Urban legends form an important part of socio-cultural narratives of shared fears and anxieties, and their presence online has developed similarly. This contribution explores the online urban legend the backrooms and examines its narrative construction offering possible reasons for the popularity and participatory aspect of the backrooms. Appearing on 4chan in May 2019, the backrooms represent an endless liminality. A diegetic analysis of 16 videos produced by Kane Parsons provides a sequential deconstruction of narrative elements within the backrooms, particularly the elements that exist within the fictional world of the narrative. A concurrent semiotic analysis examines the backrooms videos seen as an interrelated narrative. Narrative construction in the backrooms necessitates liminality alongside notions like video games, nostalgia, postmodern thought, and the vaporwave art/music aesthetic to reveal the backrooms as a digital chronotope. Findings reveal a clearer understanding of liminal spaces in the backrooms and relate how games and play address the narrative construction of the backrooms.

中文翻译：

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密室和阈限空间：数字城市传奇的探索

都市传说构成了共同恐惧和焦虑的社会文化叙事的重要组成部分，它们在网上的存在也有类似的发展。本文探讨了网络都市传说“密室”，并检验了其叙事结构，为“密室”受欢迎和参与性方面提供了可能的原因。 2019 年 5 月出现在 4chan 上的密室代表着无尽的阈限。对凯恩·帕森斯 (Kane Parsons) 制作的 16 个视频进行了叙事分析，对幕后叙事元素进行了顺序解构，特别是虚构叙事世界中存在的元素。同时进行的符号学分析将幕后视频视为相互关联的叙述。密室的叙事构建需要阈限性以及电子游戏、怀旧、后现代思想和蒸汽波艺术/音乐美学等概念，以揭示密室作为一个数字时空世界。研究结果揭示了对密室阈限空间的更清晰的理解，并将游戏和游戏如何解决密室的叙事结构联系起来。