Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between (2022) is an experimental single player game that was designed from the ground up as an exploration of, and vehicle for, holding space for players to reflect. In it, we used several strategies for doing so and saw interesting results — both positive and negative — from players.
An invitation to set the mood…
The music in Glitchhikers plays a crucial role in setting the tone of the game and conveying its emotional depth. Consider listening to it while reading this article to enhance your understanding of the experience.
Game overview
(Find out more about Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between at glitchhikers.com)
Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between is essentially a surreal walking simulator that comes in four flavors: a late night highway drive, a quiet train car in the early hours, a walk through a moonlight park, or the endless wait in a deserted airport. In each, players listen to strange music amid the ambient announcements of delays and the soliloquies of even stranger radio hosts.
Inspired by long travel and the stream of consciousness it fosters, Glitchhikers asks you to look inward. It is a game about “playing through” the thoughts and spaces that exist between destinations.
The game grew from an earlier, much simpler experiment back in 2014 (Glitchhikers: First Drive), which developed a small cult following. Over the following decade, we continued to hear from players that the game had been able to intervene in a particularly difficult time in their lives and left them feeling better off.
During the development of that initial 2014 experiment, it hadn’t really occurred to us that what we were making was also a meditation chamber for a “dark night of the soul” (i.e., a difficult time in someone’s life). In the development of Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between, we were keen to further explore the game’s possibilities in light of these player stories, especially with regard to intentionally offering space and support to players in crisis.
Designing apophenic settings
Glitchhikers began as an experiment in minimal interactivity, engaging the player in free-form association. It was a driving game without any of the mechanical hallmarks of a driving simulation, and although the main mechanics that actually “drive” the game forward were branching dialogue choices, the choices themselves were also quite nebulous.
A major narrative goal was to share the meaningful late-night solo drives we the devs had all experienced. Rather than representing any single one of them, or refining an amalgamation of them into a cohesive sequence, we instead tried to anonymize and abstract things, focusing our efforts on provoking the same kind of surreal contexts, mental landscapes, and soft focus that underpinned them.
Therefore, the dialogues, setting, art, and music are all set up to leave gaps, places for the player to themselves fill with meaning — taking advantage of “apophenia,” the human propensity to find meaning and patterns in chaos. One dialogue might reference a playground, chess, or maps; on later journeys, the player may see a character sitting in a playground or come across a chessboard or globe randomly placed in the environment.
Common themes repeat throughout the game as well: voice-over from an in-game “podcast” explains entropy, characters then explore the concepts in conversation, and a song that plays in their headphones repeats the imagery.
There’s no deliberate hidden meanings here, but a particular player who encounters these symbols at particular moments in their game journey — and in their real life — may assign them meaning and importance. In the quiet stillness of liminal spaces, Glitchhikers invites players to embark on a contemplative journey, where the boundaries between the external and internal world blur and allow the search for meaning to take center stage.
Creating provocative dialogues
In Glitchhikers, a major interactive vector for inspiring thought and reflection is through conversations with a host of strange and otherworldly “hikers” that appear throughout the game’s journeys.
While all 50 such conversations in the game are different, a core DNA or structure runs through most of them, giving players the space to reflect on the messages we’re exploring.
Dialogues in Glitchhikers almost all follow the structure set out in Creating Safer Spaces for Provocative Conversations:
- Pull the player in and set the tone
- Develop around something specific
- Expand that topic into a broader question about our place in the universe
- Turn it back on the player and ask them what they think
In Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between, a hiker on the Path engages the player in a conversation about art and its power, asking them what they think of different kinds of art and how it might affect them. Video courtesy of Silverstring Media.
In Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between, a hiker on the Highway talks about travel, turning from expansive, distant travel to a discussion about getting to know the places we live, and how society and politics might affect how we view our own local areas. Video courtesy of Silverstring Media.
Conversations in games can provoke player introspection and critical thought, holding space for reflection and transformative experiences.
Holding space
Since Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between was deliberately designed to confront players with provocative and challenging worldviews through NPC conversations, we wanted to explicitly add dynamics and mechanics into an otherwise standard conversation system that create opportunities for players and NPCs alike to model consent and roleplay care as well as demonstrate other good mental health practices.
As outlined in Checking In on the Player’s Well-Being, we did this in several ways:
1. Ask for consent
Certain conversations in Glitchhikers are about particularly dark topics: death or suicide, deep nihilism, and anxiety over the declining state of the world. Before each of these specific conversations, the NPC tells the player that the upcoming conversation may be dark and asks if the player is OK to proceed.
2. Thank for stating boundaries
If the player says no, the NPC will thank them for being clear about their boundaries, and end the conversation. (The true power fantasy of Glitchhikers: people respecting your boundaries.)
