

What does it mean when a “glitch” becomes a feature? What happens when a disruption, an inconsistency, an impossibility, becomes part of your reality? Well…they stick around. When you fully accommodate your mind for strangeness, strangeness finds you … and doesn't leave you alone. That's when the really fun shit starts. You only start seeing once you start looking.

Of course, in the internet age, when everyone's ideas can recklessly slam together (for both better and worse), these small constructs based on incorrect information are easily depreciated and frequently killed off. This is good in some cases, but bad in others. Misinformation isn't spread as easily (some material realities, though perceived as unreal, can have physical consequences) and less ideas are put at risk, but at the same time, people don't challenge themselves, and that little novelty of “what if it was real” has been washed away. That transitive feeling (no matter how fleeting)-- that one where you feel like maybe, just maybe, you've discovered something that noone else has, seeing something that nobody else can see, is very rare nowadays.

But not impossible.



Of course, that could just be me. But now you see it too, right? That in itself proves my point.

Notable Instances

"In the years of both 2016 and 2022 I had a dream in which I was watching Youtube videos and I clicked on one and it was a dead serious legitimate conspiracy video about how apparently if you went out of bounds in any game and wandered far enough in any direction you would encounter a Thing that was sentient and could see and interact with you the player but it spoke in a long dead language and so you couldn't understand it. There was very vivid footage of it speaking in the conspiracy video and it was someone recording their screen as it did so and their PS2 fucking caught on fire."

Dream I Had, credit to...me.

BEN Drowned adapts this phenomenon strikingly well, and even Deltarune has depicted it in certain ways.


Crash Twinsanity Scratched Disk. TO VIEW IN BROWSER, CLICK --> HERE


"Strange Occurances in Nonexistent Games". TO VIEW IN BROWSER, CLICK --> HERE



Personal Experience.



Petscop


"On Missingno." TO READ, CLICK HERE



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