before you read this article, please take a moment and read about the much more important news happening this week:

https://www.themarysue.com/video-game-metoo-allegations/

All of us know someone who’s had to spend most of their life inside of an office. The friend that seems to always be working either too late or too early. Often, they’ll talk of long hours under florescent lights.

The growing stresses of metropolitan life mean that the majority of us will have to (most of us already have) set foot inside of an office for work. Just like the roads in the city never seem to be wide enough, there never seems to be enough office buildings either.

Often inspired by brutalism, sitting far underneath the rest of the city in old strip-malls or towering over everything. High-rises of stacked concrete and featureless windows resembling ice-cubes that sit under the sun but never seem to melt.

Offices are urban spaces that have infiltrated the non urban. They share common architectural qualities with aspects of modern home design. A great deal of people are probably leaving work to go back to homes that look exactly like their workplaces do.

Under buzzing, blinding lights, the creaking of concrete towers rooted in asphalt and the rush of air conditioners that spend hours pumping buildings full of enough cool air to be habitable, there are empty caverns of an urban landscape.

It’s not surprise now that the emergent ghost stories in video games are about offices. From the ubiquity of indie games, of which every week it seems like there is a new You Are In An Office Late at Night, to Control or even back to F.E.A.R. The office building has started to steal ground from the popularity of the haunted house.

Are they really any different though? If we’re lucky, we’re able to bring a little bit of ourselves to every office we’re stuck living in. These spaces can become the new idea of the home. With access to an internet

Every office I’ve ever been in has had the same character as most of most ancient cathedrals in The United States. Their own character of architecture, a private genre just for people to sit at computers in.

There are the looming concrete monoliths of Government buildings. Offices that blend in so well with the buildings around them that we don’t even notice them. The squat buildings of abandoned retail malls that are turned into late night call centers for tech companies. There are as many flavors as ice-cream.

With the likelihood now that most adults (in the US) will have one of these faceless, drone jobs – it starts to make sense that they become spots ready to be explored in videogames. Twisting hallways and doors that only open to employees of a certain authority, dead end hallways and basement filing rooms. All places where small shadows cling to loneliness.

As so often happens, these places can no go beyond mere playgrounds or places a videogame is “set”.
Despite the fact that in my head I can’t even divorce it from places I’ve actually worked, we are a far cry from CS_Office. One only need look to this weeks release of Control to see a whole game set in a government-cum-office building.

There are the standard rows of desks you’d find in real life, the small pointless chambers dedicated the kind of tchotchke upper management is allowed to display. There are of course rooms that fold in on each other in possible ways. Sterile concrete hallways decorated only by new kinds of carpet. Ceilings that seem infinitely high. These little touches of flavor are fantasy, but they are a kind of caricature that’s rooted in reality.

Caricatures that are often exploring ideas shoved in our faces elsewhere. Giant companies like google have returned to open office floorplans of yesteryear, decorating all of the walls with kitsch. Very few videogames feature this type of office that aren’t explicitly denigrating. There’s an article about how people who make videogames in offices often have a lot to say about it, but not this one.

Yet I keep coming back to this singular thought of the office as an occult place. Certainly seeing a lot of Remedy’s Control lately has something to do with it. The workplace is one absolutely drenched in ritual. At this specific time of the day, you must file this document only in this one specific place. Never before and never later than that. In addition to those examples – I’m sure we can all think of the times someone has promised to summon a never-seen supervisor to deliver wrath upon us.

The office, like the home, is a place that can be infiltrated by all manner of ritual. Where there is ritual, there is a chance for that ritual to be interfered with by an outside force. Those outside forces are where horror begins – and precisely why offices make such good fodder for a ghost story.

Sooner or later, the Adult Occult will get us all.