Why is the Out of Bounds so Terrifying?

There’s… a point… where the idea of a monster  becomes less scary than a lack of one. Video games are an art form that did  something incredibly special. Up until this point in humanity’s existence,  the art we had hanging up in museums and exhibits existed in our world.

The walls  that contained our paintings and movies were really nothing special. On the other side  of those walls, we had… everything else. Even though these works create  a brand new world in our minds, we see only a window of it.

This is not  everything, and we work mentally to fill out the rest of those details. It’s how we get  immersed, we take these worlds and treat them like they’re real. Video games, though, operate  very differently.

When you play a video game, that window is ever changing. We get  to explore every corner, every pixel, every model and sprite and voice line and  mechanic. And if we keep pushing those limits as humans are always going to do, we might  find something that we’re not supposed to see.

This is the out of bounds. And it’s… eerie.  For my entire life, any time I managed to glance beyond the walls of a videogame and  peer into what I’m not supposed to see, I felt a dread in the back of my mind.

Something  disturbed me about it, and only recently have I truly started to understand why. And the  answer is… a lot of things, trust me, we have a lot to go through, so let’s start at  something you’re familiar with: human beings. There is something that’s ever present in  humanity, something that’s so buried in our psychology and society that it seems so obvious  that it’s boring: as humans, we are limited.

Those limits define almost everything about us  and the world around us. We almost never know what those limits actually are, and it seems  like they’re always being pushed, but we know that they are there, almost instinctively. When  it comes to creating things, it’s no different.

Canvases have a limited space, movies are only  so long, but it all seems natural. All of these limited things take up space and time in the very  same world. They all ball up together to what we call everything.

But not video games. It seems  normal to us now, but video games are literally otherworldly. While we control them from ours,  they take place in a different universe entirely.

It can and almost always has different properties  and functions. Impossible things are made possible, and that fantastical nature of them is  a big reason as to why people find them so fun and interesting. It’s a universe that’s not ours that  we can still interact with.

However, just like any other human made thing, video games are incredibly  limited. You can walk away from a painting, you live before and after you watch a movie, but once  you leave a video game world… well, you can’t. In these places, there isn’t an “everything”. 

There’s in bounds, and then… nothing. Now for people who wanna make immersive  video games, this whole infinite darkness thing is kind of an issue, and developers  and game studios have spent millions trying their best to hide it. And while the many  ways developers work to immerse people in video game worlds is fascinating,  that’s a topic for another video and another person.

The real meat here is the  games that either don’t or can’t hide it. A lot of games, especially older ones  meant to run on more limited software, know they can’t really convince the player but  try to anyway. In a game like Borderlands 2, it makes use of what I like to call soft limits. 

Most areas are big elevated land islands, surrounded almost entirely by steep cliffs. Most  people have played video games long enough to know what a massive, imposing cliffside means.  Also like… people who know what death is- For the places where they can’t justify a  several hundred foot tall cliff which is less than you think, and where they can’t place  a bunch of conveniently connected obstacles, games tend to use a warning system.

There’s  no barrier to stop you, necessarily, but if you step a bit too far off the beaten  path, something happens to ward you off. In Borderlands and some Call of Duty games, you’re  given a timer. If it counts down to 0, you die.

Pretty easy. In the best bad game that I’ve ever  played, 7 Days to Die, the map is surrounded by a radioactive wasteland that slowly chips  away at your health as you try to traverse it. Now, even though we know in these games  exactly where we are and aren’t allowed to go, it still kinda works.

There’s no person  on earth who sees deep into the barely textured desert wasteland about 10 miles out  and 2 miles down and thinks “I can go there”, but our brains find it way better than  some empty skybox, and… why is that? Well, while humans are very limited, our brains have  a way to trick us into thinking otherwise. You might have heard the phrase “perception  is reality” before, and while it is true, it’s kinda… vague.

So let me introduce two  different concepts: absolute truth and functional truth. Just bare with me here. When I show you  this color, there’s many many different ways to describe it.

It’s a warm color, the hex code is  bb230c, it’s opaque, monochromatic, etc. I could go into the history of the color, the first time  it was ever used, even the specific place that I actually got it, which was from this frame of  the critically acclaimed anime movie Akira. However, if you had to communicate to me what  this color is, you’d probably just say… red.

