Interactive media for cultural continuity: reimagining panji culture through branching narrative video game

Panji Culture is a collection of various literatures, poems, folksongs, performance arts, and folktales that depicts a group of various classical Javanese stories about Panji Tales. These stories are popular and widespread across Indonesia as well as Southeast Asia. Despite the rich cultural heritage and historical significance, there are noticeable decline in awareness and engagement with these narratives among younger generations. Using video game as digital media and modern entertainment and Panji Tales as the content, it is possible to leverage to revitalize interest in Panji Culture. As branching narrative may increase the replayability value of a game, the main goal of this research is creating branching narrative structure from multiple stories of Panji Tales to be adapted to fit the interactive nature of video games. The method of this research is conducted with literature study with comparative approach. First phase is breaking down stories into plot points. Second phase is finding possible nodes for divergence and convergence points for branching narrative. Third phase is assembling those points into a branching narrative and implementing it into digital narratives of video game. The main result of this research is a branching story that are combined from several Panji Tales stories that can be integrated into role-playing game concept. The branching story aims to engage multiple Panji Tales stories to modern audiences with a single video game title. In the face of the rise of digital media, traditional narratives of the Panji Tales are witnessing a significant decline in awareness and engagement. This research addresses this issue by leveraging digital gaming as a modern tool to revitalize and preserve these cultural stories.