UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Server Worlds: Preservation

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

IRVINE

Server Worlds:

Preservation, Virtualization, and Infrastructures of Control in Online Gaming

DISSERTATION

submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in Anthropology

Evan Paul Conaway

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Tom Boellstorff, Chair

Associate Professor Keith Murphy

Associate Professor Valerie Olson

2021

DEDICATION

For my grandmother, Grace, who would be proud to know I eventually went on to become a

doctor, though maybe not the type of doctor she had in mind.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF FIGURES iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi

CURRICULUM VITAE x

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION xiii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: Servers in/as Place 17

CHAPTER 2: Private Server Temporality, Preservation, and Resistance 55

CHAPTER 3: Restoring Offline Worlds at a Video Game Museum 90

CHAPTER 4: The Enchanting Afterlives of Decommissioned Servers 124

CONCLUSION 162

REFERENCES 166

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 0.1 Members of The Church guild 3

Figure 0.2 Reinserting a server blade into a server rack 9

Figure 1.1 You have been disconnected from the server 21

Figure 1.2 Realm selection screen 28

Figure 1.3 An impromptu dance party 32

Figure 1.4 Proudmoore Pixel Pride celebration 35

Figure 1.5 Character Transfer image 38

Figure 1.6 Proudmoore is full 44

Figure 1.7 Cross-server play 51

Figure 2.1 PlayStation 5: Digital Edition 59

Figure 2.2 A list of expansions and patches 61

Figure 2.3 A list of vanilla WoW private servers 69

Figure 2.4 Players demo WoW: Classic at BlizzCon 2018 88

Figure 3.1 Gaming in the MADE 91

Figure 3.2 The apocalyptic end of Planetside 97

Figure 3.3 Viewing the MADE from the street 101

Figure 3.4 Logging into NeoHabitat 112

Figure 3.5 The MADE tweets about DMCA exemptions 117

Figure 3.6 Black and white photo of the now closed MADE 122

Figure 4.1 A Proudmoore server blade 126

Figure 4.2 The commemorative plaque on a server blade 133

Figure 4.3 A World of Warcraft tattoo 141

Figure 4.4 A server blade at the Computer History Museum 147

Figure 4.5 World of Warcraft memorabilia on display 148

Figure 4.6 A framed server blade display 153

Figure 4.7 A broken server blade case 158

Figure 5.1 Autonomy Cube, a server sculpture by Trevor Paglen 165

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I finally made it to the end, and I have many people to thank. First, I would like to extend my

gratitude to all of the nerdy gamers and experts I spoke with while conducting this research,

especially the folks at the MADE, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive, as well as all of

the anonymized World of Warcraft players who shared with me their passions and experiences.

I’d especially like to thank the Rough Trade Gaming Community, who welcomed me with open

arms during my first summer of preliminary research. I had the absolute pleasure of being a

member of their guild in Guild Wars 2, and the Bear Taint guild in World of Warcraft. My

guildmates provided me with so much guidance, encouragement, and friendship that were

invaluable early on in my research career. Lok’tar Ogar!

I’m very fortunate to have had an incredibly supportive and patient dissertation committee,

who have all been sources of endless intellectual inspiration and knowledge, always challenging

me to think and write more creatively. My chair Tom Boellstorff—who has been my advisor

since day one—has helped me every step of the way, generously doling out sagely wisdom

paired with concrete anecdotes, and acting as my True North whenever I felt lost. Keith Murphy

has been both a critical mentor and confidant, unafraid to push me with my arguments and light a

fire under my ass when I needed it most, while also carefully tending to my own insecurities and

doubts. Valerie Olson has always encouraged me to consider the relations between things in new

ways and was the first person to suggest servers as potential objects of study, a rabbit hole I am

very grateful that I decided to tumble down.

Working on an interdisciplinary project meant that I had the opportunity to interact with

amazing scholars across campus, especially the Informatics Department. Bonnie Nardi and

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Aaron Trammell both served on my orals committee and left me with key theoretical and

ethnographic threads to follow as I headed to the field. A special thanks to Amanda Cullen and

Spencer Ruelos, colleagues from Informatics who were vital conference buddies, game studies

partners, and Pokémon Go teammates. I want to give a special shout out to Bo Ruberg, a queer

icon who has expressed support and enthusiasm for my project at various stages. I’d also like to

thank Lina Eklund, who I met at the Queerness and Games Conference organized by Bo, for

inviting me to be a visiting researcher at Stockholm University for a summer, where she

encouraged me to consider the MADE as a potential field site and set up meetings with scholars

from around the country to give me feedback on my project design.

I benefitted greatly from participating in Kris Peterson’s post-field course, along with

colleagues Forest Haven, Sandy Wenger, Annie Wilkinson, Oviya Govindan, and Kyrstin

Mallon-Andrews. Being able to share frustrations, work through ideas, and receive feedback on

early writing in a safe space with such brilliant minds was both electrifying and deeply soothing.

