You change the size of things by picking them up, then looking and moving around until they appear differently from your new position. Gentle, soothing jazz plinkles away in a series of rooms you must navigate by resizing objects, but there's no embiggening gun or shrink ray here. You're a volunteer, testing an experimental sleep therapy based on inducing dreams you can muck about in. Superliminal is a short, linear showcase of puzzles built around the creative use of perspective. Do I even need to name the shadow looming over this whole genre? Carson explains that the back rooms in gaming platforms "pick up on the sense of being lost beneath the surface, wandering without direction, feeling threatened without especially knowing why." Hotels and roadways can also be considered a type of liminal space, as they are mere stopping points between destinations.It must be daunting, making a first person puzzle game about messing with physics. In an increasingly virtual world, liminal spaces are showing up more and more via gaming platforms. This focused attention to "in between" areas, which one typically wouldn't think much about, is arguably what gives liminality its edge. However, shared spaces like an airport bathroom or hallway are not places where people normally spend much time, so lingering in these areas can feel subversive. For example, a person's home wouldn't be considered liminal by the resident because they traverse it all the time, taking note of their surroundings like what needs to be fixed, cleaned, etc. That said, just because a place is empty doesn't make it a liminal space. These physical spaces are usually functional and not aesthetically pleasing. That's because, much like emotional liminal spaces, the physical ones are transitional areas. Although both definitions of the term are applicable, she says that the latter is "particularly salient" right now, as "we are standing on a threshold between how we lived previously and new ways of living, working and occupying space."Īctual, tangible liminal spaces are not difficult to find, since stairwells, doorways and hallways are pretty much everywhere. "These are spaces that are liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another," Ogle explains. However, the fluid definition of liminal spaces has expanded recently to include empty spots, like abandoned shopping malls, corridors and waiting rooms. "Most of the people I explain liminality to end up saying, 'Ah! That's what I've been in! I just didn't have words for it!'" Carson says. It's an all-too familiar feeling for many people. Timothy Carson, who teaches liminal studies, refers to the pandemic as an "involuntary social liminality, a time/space that was full of uncertainty and ambiguity, all the landmarks gone, the future undefined." During this and similar situations, "disorientation reigns," he says. Such a liminal space can be individualistic in nature, like a woman who isn't sure whether or not she wants a divorce, or fully global, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Liminal spaces can also refer to emotional "places" a person might experience during a transitional period, at the threshold of either side of a life experience. "They are transient spaces created for movement from one place to another - lobbies, hallways and thresholds at a building scale," she explains via email. This can include boundary zones, she says, like the areas between indoor and outdoor, public and private, or even simply here and there. Liminal spaces in the physical sense are those places that "occupy the spaces between," says Tara Ogle, director of architecture for Page & Turnbull.
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