Written text for a collaborative project by Chris MacInnes & Eleni Zervou.
Commissioned by +DEDE

"The games we play, whether as children or as adults, at once reaffirm hegemonic social structures while also revealing to us the rules of play. Whether they are games of chance or games or strategy, play achieves this ambivalence through a spatial symbolic motif that Huizinga calls "the magic circle." [...] The magic circle need not actually be a circle, nor need it be magical. "Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the 'consecrated spot' cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground." Hence a playing field, a game board, or even a special hall or building can be an incarnation of the magic circle.[..]"
- Eugene Thacker, In The Dust Of This Planet

Three years ago, an anonymous 4chan user posted an image in the /x/ forum1 in a thread about cursed images. The image showed a room with mono-yellow patterned wallpaper, dingy fluorescent lighting, stained carpets and a sense of impending dread; the more you looked, the more you felt disquieted. The user called this The Backrooms, a space you enter when you noclip out of reality: the humming buzz of the lights, the stench of the mildewed carpets, the lack of human presence, and the sensation of familiarity give The Backrooms a feeling of Kenosopia, the eeriness of places left behind.