# source engine maps and dry existential sadness in which there's little that's sadder than old source engine maps walking around these airless electronic deserts it's hard to imagine much fun happening there there's something about the virtual light of valve's ancient engine that makes all maps feel 'dry' - ontologically parched existentially dehydrated - desiccated considered as real places you can almost hear the dust of time settling and apart from your own listless heartbeat there are no birds or traffic in the background - only the blank light of an invisible sun without heat shining from anywhere in peculiar there are some impossibly ancient half life 2 death match maps still dutifully in existence humble garming servants forever in waiting for players to grace ir empty halls with the hollow sounds of gunfire and random gravity thrown projectiles such unaccountably strange conceptually arbitrary non-places express a quiet unspoken loneliness; an exacting vagueness of emotional form - an electronic dream of feeling lost in long abandoned digital nowheres a mildly desperate architecture of unflinching blankness - vulnerable tragic and oddly sublime [caption id="attachment_37973" align="aligncenter" width="656"] source engine isolation[/caption] it's almost as if a public secret is being expressed as every surface in such maps - but what are these places actually maps of and what is the secret // republic of bob