We survive not in our bodies, but in our legacies—and in the memories others carry of us, where we settle into a space of relevance within posterity. To exist in the distant future, then, is to exist as a subject of mourning. Yet this status is no longer an exclusively human privilege. The mnemonic space of remembrance is no longer cushioned by speciesist criteria for eligibility; increasingly, more-than-human beings and beyond-human landscapes are remembered as sentient, or at least as worthy of care, attachment, and grief. Humans now constitute only one part of a broader field of mournable life and loss.

Traditionally, mourning has been organised through culturally specific rituals and communal practices that stabilise social bonds, reaffirm human exceptionalism, and delimit who is considered mournable. In contemporary digital cultures, however, these boundaries are unsettled as digital infrastructures transform the scale, temporality, and visibility of mourning across cultures and species. Online elegiac practices—ranging from social media memorials and digital rituals (Hu & Hong, 2025; Romeo, 2020) to interactive autobiographical and speculative games (Chew & Mitchell, 2016)—reconfigure mourning by transforming how loss is expressed, shared, and preserved. In doing so, they reshape cultural memory in ways that are particularly significant to the field of Digital Humanities, where questions of mediation, archive, and memory intersect with digital infrastructures and more-than-human histories.

The study is hinged upon a four pronged theoretical framework—posthumanism (Hayles, 1999; Haraway, 2003; Wolfe, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, Nayar, 2023), affect theory (Kübler-Ross, 1976; Klass et al., 1996; Tomkins, 2008) elegy studies (Costello, Morton, Sherry and Spargo in Weisman, 2010) and reading practices (Richards, 1938 in Das, no date; Brooks, 1947; Iser and Fish in Baktir, 2019; Moretti, 2013; Drucker, 2017; Schelpe, 2026)—that establish the foundation for positing the study as a dedicated meditation on “ludiobiographical” (Gallagher, 2022, p. 370, cited in Nayar, 2023, p. 220) Now, drawing on a systematic literature review, this study finds that mourning emerges not as a private psychological process but as a relational, distributed, and posthuman event involving humans, non-human life (Satama & Huopalainen, 2018; Laue, 2019; Chemi, 2025), landscapes (Cohen, 2022; Radomska & Åsberg, 2022; Zaiets, 2024), and technological infrastructures (Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish, 2013; Harju, 2024). Digital platforms store, circulate, and reinterpret the dead in generative yet fraught ways, raising urgent questions of ownership, consent, and Indigenous or collective data sovereignty. Whose grief becomes publicly archived? Who benefits from these digital traces? And how might vulnerable communities reclaim agency over their dead and their data?

This study proposes POEM (Posthumanist Mourning, Online Mourning Practices, Elegy 2.0, and More-than-human Beings and Beyond-Human Scapes), a new analytical framework that integrates posthumanist approaches to mourning with the methodological and infrastructural affordances of Digital Humanities. The framework enables a systematic analysis of how grief, memory, and care are mediated across digital environments. By aligning digital mourning with broader debates on cultural memory, archival materiality, and more-than-human histories, the project situates online elegies within the ADHO 2026 subtheme Remembering | Digital Humanities and the Memory of the World. Further, this study argues that digital elegy constitutes an emergent form of memory practice that exceeds traditional archival logics, generating communal, political, and multispecies modes of remembrance. Ultimately, it positions the digital elegy as a critical site for rethinking memory, relationality, and futurity in a technologically mediated and ecologically precarious world.

The project approaches these infrastructural and political questions through posthuman theory and play, treating interactive fiction not as an aesthetic supplement but as a critical method for inhabiting, exposing, and reconfiguring digital power relations. Thus, the author presents early development work for You Are a Cosmic Dream, an original Twine game designed to explore posthuman memory-making and relationality through interactive fiction. Players inhabit one of three more-than-human figures—Laika the space dog, the Ayrshire two-headed calf, or the recently surfaced anglerfish—each navigating symbolic landscapes (Outer Space, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Atlantis).

Figure 1 Titlecard of the game

The prototype version of the game was built using the default Harlowe 3.3.9, which forgoes extensive knowledge of HTML, JS, and CSS in favour of a familiar narrative construction and progression. This readily allows writers to become game makers “[b]y focusing on the expressive potential of hypertext, rather than the technological capabilities of the platform” (Friedhoff, 2013). The visual assets consist of self-drawn GIFs, while the audio assets were sourced from Pixabay, an open-access repository for audio-visual material; all associated files, along with their relevant metadata and usage information, are documented and stored in the corresponding project repository. At any rate, some game dynamics must be explained thus:

• Embodiment, while not explicitly foregrounded as a mechanic, is operationalised at the point of character selection (one of the three elegiac anymal subjects—Laika, or Two-Headed Calf, hereafter named “Ayreshire” after a famous taxidermized version of a specimen, or the 2025 Anglerfish, hereafter named the “Angler”) and subsequently extends throughout the game as an underlying posthuman sensibility.
• The player progresses through a sequence of structured challenges, referred to as “Encounters,” that require active responses and cumulatively shape the journey’s trajectory.
• The journey is governed by a dynamic system of opposing forces constituting the player's “Essence,” where each decision in the Encounters alters one of the two Essence points by increasing or decreasing it—of course, the player will not know which until after the decision is already made.
  For each character, there are different essences: for Laika, connection and isolation; for Ayreshire, unity and diversity; for Angler, visibility and obscurity. As in any other game where a certain buff could give a ‘stat boost,’ having more of a certain quirk—say, more Connection scores than Isolation scores in the Laika path would unlock specific branches otherwise hidden and vice versa. It is not the intention of this author to decide if an attribute is more ‘important’ than its counterpart, but to highlight that player choices influence both the essences accumulated and the journey direction.For each character, there are different essences: for Laika, connection and isolation; for Ayreshire, unity and diversity; for Angler, visibility and obscurity. As in any other game where a certain buff could give a ‘stat boost,’ having more of a certain quirk—say, more Connection scores than Isolation scores in the Laika path would unlock specific branches otherwise hidden and vice versa. It is not the intention of this author to decide if an attribute is more ‘important’ than its counterpart, but to highlight that player choices influence both the essences accumulated and the journey direction.

Figure 2 Screenshot of an in-game passage in the Laika path

• The overarching objective is “Existence,” conceptualised as a personalised form of the posthuman condition (POSThuman—whether as (self), other(), or future(), which emerges as a direct outcome of the player's accumulated decisions and navigational choices. This part draws inspiration from minimalist works like Space Frog (npckc) and mourning-oriented games such as Goodbye (barrels).

The game is currently under development, featuring 41 unique passages and 23 links, with Chapter 1 of the Laika story track completed, and an early version of the Angler journey. As such, the prototype link will be made available on itch.io as soon as possible. For now, players can access it via GitHub (https://github.com/kaushikichowdhury/You-Are-a-Cosmic-Dream-Twine/tree/main).

Figure 3 Twine Workspace for an early version of passage networks in You Are a Cosmic Dream

Most of all, while posthumanism and DH both call for expanded notions of subjectivity, vulnerability, and world-making, they largely circulate within inaccessible academic spheres. This project counters that exclusivity economy by rendering theoretical concepts playable. The project argues that interactive digital fiction offers new modes of remembrance that unsettle canonical archives and invite players to inhabit posthuman grief, care, and futurity. The presentation will outline the conceptual framework, prototype design, and early implementation of this pedagogical and speculative digital humanities tool.