Cybernetic semiotics in interactive digital narratives: Toward a semiotic framework for meaning-making in cyberspace with Detroit: Become Human as a case study

Razizadeh, Ali

doi:10.22059/jcss.2025.406313.1198

Cybernetic semiotics in interactive digital narratives: Toward a semiotic framework for meaning-making in cyberspace with Detroit: Become Human as a case study

Document Type : Original article

Author

Ali Razizadeh

Department of Media Arts, Religion and Media Faculty, IRIB University, Qom, Iran.

10.22059/jcss.2025.406313.1198

Abstract

Background: Cyberspace has evolved into a vast and intricate cultural ecosystem in which the boundaries between communication, cognition, and creation are constantly being redefined.
Aims: This study examines how digital interactivity restructures the semiotic logic of narrative meaning-making within contemporary cyberspace, using Detroit: Become Human as a paradigmatic case of interactive digital narrative. The research aims to determine how multimodal signs, procedural architectures, and player agency interact to produce dynamic and networked processes of semiosis.
Methodology: Through an integrative semiotic framework, encompassing multimodality, interactive agency, and branching narrative design, the analysis demonstrates that meaning in the game emerges not from fixed textual structures but from recursive exchanges between human interpretation and algorithmic responsiveness.
Findings: The findings reveal that the game’s interactive architecture generates a self-modifying semiotic environment in which choices function as sign-acts that reorganize symbolic patterns across divergent narrative trajectories. This networked mode of signification reflects the broader cultural logic of cyberspace, where meaning is co-created through participatory, decentralized interaction rather than linear authorial transmission.
Conclusion: The study concludes that interactive digital narratives constitute a distinctive semiotic paradigm, one that transforms storytelling into a collaborative and cybernetic process of meaning construction. These insights offer a foundation for future research on how digital media, algorithmic systems, and user participation jointly reshape contemporary forms of narrative and cultural signification.

Keywords

cyberspace studies

Detroit: Become Human

interactive digital narrative

player agency

semiotics

Subjects

humanities & social sciences

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