While everything I just said before now is  true, we don’t communicate everything we know about something as simple as the color red.  Many things are unknowable, some information is useless or redundant, but everything I said  and infinitely more would fall under the idea of absolute truth. Complete information.

But, while  there are an infinite number of shades of red, all we need to say most of the time is red  to get the message across to another person. This is the difference between absolute truth  and functional truth. While absolute truth is an entire mural, one that’s both large and incredibly  detailed, we can only see small parts of it at any given time.

If we stare closely at the specifics,  we can’t see the bigger picture. If we view out as far as we can, those details aren’t visible  anymore. We can only perceive so much about any given thing at any given time, and our brain is  built around filling those gaps in our perception.

When we look over the edge at a landscape we know  is fake and barely textured, our brain simply fills in the details. It’s nothing new, really.  No matter what we understand intellectually, that there is nothing there, we still see it, and  that’s good enough.

However, even with the ability to trick our brains right at the fingertips  of any developer, not all of them bother. For only the most videogamey of video games, we  have my favorite approach to the out of bounds, not caring at all. Games like Super Mario 64  and Trackmania have the world and the lack of world in clearly defined sections, roughly here  and here.

These are games that have absolutely no problem with you knowing in every sense  that it is a video game. There’s no attempt at realism because that’s not the point. Your  goal in Super Mario 64 is to collect stars, your goal in Trackmania is to race. 

Nothing else really matters. However, while most games fall under this general  scale of immersion, from realistic to arcadey, there is actually a fourth category as  to how games deal with the out of bounds. Minecraft is a game that is infinite. 

Wait, let me rephrase. Minecraft is a game that is functionally infinite  in the x and z directions. Okay, actually just… one more time.

Minecraft  is a game that uses a preset algorithm that inputs a seed to generate a word that  fits within a complex set of parameters to give the illusion of natural generation for a  playable space that is functionally infinite for all gameplay purposes but does have an  edge where it no longer functions correctly. See, being infinite is kind of a binary thing.  Something either is infinite or it isn’t, and when it comes to “infinite” games, there is some point  where it breaks.

That point just so happens to be so far away that no human being would ever get  there without actively trying to. But even then, with an in-bounds that would take millions of  years to properly explore, what a game sacrifices to be functionally infinite is actually quite  a lot. When you leave a world’s generation up to a soulless algorithm, what special things  you can add to a game are far more limited.

You have an infinite space, but only so  many biomes. Endless hills and valleys, with only a certain amount of mobs. So many  ores, so many blocks, so few things stretched out everywhere.

The limits of the worlds we  make don’t get bypassed, they just get shifted. There are even games that take advantage  of this sort of limited infinity. Manifold Garden is a game that is infinite in a  very finite way.

Every single room in the game has endless copies around it,  and you as the player need to maneuver around by changing gravity and falling between  them. By all definitions, this is infinite, but it somehow feels less open to me than any  normal game. In a game like Titanfall 2, even if you know that the landscape around  you is fake, you can at least imagine some sort of continuity to the world.

When it comes  to Manifold Garden, there is no such thing. It is this little island all around you, over and  over again, in a cold, white, void. Forever.

While this video asks the question of  “Why the Out of Bounds is so terrifying”, it’s important to note that it isn’t  always seen as scary. Shesez, the youtuber, runs a series called Boundary Break, using  modded camera tools to look outside of any game’s bounds. In this series, the out of bounds  is almost equivalent to a sandbox, with secrets of the game’s developmental history hiding  just past what we’re normally allowed to see.

Yet, just like the out of bounds, this  discovery process with video games is often taken for granted. Within the past few  decades, scientists and art historians have been using an x-raying process to see beneath  the surface of famous paintings. Being able to see the bones of these famous works,  the muscle and the cartilage, the veins, the blood, earlier versions, even entirely new  - or I guess even older - paintings, has given people a new perspective on the creative process. 

We’re taking these iconic works, beloved and praised and analyzed for centuries, and finally  seeing what the creators never intended for us. The Stanley Parable is a very, very, very meta  game. You play as a faceless character named Stanley, an… accountant, let’s just say, at  a nondescript corporate office.

