post #26: FNAF: Security Breach: what does it mean to be liminal?
I'll preface this essay with the same thing I prefaced a recent comment I left on a video analyzing Security Breach's "liminal spaces," that is, I haven't played the game (or any of the other FNAF games), so take what I say with a grain of salt/sand. That being said, I don't think my lack of personal experience should invalidate what I have to say. I have spent hours and hours watching people play these games and talk about these games and thus I have opinions about these games. I think people can analyze and criticize media even if they haven't engaged with it in the way it was, theoretically, designed to be engaged with. That is to say that my comments won't offer to speak about the experience what it is like to play the game, but the experience of what it is to conceive of the games themselves. After all, FNAF has always been inseparable from being a spectated object. I think it's naive, therefore, to suggest that this fact of spectatorship wouldn't inform the way these games look or operate in any kind of way. As a result, think of my comments as coming from a Film Studies background more so than a Game Studies one.
Motivating this essay are two recent videos I've watched about the intersection of FNAF Security Breach and the concept of liminal spaces. The first one I watched was a new video by the channel fmplus that offered specific, close readings of various liminal spaces within the game's setting (the pizzaplex). The second video, the one I just finished before starting work on this essay, was from two years ago (coming out within a year of when Security Breach first released) and talked about the game in relation to Mark Fisher's concept of "hauntology." This video ultimately served as an elegy to the game that Security Breach apparently could have been and as a call to action for people to spend their money elsewhere. I have problems and disagreements with both videos, but I likely won't get into them here.
I want to start off my discussion by talking about a discourse I've talked about in the past. Since Security Breach first came out, there have been people vocally complaining about the fact that the game isn't scary. Maybe this is true. Certainly, it is something that many people seem to feel is worth being vocal about. In conjunction with this is another discourse around skepticism about the legitimacy of horror, that is, discussions about the degeneration of backrooms content. This argument goes roughly as follows, whereas the conceit of the backrooms as a liminal, haunted space was initially creepy, it became over-saturated and then (after getting picked up by algorithms) developed into an evocative site for producing content slop to the point where now it is seemingly not as scary or unique. I think this argument may be true as well. That being said, I want to partially push back against both of these. My question in this is the same as it was before, what does it mean to be scary? to be horror? In the terms that people seem to normally mean these words, I can understand how Security Breach and Backrooms sludge would no longer qualify. At the same time, these perspectives seem inherently conservative in their scope. I understand them as somehow saying, 'horror is what I want it to be and it cannot change. ... Kids these days don't know how it used to be--' Something like that. I want to tread this point carefully, if possible. I think part of this argument is probably true. Insofar as it is scary to be alone, then it is less scary when things become well populated. When a fantasy gets trotted out so much, you get used to it and its effect might wear off -- sic, exposure therapy. But I think that novel, solitary horror is not the only type of horror that there can be. I still don't have a working definition of what it means to be scary or horror that I feel totally comfortable with, so I will instead provisionally define these concepts as: when someone is averse to something. This is a broad definition and I think it's likely that it will end up incorporating elements distinct from what the initial conversations wanted to talk about. However, it feels like a more compelling framework to me so it is what I will operate with. In other words, I'm saying that I think people might be scared of Security Breach not being scary.
I pivot now to talk about backrooms-- liminal spaces. If there's one thing I think I agree with in the people saying that backrooms sludge has delegitimated itself, it is that the concept of "liminality", in being so widely propagated, has lost clarity of definition. This is not unique to this term, of course, see, for example, any number of etymologynerd's videos talking about how the propagation of language leads to the broadening of its definitions (e.g., therapy talk going from specific relationship/abuse-related contexts to quotidian, non-relational ones). Even though it is a tired point now, somewhere in the concept of liminality is apprently a concept of horror. Liminality, broadly defined, is being in-between. The two videos that motivated this essay defined the term as spaces that people move through which aren't supposed to be meditated on in specificity. I think this is a somewhat unhelpful definition, but that's besides the point. What I think I can agre with, though, is that (in relation to place) in-betweenness is categorized by movement, rather than stasis. In other words, if somewhere is your destination, then it is likely not a liminal space and if somewhere is a means to an end, then it likely is. French anthropologist(?) Marc Augé has a similar concept, of the dichotomy between place and non-place -- where non-places are "spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure)" (there's a second meaning of the term which is "the relation individuals have with these spaces," but that's beyond the scope of this consideration) (94). The pizzaplex is liminal (and a non-place) in the same way that any workplace outside of a home is liminal (and a non-place) -- it is somewhere people go to so that they can get things or make money so that they can go somewhere else (home, in theory). So what is horrific about this? This has been one of the main things that has evaded me about liminal spaces since the discourses around the term first came to my attention. Being alone can be scary, I can agree with that. Being in transit can be scary, I can agree with that. ... Well, where my thinking is now is that it's something like this: it's scary to be unmoored; it's scary to be in relation to capital (something fundamentally precarious). It's on this later point that the second video's mention of hauntology can be a useful vector for consideration. Hauntology is to say that capitalism forecloses certain relationships to the future via a ransomed relationship with the past -- the existence of *a* past is held against people to prevent other futures from coming into being. This can be scary insofar as capitalism means remaining in liminal positions for longer periods of time. Capitalism would that it were that nothing ever came to be anything. You can never get where you're going with capitalism. And that is scary, the story goes, because people are on journeys with destinations. I think there can be disruptions to this argument, but nomadness isn't related to the ideas I will talk about here on.
