Silence And Space
On the parts of games where nothing happens
A journal that formed around one disagreement and never entirely resolved it.
Silence And Space
On the parts of games where nothing happens
A journal that formed around one disagreement and never entirely resolved it.
Silence And Space is written by three people who could not agree about a boat. One of us thought a fourteen-minute row across an empty lake was the best sequence in a game we had all finished. Another thought it was unfinished content. We are still arguing, but now we time things.
The argument mattered more than the boat. What became clear over a long evening was that none of us could support our position, because we were describing sensations rather than the game: it felt long, it felt meaningful, it felt like padding. Everybody was certain and nobody had a number.
So we bought a mechanical stopwatch, which was a slightly absurd purchase, and started timing the parts of games where nothing was happening. Nine issues later the absurdity has not worn off, but the arguments have improved considerably. It turns out that once you know a corridor is six minutes fifty-five and that eighteen of its doors are empty, you are having a conversation about design instead of about taste.
Writing about games is well equipped to describe events and poorly equipped to describe their absence. There is vocabulary for a boss fight, a twist, a set piece, a mechanic. There is almost none for the twenty minutes of walking that preceded it, except as a complaint — bloated, empty, padded, a walking simulator.
Those complaints are often correct. A great deal of emptiness in games is a map built at the wrong scale, or a cut traversal upgrade, or a studio that mistook size for value. This journal exists to distinguish that from the other kind: emptiness a designer fought for, protected from playtesting feedback, and spent something to keep.
The question is never whether a stretch of a game is empty. It is whether the emptiness is doing work.
Each of the three of us plays every game in an issue to completion, at retail, before any timing happens. Then we time the same stretches independently, compare sheets, and write the essay around the places where our figures or our reactions diverge. Where we disagree, both positions appear in the essay — the reader who reloaded a save because they assumed the silence was a bug is in essay six, and the reader who resented walking half an hour to an unrewarded arch is in essay five.
Nine games go into an issue and between five and seven essays come out. The games that get timed but not written about are usually the ones whose longest silence is under two minutes, and their figures are published on the measures page because they establish the scale everything else sits on.
Two reasons, and the second is the real one.
The first is that naming turns an essay into a verdict. A piece arguing that a fourteen-minute row is load-bearing becomes, the moment the title appears, an opinion about whether you should buy that game — and readers reasonably start weighing the paragraphs as purchasing advice rather than as an argument about pacing.
The second is that we are frequently wrong about intent. When an essay says a designer withheld six systems from one crossing, that is an inference from play, not a fact about a meeting we did not attend. Withholding the title keeps the claim where it belongs: a description of what the game does, not an accusation about what somebody decided.
Issue six contained an essay about a game two of us had finished and one had not. The absent reader disagreed with the central claim on completing it four months later, and we published their objection as a correction rather than editing the original. It remains the only correction of that size in nine issues and the reason for the finish-first rule.
Issues appear when they are ready, which has averaged a little over twice a year. Timing nine games properly takes longer than playing them, and the second pass — the one with the stopwatch — is slow work that cannot be hurried without producing figures we would not stand behind.
There is no schedule, no newsletter and no way to be notified. The essay index is here and it changes when an issue lands.
The finding that has held across nine issues is the uncomfortable one: only around one stretch in eight survives five minutes without the game reaching for something to fill it. We assume this is a response to feedback loops that reward density, and we would be glad to be shown that it is instead a coincidence of the games we happen to buy.
If you run something similar and get different figures, that is more useful to us than agreement. We would rather the method were tested than adopted.