3. Thank for holding space
If the player does engage in a dark conversation with an NPC, the NPC will thank them afterward for holding space for them despite the difficult nature of the topic, again modeling care.
4. Allow opting out
Finally, at any point during any conversation, even if they initially said “yes” to engaging in the conversation, the player can choose to suddenly exit the dialogue. Maybe they said yes not understanding the ramifications, or maybe some unintended topic became uncomfortable to them. All they have to do is hit “Esc,” and they’ll be given the option to end.
Once again, the NPC always responds positively, respecting the player’s choice.
Checking in with the player
In a way, all of the NPCs in Glitchhikers are in some way “checking in” on the player, probing their sense of self and personal philosophies.
But one NPC in particular has a special role and relationship with the player: The Clerk. The way this character “checks in” is much more direct, and directness — to the point of breaking the fourth wall — is part of their function. They serve as an introduction and tutorial of sorts.
After the player has had one of the more difficult or dark conversations, the clerk will automatically check in with them the next time they speak. Any time they speak with the Clerk, the player can tell them that they aren’t feeling well at the moment. If they do, the Clerk will commiserate and start following a basic self-care flowchart — asking the player, “Have you hydrated lately?” and then going through the checklist of usual issues: “Have you taken your meds?”, “When was the last time you’ve eaten?”, etc.
In Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between, the Clerk checks in with a player after a difficult conversation. Video courtesy of Silverstring Media.
Player feedback — Positive and negative
Glitchhikers is a small game with a small audience; it may never reach beyond its niche. However, the feedback we’ve received has been fairly consistent, even going back to the initial version of the game. And we’ve seen that these strategies can work — the game has helped some players process their lives and move forward with more confidence.
Dialogues and themes
Not everyone has found the game so profound, of course. A common refrain is that the game isn’t very deep, that it’s very “Philosophy 101.”
Another critique is that the hikers are pretentious because they are like the insufferable people at parties who pretend they are deep when they’re actually quite shallow. The reviewer isn’t wrong — the hikers are, necessarily, shallow automata that won’t ever truly know you. They are a reflecting pool, not an ocean.
As a tool for introspection, Glitchhikers is about what you bring to it and what it brings out of you, not what it provides on its own.
Clerk check-ins
“This is the game some of us really need,” one player said after encountering the Clerk’s feel-better flowchart.
The idea isn’t necessarily that every player needs these kinds of support or will directly benefit from them being in the game. Nevertheless, including them signals to players that this is a safer place to be Not OK within.
However, player responses are not always positive.
Glitchhikers: First Drive did present a much more classically existentialist, sometimes even nihilistic, perspective on the world and did not prepare the player or ask for forgiveness before launching into discussions of suicide. For some people, existing alongside and thriving despite a bleak reality is a point of pride, and the constant centering of the player’s needs and mental state in The Spaces Between, paradoxically, represents an assault on that.
And of course, many players simply did not fully understand what we were attempting to do with the game — their experiences are valid, but do not in turn invalidate our own efforts.
Lessons
It would be impossible to please all players, and Glitchhikers especially is a game trying to create a very specific type of experience, though we endeavored to make it universally accessible. However, there are a few things we might have done differently, in retrospect:
- Put more thought into establishing the “secondary magic circle” for most check-in efforts, giving players the opportunity to separate, filter out, or reject them as desired.
- Create additional “roleplaying” vectors for players to express their dissatisfaction or disagreement with the hikers.
- Create more opportunities for hikers to respond emotionally, or delve more deeply into their topics.
- Build systems to allow conversation topics to be more targeted, perhaps asking the player what they’re looking for in a given play session.
Final takeaways
Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between is not a typical game — it’s niche and experimental. From the beginning, it was meant to explicitly be a space to explore difficult issues and provoke introspection, so we designed the game with those strategies built into its very foundation.
Not every game will be that, and not every game should be. But we know that for many players, it worked. Glitchhikers has been an important part of the lives of some of those players.
Some have found it downright therapeutic (and appreciated that Glitchhikers doesn’t charge by the play session). Of course, it’s important to note that we are not therapists, and jokes aside, we do not believe that games like this can ever be a replacement for therapy. We are also not developers that specialize in creating gamified meditation apps, or have scientific data and metrics to back up the statistical gains that playing Glitchhikers can provide.
But this work, and these types of experiences, are valuable.
Now what?
The Power of Holding Reflective Space
Games can be transformative experiences, and designing with that possibility in mind is important for digital thriving.
Creating Safer Spaces for Provocative Conversations
Conversations in games can provoke player introspection and critical thought, holding space for reflection and transformative experiences.
Checking In on the Player’s Well-Being
Here are several ways that NPCs and the game itself can directly check in on players’ well-being.
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