One day you realize that everyone has disappeared, and  it’s your job, with the help of a narrator, to find out what happened. Or… you could do  absolutely nothing that the narrator asks you to. The entire game is an adventure  involving you either following or going against the Narrator in order to discover  as many different endings as you can.

There is even an ending where your goal is  to glitch yourself out of bounds in the very first room you step into. However, it is  notably not disturbing in the slightest… [show narration]. As I said, it’s a meta game  (kinda grumbly, throwing it away), BUT- what if I told you that there was an ending  you were never intended to find?

While the game was revamped quite recently,  the original version holds a secret. If you follow the Narrator’s intended path, you  eventually find yourself uncovering the dark truth behind the company that Stanley works for. The  journey the narrator intends for you brings you through the office, up to your boss, and through  a winding series of hallways until you discover a mind control room.

Deciding that the horror should  continue no longer, Stanley shuts everything off. It ends with you escaping the facility, entering  into a beautiful landscape, with nothing but the freedom of the world in front of you. Until…  the game resets, just like any other ending.

If you follow this path again, or any other  one, you’re always stuck with the narrator, and he’s stuck with you… except…  if you go back to the first path, the one the narrator intends for you,  you can do this. [Cut off music, maybe have droning noise creep in]. The game suddenly  feels very different.

The narrator is gone, and all you’re left with is an empty office  devoid of life and really anything else. What’s made creepier is that the game doesn’t  just break. After the door in front of you closes, a door to the bathroom, something that  never opens in any other part of the game, becomes available.

Not only that, but another  door does too. One that’s pitch black, and loads an entirely new area. You’re  greeted with a series of hallways, climbing up the floors of the office building  one at a time.

After climbing 6 stories, you arrive at what’s called the Escape Pod  room. It’s pitch black and nondescript, with only a singular source of light at the end. The  escape pod itself.

But once you step too close… At the game’s release, people who found  this were convinced it was some sort of secret ending. On the poster leading up  to the room, some text obscured by dirt in the game says that you need both the  player and the narrator in order for the escape pod to work. Everyone was convinced  that this was actually some sort of extra extra meta ending that requires you to  find some way to access this with the narrator tagging along.

But… as the years  went by, no such ending was ever found. In the deluxe edition that was released  recently, there was actually a secret cutscene added if you bring along a bucket,  bringing some sort of closure to this, and a fan made mod was released for the original.  This mod actually has new dialogue from the real voice actor for the narrator, which tells me  that the escape pod ending in the first game was simply unfinished.

It was an idea that  was scrapped before the game was released, but wasn’t removed entirely. However,  while all of this acts as proof, it was very clear to me from the very first time  I saw it that this was not meant to be seen. It’s just so… eerie.

It feels like something  not made for us. At the same time, the ending that had the actual out of bounds isn’t  eerie by any means. The difference here, why one is unnerving and the other isn’t,  boils down to author intent.

Even though we’re shown the cold white void, The Stanley  Parable was never trying to immerse us. As the narrator so sarcastically pointed out,  the out of bounds ending is a commentary on video game structure, but… this isn’t  a commentary on anything. All of the wit and cheerfulness and… life is… gone. 

It’s a human creation devoid of humanity. It feels tempting to compare it to something  like a zombie. It’s a person full of life that isn’t anymore.

It’s a corpse that still walks.  In a similar way, abandoned buildings have their own sort of terror to it. It’s a place  that humans aren’t supposed to be anymore, and despite being dead, it still stands as  well as it can.

But these things, while dead, are incredibly human. Rot and decay are natural  parts of our world, and like so many mythical creatures and horror monsters, they serve  as extensions of our own natural fears. But… what’s natural about this?

If you’ve been  online long enough, you’ve come across images like this, called liminal spaces. Rather than  being some imaginary place, it’s rather a concept, and one that exists in reality. Many  people have tried to define what it is, but we should start with what all of these images  share, or rather lack.

Humans. Even further, any sign of humans. There can be infrastructure  and signage, clear evidence that people should be here, but… they’re not.

