The question is not settled. Rather than hide the drafts, this page keeps all of them, with the reason each one turned. A turn is a version bump, not a mess.
v1 — Game engine × live AV performance
Until roughly May 2026. Archived.
Instrument → engine → audiovisual output. A musician’s signal chain.
Why it turned: it only described the medium. There was no account of what the audience experienced, and no account of what the work was about.
v2 — Gameful design × embodied experience in screen-based installations
From 28 May 2026. The official MA direction.
In screen-based interactive experiences, how do gameful design principles shape the embodied sensory experience of audiences?
Why it turned: it gave v1 the missing half — how the audience feels, not just how the system works.
v2.5 — Multi-person collective experience
From late May 2026; adopted in the MA proposal, 15 June 2026.
Collective embodied experience among co-present bodies in immersive public space. Anchored on Wavy RGB and on relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, Bishop).
Why it turned: single-person embodied interaction already looked saturated — Tangible Affect (DIS ‘24) surveys 49 systems and finds hand-based interaction dominant. Multi-person collective experience read as the open gap.
v3 — The controller as an entry point
Emerging since August 2026.
An ordinary player, a game controller as a familiar cultural symbol, a screen, and an audiovisual response. Not a musician, not a concert.
Why it matters: this is the layer that keeps reasserting itself in my own practice, and it is the one v2.5 dropped.
v4 (current) — Strangers, co-present bodies, and narrative meaning
From 2 September 2026.
In multi-person interactive installations that depend on bodily co-presence, how do strangers construct narrative meaning through playing together?
Why it turned: v3 put a controller in one person’s hands and had no account of anyone else in the room. Phosphor is where that broke in my own work — agency belongs to the performer, but meaningful play has to hold for an audience holding nothing. v3 treated everyone who was not holding the controller as a residue. v4 makes the relation between co-present bodies the thing being studied rather than the thing left over.
What it takes back from v2.5, and what it repairs. It returns to several people in a shared space, which v3 had dropped. But v2.5 was never testable: collective embodied experience is not something a study can be pointed at. v4 names the condition and the outcome separately, and both are specific enough to fail.
- Strangers, not friends. This is a variable rather than a detail. Wavy RGB is the case that put it there — strangers organised into something like a community in minutes, in public, with no prior relationship to draw on.
- Narrative meaning, not presence. Most co-presence work measures how present or how comfortable people felt. v4 asks what they took the thing to mean, and whether that meaning was built between them.
What the reading supports so far. Three findings, all at abstract level and none yet verified against full text:
- Zhang et al. (CSCW 2020) study collocated play and meaning-making, but among friends, in found spaces, observationally — no designed intervention.
- The intercorporeal presence framework (Springer 2025) argues presence is co-generated through coordinated action rather than individually held, and offers five dimensions — posture, rhythm and synchrony, proximity, kinaesthetics — that could serve directly as analysis tools.
- Work on bodily interplay in social exertion games finds strangers share space and make contact measurably less than families or friends. That is the empirical reason the strangers condition is worth isolating instead of studying “multiple people” in general.
The literature currently splits along a line that is useful to me: co-presence research sits mostly in VR, is quantitative, and measures presence and efficiency; narrative meaning-making sits in game studies and narratology. The two lines barely cite each other.
What is still open.
- Whether the controller survives at all. It is the one element that came from my own fragments rather than from a literature, and v4 does not obviously need it.
- Whether “narrative meaning” can be recovered from participants at all, or only reconstructed afterwards. This is a question for micro-phenomenological interview and thematic analysis, and it decides whether the question is answerable.
- Whether an installation I can actually build produces the strangers condition, or quietly produces friends who arrived together.
How the v2.5 / v3 split stood before v4
Kept as the record of the reasoning, because v4 is an answer to it rather than a replacement for it. At the time this stood as: v2.5 and v3 are not the same research, and I have evidence pointing both ways.
| v2.5 — Multi-person collective | v3 — Single player, controller | |
|---|---|---|
| Theory | Bourriaud, Bishop, Zhou et al. | Embodied metaphors, meaningful play, ludus/paidia |
| Main case | Wavy RGB — field observation done | Sion Cao — interview done; Phosphor — my own work |
| Community | Relational aesthetics, participatory art | CHI PLAY / TEI, Exertion Games Lab |
| Where it lives | The written MA proposal | Everything I have actually read since June |
Two things make this uncomfortable and worth saying out loud:
-
The gap I found does not support the proposal I wrote. The convergence line in the readings was derived from seven papers, none of which are about multi-person collective installations. The empty coordinate it points to — an ordinary person, a controller, a screen, an audience whose body is involved — is a gap in the single-player literature.
-
The multi-person direction is not in my Fragments. It grew out of one field observation and a gap analysis. It did not grow out of my own practice.
How v4 answered it. Not by folding v2.5 into v3, which was the inclination recorded here at the time, but close to the reverse: the co-present multiple bodies of v2.5 return to the centre, and the controller becomes optional. What survives from v3 is its actual contribution — the insistence that the question be anchored in something concrete a person is doing, not in a category of experience.
Point 2 above still stands against v4 and is not resolved: the strangers condition came from a field observation rather than from a fragment. The seed about whether single-player interaction can be gameful at all is now the piece of my own material that v4 leaves unused.
What I would most like to discuss in supervision is now item 1 under v4: whether dropping the controller drops the only part of this that came from my own practice.
Working titles (supervisor exercise 1)
Attempts at a title and subtitle, made under v3. Both put a single player at the centre, so both need redoing under v4:
- Playing with a Controller in Public — gameful design and the embodied experience of the audience
- Holding the Thing You Already Know — the game controller as an entry point to embodied audiovisual experience
Neither is right yet.