P.T.
GameBy Kojima Productions · Released Aug 12, 2014
Documents about P.T.
Whitepaper13 pages
Aesthetics of Holarchic Narrative Design: Participatory Pleasures of Game Storyworlds
Holarchic Storytelling (HS) is presented as an aesthetic approach to narrative design in which games fragment their stories into self-contained yet interconnected units, or "holons," such as notes, recordings, and sub-stories.
- Holarchic Storytelling fragments a game's narrative into self-contained but interconnected units called 'holons' (notes, recordings, sub-stories) that work both as standalone experiences and as contributions to a unified storyworld, drawing on Arthur Koestler's holon theory and James Dalby's 'holarchic media.'
- The approach is framed as a response to commercial pressure on player retention and the rise of open-world design, both of which favour participatory and interpretive engagement over passive reception.
- The author argues that players shift from consumers to active meaning-makers, a relationship termed 'creatorship,' in which player agency and authorial intent occupy opposing poles.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Living Games and Digital Decay: Curating as Temporal Practice
This paper examines the challenge museums face as they increasingly collect video games whose identities shift through updates, expansions, and community activity.
- Living games such as Minecraft, Fortnite, and World of Warcraft resist fixed identity because they function as ongoing networked processes shaped by updates, expansions, and community activity, so museum preservation must shift from the artifact to its temporality.
- The paper's central argument is that preserving living games requires attending to their entropic dimension: systemic decay, obsolescence, and infrastructural fragility built into platform-based existence.
- Games depend on server continuity, patch cycles, licensing arrangements, and corporate ecosystems, so earlier versions, features, and worlds are routinely superseded or made inaccessible.
DiGRANov 2025
Companies behind it
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