Silence And Space
On the parts of games where nothing happens
Short terms for a journal that publishes six essays a year and sells nothing at all.
Silence And Space
On the parts of games where nothing happens
Short terms for a journal that publishes six essays a year and sells nothing at all.
Reading these pages means accepting the terms set out below. They are brief because the journal consists of essays and nothing else: no accounts, no purchases, no submissions and no undertakings about anything you might buy elsewhere.
The durations here were timed by hand by three readers and are honest but approximate. The essays are arguments about design, not purchasing advice, and no game discussed is ever named.
Each essay describes a stretch of a finished game in which the designer withheld something, measured against the four conditions set out on the measures page. Every figure was produced with a mechanical stopwatch on a second pass through the game, recorded on paper, and cross-checked between three readers.
They are not instrument readings. A hand-timed duration carries a margin of error of a second or two at the start and end of every measurement, and a stopwatch cannot capture how long a stretch felt. Where subjective duration matters to an argument, each reader's account is given separately rather than averaged into a number.
They are not reviews and carry no scores. Because no game is named, no essay can function as buying advice. Nor are they statements about how a game was made: where an essay says a system was withheld or a decision was fought for, that is an inference from play and is offered as such.
Nothing here is commissioned, sponsored, gifted or shown to anyone outside the journal before publication. We accept no review copies, run no advertising, hold no affiliate arrangements and receive nothing of value from anyone connected to any game examined. Games are bought at retail by whichever reader plays them first.
The essays, the photographs and the illustrations on this site were made for it and remain the property of the journal. A reasonable extract may be quoted for discussion, criticism or review provided the journal is credited and the sense is preserved. Republishing an essay in full, or reusing the artwork, requires our agreement.
Where a figure turns out to be wrong, the essay is amended in place and the correction recorded at the foot of it, with the original claim left visible. The timing sheets behind every issue are retained so that a disputed duration can be re-checked, and one substantial correction has been published in nine issues.
This is a small self-funded journal and the site is offered as it is, with no undertaking that it will stay reachable, complete or unchanged. Issues are frequently late. Essays may be revised, and in rare cases withdrawn if the timings behind them prove unsound.
The essays are published for interest and argument. So far as the law permits, we accept no liability for any decision taken on the basis of anything here, including decisions about how to spend time or money on games we have deliberately declined to identify.
Should any page here point to a destination we do not control, that destination is governed by its own terms and we make no representation about its content, accuracy or availability.
These terms describe how the journal currently operates. If that changes — if it ever took funding, or began accepting copies from publishers — the terms would be rewritten before the change took effect and the difference stated plainly on this page.