Thanks to Melissa Wrapp for the Instagram check-ins and words of encouragement. Special

thanks to Sandy and Chandra Middleton who agreed to form what we called our “Dissertation

Support Group” as we were in the throes of writing, while researching Animal Crossing. Their

camaraderie, humor, and sarcastic wit have been invaluable assets throughout graduate school,

but especially welcome in those final months of writing. Their thoughtful comments were

immensely impactful to drafts of all four chapters.

This project was possible thanks to financial support from the National Science Foundation

Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Department of Anthropology, and the

School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

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I would like to thank all my other friends and allies who have supported and encouraged me

throughout this entire process. A special thanks to Jenn Thompson, my early mentor in

anthropology, for taking me on as an assistant and teaching me how to be an ethical, rigorous,

and resilient anthropologist. I would not have been able to get through this without my chosen

family: Thomas, Luke, Alex, and Brad. Thanks for all the fun adventures, as well as your infinite

warmth, wisdom, and light, especially when times felt impossibly dark. Thanks to my Bay Area

family, especially Brianna, my fellow Southern queer in the big city and the best listener I’ve

ever had the pleasure of knowing. I owe a debt of gratitude to Justin, one of my closest and

dearest friends who selflessly offered editorial advice for the final draft of this dissertation.

Thanks to Juan Pablo for loving me, giving me space, and carrying me to the finish line.

While I was living in Oakland and conducting this research, I stumbled into a new hobby: the

art of drag. Performing in drag quickly became my primary creative and emotional outlet and

introduced me to a thriving community of incredibly supportive and passionate individuals

across the Bay Area. I owe it all to Padraig (aka Rosie Petals) for offering to put me in makeup

for the first time and believing in my talent and humor. Thanks to Donnell (aka Ava LaShay), a

dependable friend who gave me my first opportunity to perform in front of a crowd, and for

booking me again, even though I forgot my heels. Thanks to Edsel (aka Nia Politan) for all the

inconsolable laughter; she is truly the Trixie to my Katya. There are too many others to name,

but these people are my family, my light, my coworkers and co-conspirators, and my friends for

life.

I am also very grateful for the powerful friendships I made during various stints in Southern

California, between Irvine, Long Beach, and Riverside. Thanks for Hayden for building up my

confidence and showing me how to be more open about my emotions. Thanks to the Mordoors

family in Orange County—Janiece, Marty, Alex, and Nikki—for all the late-night Netflix binges,

game nights, and Halloween parties, and a special thanks to Nikki Crenshaw for the mentorship

and frequent ego boosts. When I first moved to Long Beach after fieldwork, Maliq was my

closest friend, ally, and fellow queen, and I am so grateful for those times she made me get in

drag just to go out. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, I moved in with Billy and Trent, who

took care of me when I broke my arm and supported my digital drag projects. I’m forever

grateful for their generosity and friendship.

Finally, I would like to thank my biological family in Georgia, for nurturing my quirkiness

and giving me the tools and support I needed to accomplish my various creative and academic

projects. Thanks to my mom and dad for always reminding me how proud you are of me, and for

being patient while I pursued a nontraditional scholarly path. Thanks to my brother Kyle for

being my original gaming buddy, and for teaching me the true joy of play and healthy

competition. Thanks to Austin, my sister-in-law, for always cheering me on and truly being the

sister that I never had.

I am humbled to look back at all the people who have built me, loved me, and supported me.

In this dissertation, their voices echo between the margins. Thank you. I love you.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Evan Paul Conaway

EDUCATION

2021 Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine)

2017 M.A. in Anthropology, UC Irvine

2017 Graduate Specialization in Anthropologies of Medicine, Science, and

Technology, UC Irvine

2013 B.A. in Anthropology and Spanish, University of Georgia

AWARDS AND HONORS

2020 Associate Dean Fellowship, UC Irvine

2018–19 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant,

Cultural Anthropology, “Computer Servers and User Communities,” Tom

Boellstorff, PI

2015-17 Summer Research Fellowship, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine

2016 Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, Collaboratory for Ethnographic

Design, UC Davis

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

2021 The Law in Computation: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data

in the Age of Algorithmic Governance. With Tania DoCarmo, John Emery,

Noopur Raval, and Stephen Rea. Law & Policy.

2016 Colleagues as change agents: How department networks and opinion leaders

influence teaching at a single research university. With Tessa Andrews, Erin

Dolan, and Jun Zhao. CBE-Life Sciences Education.

2015 Undergraduate students’ development of social, cultural, and human capital in a

networked research experience. With Erin Dolan and Jennifer Jo Thompson.

Cultural Studies of Science Education.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

2020 Social Media and Youth Wellbeing Report: What We Know and Where We

Could Go. With Mizuko Ito, Candice Odgers, Stephen Schueller, Jennifer

Cabrera, Remy Cross, and Maya Hernandez. Connected Learning Lab website,

published June 23.

2019 The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds. Platypus, the

official blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and

Computing (CASTAC), posted 10 December.

2018 Do We Inherit Abandoned Online Games? Platypus, the official blog of

CASTAC, posted 27 November.

