The Pararchive Project

Defunct software artefacts ignored by their creators – with availability, support and copyright often left ignored – has given rise to a culture of Abandonware. Amateur enthusiasts, unofficially and usually with fuzzy legal positions, make older software available through emulation or download. Just a few days ago, the Internet Archive launched a public collection of almost 2400 MS-DOS…

We have always had the notion of Pararchive stories inhabiting a tapestry of connected tales – with characters, places, objects, institutions and times as their connective threads. With the notion of serendipity at the core of our design philosophy, our hope was that these threads would allow new narrative patterns, paths and perspectives to emerge both organically and explicitly. Lately I’ve…

Everything happens in the mind of the player – the main character of the story. Part radio play, part interactive storytelling, ROOM is inspired by analogue, literary based computer games like Dungeons and Dragons & Interactive Fiction. In these, the player makes decisions that lead them through a variety of pre-determined adventures. However, in ROOM,…

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be a gathering place to experience narrative art and the evolution of moving images – from illustration to cinema to the digital mediums of the future. The museum’s seed collection – a gift from founder George Lucas – spans a century-and-a-half and features the images and the mediums…

Anna Anthropy’s queers in love at the end of the world is a provocative example of a brief game created using Twine, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories”. Anthropy’s game takes place in the last ten seconds of the world’s existence, forcing the player to make a series of decisions about how to spend the end of…

The Pararchive team has been reflecting on the merits of linear storytelling versus interactive non-linear storytelling. Though we’re still partway through the process of understanding the needs of our various communities, the question of linear vs interactive is already beginning to shape some of our design decisions. There’s great value in stories which have a…