If i could be bothered to google it, i would remind you of a previous boingboing post about, a sub genera of writing along these very lines, about people being trapped in ikea, and monsters apering when the lights went out, in the form of ikea staff, and they had to build forts out of the endless furniture to survive, i think at one point there was even the start of a procedural generated game made off the idea…
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Likewise. I had to stop watching the procedurally generated building sequence, because it reminded me too much of a recent dream where I was going up and down staircases and through rooms trying to find the exit. But there’s only really one exit to a dream.
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I experience this everyday at work. I lock up.
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I work at a university, normally bustling with all kinds of people. My work had me in my building even during lockdown earlier this year and I was surprised at how unsettling it can be to find oneself the only person in a huge building… it is good to have kenopsia as a word to describe it. By the time I had overcome kenopsia at the lack of people, they started coming back and I was even more unsettled by that.
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The library is large. It does contain a description of everything. Including, if one allows an arbitrarily long list of volumes a complete enumeration of all the possible quantum states in the universe from big bang to big crunch. But it’s not infinite. The number of volumes, although incomprehensibly large, still rounds down to zero.
Citation needed
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I never played Myst, but Zork absolutely does it for me. Of course, that can work both ways - sometimes a real-life place can remind me of it, as well.
This old locktender’s house on the Hennepin Canal near Wyanet, IL just needs a mailbox in front of it. Well, not quite, the direction is a bit wrong for the entrance. 
Of course, the canal itself has this kind of vibe; it’s a state park now with a bike trail along most of its length. It was already obsolete by the time it was completed, but construction techniques developed for it were later used on the Panama Canal.
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I had been stationed at the decomissioned US Navy Hospital Philadelphia as it was being sunsetted .
That place had spanned a long city block and had long passageways with locked doors and a general abandoned dilapidation overlaying its WW2 aesthetics. So weird being the only person awake on an overnight watch and wandering the mazes of once-bustling halls at 2am. Loved it. The rooftop of the elevator towers had an unparalleled view of the Philly skyline.
Also, the game Portal 2 has a bit of this vibe of a massive complex which had been abandoned but still has the touches of people who were once there, plus it seemed to have the potential of being endless as well.
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I work for a telecommunications company. My office is in a building complex that once had about 2500 people coming to work. Now, between the massive downsizing of the industry and tele-working and before the pandemic, we maybe had 80 people showing up for work. The company is stuck with it because of the massive cost to rebuild the labs in a smaller facility. There are hundreds of empty offices and cubes all over the building. It’s a sad reminder of the people who once filled the place. I find it curious that anyone needs or wants to realize this kind of space artificially.
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For that dream quality, it should proceduraly re-generate things depending on time and distance from you. Walk down a corridor, look back, and in the distance it’s not quite the same.
Dial it up for that Corwin of Amber hellride effect, where things further away are constantly shifting.
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One of the things that made the horror video game Layers of Fear so effective in evoking a sense of dreamlike instability was taking advantage of the malleability of a digital environment to do things like swap whole sections of the scenery when you weren’t looking at them, sometimes several times in quick succession. It’s very impressive and seamless, though now it’s lost its effectiveness a bit because everyone and their uncle started aping it.
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In the 18th century, architect and artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was designing on paper what he could not construct in real life. His Imaginary Prisons invoke colossal ruins of the past that dwarf and overwhelm their human inhabitants. The image below also features an early example of impossible architecture, created about a hundred and forty years before Escher’s birth.
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Note too, Clive Barker’s depiction of the glorious cityscape of Heaven that becomes more baroque and outrageous and insane the further into it one travels.
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I have re-occurring dreams of neglected pets and unescapable interiors. The interiors are the worst - if I manage to go out a window… I look up and instead of sky there’s just ANOTHER CEILING.
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Came here looking for a link to this. Thanks!
@JJA thanks for mentioning the artist Piranesi. Awesome art that I never mind revisiting.
And it’s hard to believe that no one has mentioned the speculative fiction novel Piranesi, which came out a few months ago. It was released as mainstream and critics all loved it.
It’s the best book I’ve read in a long time. I loved the long stretch at the start, incredibly well written, of kenopsiac atmosphere.
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