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Empty Room Psych: Difference between revisions
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Over decades of play, gamers have been conditioned with the notion that there is no such thing as an "empty" room -- [[The Law of Conservation of Detail]] demands that if a room is placed in a game, it must do ''something'' of value, be it a scripted plot event or NPC, [[Dungeon Shop]], [[Level Grinding|monsters to slay]], [[Inexplicable Treasure Chests]] containing [[Healing Potion|healing items]] or weapons/ammo, [[Plot Coupon|Plot Coupons]] to pick up, etc etc. After all, programmers and writers have limited time and money to do this, so they won't needlessly create a majestic cathedral and fill it with ... empty white space to distract the player from [[Notice This|more important stuff]]. Plus, why torture those players out for a [[Hundred Percent Completion]] by adding loads of [[Copy and Paste Environments|copy-pasted rooms]] with [[Missing Secret|nothing in them]]?
The purpose of this trope is often to keep players on their toes, either by filling the room with enemies (essentially a trap room) or to get the above confused reaction. Players who run into enough consecutive Empty Room Psych's may overlook or ignore a new one, thinking there's {{color|white|[[Self
Now if you wander into an ''exceptionally large'' empty room, especially one [[Suspicious Videogame Generosity|with a nearby]] [[Save Point]], this usually means one thing and one thing only: [[Boss Room|Incoming]] [[Boss Battle]]!
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Not to be be confused with the psychological study of [[Go Mad From the Isolation|being left alone in an empty room]]. When played for terror, see [[Nothing Is Scarier]]. See [[Cow Tools]] for a non-video game sister trope.
{{examples
== Action-Adventure ==
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** ''[[Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (Video Game)|Final Fantasy Mystic Quest]]'': All of the cavernous "temples" on the southern continent. Absolutely nothing useful in them besides restorative items and one brief, optional encounter with the Old Man.
* While there are more than a few rooms empty of enemies or treasure in ''[[Vagrant Story]]'', they all at least lead somewhere, except for one room early in the game which contains only a few enemies and nothing else, leaving you to simply leave the way you came in.
* In ''[[Tales of Symphonia (Video Game)|Tales of Symphonia]]'', there's a tall building in Welgaia with two identical rooms on each identical floor. Most of them are empty. One potentially contains Regal's [[Infinity
** Also in "[[Tales of Symphonia (Video Game)|Tales of Symphonia]]". In Palmacosta there is a lighthouse that you can't enter because the guy in front of it says that everyone who goes up there gets sick. As soon as the first people to enter Palmacosta saw this they swarmed the internet with questions about it. Some presented theories that a secret item/weapon/character/boss/ability was up there. Eventually people did some searching and found out that it was part of a mini-game (that didn't give you anything in the Gamecube version and a Title in the [[PS 2]] version).
** A popular theory was that Raine's [[Evil Weapon|Devil Arm]] was inside the lighthouse, as it can be found {{spoiler|among the city's ruins}} after {{spoiler|Palmacosta gets destroyed mid-to-late game}}.
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