Okay, so liminality is being suspended and being incomplete and this is scary because it is vulnerable and it is lonely and it is uncertain. So how is Security Breach liminal? The obvious answers point to its aesthetics -- whether its synthwave aesthetics or its lonely emptiness -- the fact that you are there after hours with no other humans in this giant, abandoned, empty-but-for-robots, megaplex of an institute. I don't doubt these -- I don't contest that these are sites of liminality, but I extend that they aren't the only ways to think about the game via a framework of liminality. The thing that has been most interesting to me about Security Breach is that it has, since launch, been apparently a fundamentally broken game. The game development was rushed and there were miscommunications involved the whole way up. This, coupled with complications of the pandemic starting during development, means that many things do not work as would seem to have be intended to and many mechanics seem to feel unfinished or buggy. It is easy to clip out of bounds, you can duplicate enemies, cutscenes and models break, the game is power hungry and runs incredibly poorly on many consoles and computers, et cetera. Well, this all seems very liminal, in my opinion. People are disconcerted by the fact that the game isn't finished -- the fact that it doesn't feel complete (correct) to play. It unnerves people to the extent that they stop playing it, according to anecdotes from the person who made the second video. I'm not going to say that the game developers intended to let players clip out of bounds, but it remains that they made a game with this quality and, even in patching the game a couple of times, have not amended it entirely. Security Breach is still broken, it is still liminal, it is still distended from time. Can that mean something? Can this be a way in which the game is fundamentally haunted? (So haunted that not even the video about hauntology from the channel called hauntology was willing to discuss it in this way). Because this would be uncomfortable to address. What if it wasn't easy to dismiss something? What if a game was ugly and that meant something?
I'll end by pasting an excerpt from the comment I left on the first video I mentioned:
your framing of the pizzaplex helped crystallize my understanding of how this is still a horror game. the backrooms are,, a thing, but i feel like even though both the backrooms and the pizzaplex may be similar in their liminality, what that means is not necessarily the same in both cases. the backrooms i think represents something like the horror of being trapped in an infinite liminality. i'm not super read up on backrooms content, but i've heard arguments saying that it's been over done and content farmed such that it's become more of a pastiche than a site for meditation. to be clear, i don't think this shift is necessarily bad. anyways, my point is is that backrooms does A (one) thing and then loops it for however long. what's intriguing about the pizzaplex, and what i think you do well to highlight here, is that it is so multifaceted in its liminality.
liminal gets a bit overused as a buzzword, i think, to where it's sort of a meme and maybe doesn't always convey a ton of specific information. that being said, the pizzaplex, as you've presented it, seemingly must be liminal. that is, even if liminal as a category has become threadbare and loose in its application, the pizzaplex still applies because it is liminal in many different ways. if liminal is being in-between, then the pizzaplex is liminal even in its liminality; it is not easy to categorize even in this way. again, your video (perhaps inadvertently) highlights this. a liminal categorization of the pizzaplex recounts strange hallways and passages which are not meant to be stayed in, only moved through -- this is bog standard liminal categorization -- yet you also point out the strange peculiarities endemic within the pizzaplex's asymmetry and in its failure to meet the confines and expectations of how malls look and operate in the real world. i don't think this is a mistake on your part, to be clear. i think these too are liminal, just in different ways.
the horror of the pizzaplex, then, is of a place that has been ripped apart at the very seams -- that is distended at every front and which writhes in the mere agitation of being seen, of being compresent within. the pizzaplex, in this way, is somehow organic (and yet not fully). everything is in limbo. the horror of, what if nothing worked?, what if it was impossible for there to be logic or order or...? , and to this end, i think that the game is a mechanical failure only amplifies its backwards horror. the thing defies comprehension. so monstrous is security breach and the pizzaplex that people who perceive it need to invent narratives for why it is what it is. it cannot simply be and be terrible, it must somehow be a figuration of intent (and yet, as you point out, even this framework has limits; the justifiability of the dev choices runs thin, quickly). what if the very world you lived in was unfinished, was not meant for you to exist within, was at once empty, haunted and vibrant, alive.
i can speak a great deal more on this, but i will cut it short (soon). i leave this comment with the following questions: can it mean something that the pizzaplex doesn't even resemble reality? (that there are trees yet this is utah-- that there are [not sufficient advertisements] yet this is a mall?) can it mean something that even the game devs abandoned this facility? maybe the broken game is not a mistake (not only) but a symptom. maybe there's an impulse of intention writhing beneath it all...
Augé, Marc. "From Places to Non-places." _Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity_, Verso, New York, NY, 1995, pp. 75-115.