And it almost  feels like they never actually were. These places being photographed, too, are  almost always somewhere or something that almost everyone knows. A playground, a nondescript  hallway, even a famous music video.

It’s places that we’ve all seen or experienced that were  designed to be full of life. People moving, talking, humans doing human things, but…  without us. It’s artificial.

It feels like everything is placed intentionally,  mimicking the complexity and decay and life of our world, but falling flat,  landing squarely in the uncanny valley. Liminal spaces grew in popularity around  the same time as another internet trend. A modern day legend that’s been spread  around for the past couple years, of a place called The Backrooms.

It all started  with a single 4chan post. “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong  areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old  moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent  lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred billion square miles of randomly  segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around  nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

” The pure simplicity of this original post is the  very thing that makes it scary. Just like the x-raying of paintings and exploration of the out  of bounds, the Backrooms serves as the leftovers of our own reality. A place not made for us, but  instead out of everything that wasn’t.

Similar to liminal spaces, The Backrooms by design feels like  a place created from all of humanity’s collective unconscious. All of the faded, blurry images of  carpets and hallways merging together haphazardly and without any grand design. Using our minds as  parameters to generate a near infinite bounds.

The Backrooms started as an idea around 3 years  ago now and funny story, I was actually a pretty early adopter. Just one month after the original  post, I made a really shitty video quote unquote, “exploring” the Backrooms. However, just  like Kane Pixels, just like the community, and just like the original post itself, I missed  the scariest part of the Backrooms, the connection between all of these games and their limits.

When  talking about darkness, people love to mention the “fear of the unknown”. In the backrooms, every  single game and short film and video has some type of monster. It begs to answer the question  of the original post, what thing has heard you.

But, to be honest, I think the realer, deeper horror comes with the idea  that there’s nothing else at all. The thing you play as in Manifold Garden has  a goal. You solve a series of increasingly complicated puzzles using 4th dimensional gates to  travel between different infinitely large rooms.

You work to grow the garden one cube at a time,  until you’re finally able to make it past the final section of the game. And your reward for  doing all of this… is death. To stop existing.

You cannot die at any other part  of the game. There are no monsters, there’s no timers or fall damage  or any existential threat. No, the problem is much bigger than that.

While every  single room in the game is infinitely large, you know exactly what it is and what it will be  forever. There is no such thing as the unknown in this void. Every room is a prison cell  that goes on forever, in a body and existence that you can never escape.

It’s an artificial  immortality, devoid of life or change or meaning. The fear that we see in the void, in the out  of bounds, starts out natural. Like peering into a dark room, your brain goes wild with  what might be lurking inside.

Yet, after that brief moment, a greater, deeper fear sets in: the  realization that there is truly nothing at all. It’s like our brain breaks at the thought, the  idea of infinite nothing, that it doesn’t even connect with us until it’s right there in  front of our eyes. The natural result of a finite person creating a finite world, the  remainder of infinity.

Direct access to a place that’s truly and entirely inhuman, a vacuum  of absolute truth. Every time we play a game, we open a window  into a world filled with human limits. A world of mistakes, failures, bugs, glitches,  secrets, stories, beauty, and passion.

These tiny islands of light stand strong  and forever as monuments to humanity. All of our irrationality, the gap between functional  truth and absolute truth, the unknown and all of our imagination and delusions. We humans might  die, we hit our limits, just like any other day, but these worlds we create will last, just as  flawed and human as the person who made it.

A weak light forever shining in the infinite  darkness. Thank you and have a nice day. I hope you enjoyed the video.

This script was very  difficult to make and I still don’t know how well I really did on it, but I gave it my all. If you  enjoyed this video and think you might like more, consider subscribing to my channel. I work very  hard on the videos I make.

Unrelated, but if you like Trackmania videos, iceberg videos, or both,  I helped voice a Trackmania iceberg video on LoupphokTM’s channel if you wanna check that out.  Anyways, if you wanna go a step beyond and support me directly on my content, I have a patreon that  pays out only when I actually release a video. For just 2 dollars, it comes with a direct message  line to me, access to sneak peaks of my videos, comes with a role in my discord, and also  gets your name at the end of all of my videos.

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With all of that out of the way, I’m glad  you watched, and hopefully, see you next time.