PRIMER

One of the most important, though perhaps less considered, aspects of art is negative space. In traditional fine art spaces this refers to any space not taken up by the focal point or main subject of an image.

Let’s illustrate this with a painting by Rene Magritte:

Georgette Magritte, by Rene Magritte. 1934

In this portrait of his wife, Georgette, the negative space is marked by the cloud pattern. The positive space is, of course, the portrait itself. While the negative space might not initially seem as worthy of attention, it is as important to the composition as the portrait. In fact, Magritte was very aware of this fact, and plenty of his more cheeky paintings intentionally play with the relationship between negative and positive space. Let’s take a look at The Flash, also by Magritte:

The Flash, Rene Magritte, 1959

In this painting Magritte takes what would generally be the focal point, the still life of the flowers, and gives it the properties of negative space by rendering it in silhouette, and then creates a second focal point within that space.

Here’s another example of playing with negative space, this time from surrealist graphic designer Shigeo Fukuda:

UCC Coffee Ad, Shigeo Fukuda 1984

Due to the large contrast and outlines, the initial shape that appears are the black hands holding coffee and large black space in the center. Cleverly, these hands also coordinate with the negative space to form a second set of hands, creating an illusion where both the dark and light spaces can both be considered negative space.

Negative space is the reason why cropping a photograph can improve its quality. It’s also part of the reason image services like Instagram default to a square format, which makes it easier to frame an image and see what parts of a composition feel correct in the frame.

Negative space applies to more than images as well. Think of music and rhythm, about the space between notes. Those notes you don’t play are as important as the ones that are heard. The same concept can also be applied to fiction and cinema, where the space in between events gives time for those events to “breathe” and can frame them with contrasting moments.

These are concepts, I’d argue, that are also useful when talking about videogames.

OCCUPIED SPACE

Another way to think about negative space is space that is “unoccupied”. While the multimedia nature of games makes it easy to apply ideas of negative space from other media upon it, thinking about it in terms of unoccupied space allows us to consider the way designers shape our interactions in a different way. Take a look at what the fighting game community commonly refers to as “zoning”.