2018 Privacy and Piracy: Investigating Unauthorized Online Gaming (Law in

Computation Series). Platypus, the official blog of CASTAC, posted 8 February.

2017 From the Archives: Play as Theory, Object, and Analytic. American

Anthropologist website, posted 27 November.

2017 Locating Servers, Locating Politics. Platypus, the official blog of CASTAC,

posted 17 October.

2017 The Nerd is Dead, Long Live the Nerd. With Lina Eklund. Platypus, the official

blog of CASTAC, posted 27 June.

2016 Pokémon GO and the Visibility of Digital Infrastructure. Platypus, the official

blog of CASTAC, posted 26 July.

2015 Queering Representation in Video Games: a review of Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming

at the Edge. The Geek Anthropologist, posted 22 May.

INVITED TALKS

2019 Guest speaker, “Critical Play” undergraduate course (Laura McGough,

instructor), School of Art, Alfred University, 10 April.

2017 Guest speaker, “Technology, Sexuality, and Gender” graduate course (Bonnie

Ruberg, instructor), Department of Informatics, UC Irvine, 7 November.

2016 “An Ethnographic Approach to Studying Game Servers.” Invited speaker (Lina

Eklund, host), Stockholm Internet Research Group, Stockholm University,

Sweden, 13 September.

2016 “Server Worlds: the Ethnographic Lives of Game Servers.” Invited speaker

(Fatima Jonsson, host), Media Technology Department, Södertörn University,

Sweden, 7 September.

2016 “Server Worlds: the Ethnographic Lives of Game Servers.” Invited speaker

(Patrick Prax, host), Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University,

Sweden, 1 September.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2021 “Virtual Worlds, Mental Well-being, and COVID.” Presentation at Virtual Ability

Mental Health Symposium, Virtual Ability island in Second Life, 16 April. With

Tom Boellstorff and Sandy Wenger.

2019 “The Spirit of Vanilla: Player Narratives and the Recreation of Classic World of

Warcraft.” Presentation at panel “Evolving Worlds: Historicity, Temporality, and

Change in Online Worlds” at the 118

annual meeting of the American

Anthropological Association, Vancouver, 23 November.

2019 “Living by the Code: Drafting and Enacting Community Guidelines for a More

Inclusive Esports Environment.” Presentation at panel “Fostering Diversity” at the

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annual UC Irvine eSports Conference, 10 October. With Amanda L. L. Cullen

and Matthew Knutson. Also published in Conference Proceedings

2018 “Abandonware and the Preservation of Online Games.” Presented (and panel

organizer) at panel “Fanthropological Adaptations” at the 117

annual meeting of

the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, 17 November.

2017 “Coercive Play: Questioning the Intersection of Values, Culture, and Design.”

Co-organized workshop with Nicole Crenshaw, Matt Knutson, Amanda Cullen,

Dan Gardner. Presented at Critical Games Studies Symposium, UC Irvine, 1 May.

2017 “The Branding and Censoring of a Queer Gaming Community.” Presented at

panel “Games and Community” at the Queerness and Games Conference,

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1 April.

2016 “The Virtual is Material: Spatial and Social Realities of Virtual World

Infrastructure.” Presented at panel “Information Infrastructures: Materials,

Knowledge, Place” at the 115

annual meeting of the American Anthropological

Association, Minneapolis, 18 November.

2016 “Virtual Flesh: The Technical Modification of Queer Self-Presentation in World

of Warcraft.” Presented at panel “Nuanced Bodies” at the 8

annual

Anthropology in Transit Graduate Student Conference, UC Irvine, 1 April.

2015 “Identity and Community in Queer Online Gaming Spaces.” Presented at panel

“Who Are (Queer) Gamers?” at Queerness and Games Conference, UC Berkeley,

18 October.

RESEARCH APPOINTMENTS

2020-21 Graduate Student Researcher, “The Role of Emerging Virtual Cultures in the

Prevention of COVID-19 Transmission,” UC Irvine, Tom Boellstorff, PI

2019 Graduate Student Researcher, “How Can Digital Connections Support Mental

Wellness for Vulnerable Teens? A Synthesis of Research and Development of

Targeted Interventions,” Connected Learning Lab, UC Irvine, Mizuko Ito, PI

2017–18 Graduate Research Fellow, Technology, Law, and Society Graduate Fellowship

Program, UC Irvine, Bill Maurer/Mona Lynch, co-PIs

2016 Visiting Scholar, Stockholm Internet Research Group, Stockholm University

2015 Summer Research Assistant, Biology Education Research Group, UGA

2013–14 Full-time Research Assistant, Biology Education Research Group, UGA

TEACHING APPOINTMENTS

2020, 2021 Teaching Assistant, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine

2017–19 Anthropology Instructor, Summer Interdisciplinary Field Program, UGA

Course co-taught: Honors Introduction to Anthropology, three summer sessions

2014–17 Teaching Assistant, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine

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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Server Worlds: Preservation, Virtualization, and Infrastructures of Control in Online Gaming

Evan Paul Conaway

Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology

University of California, Irvine, 2021

Professor Tom Boellstorff, Chair

This dissertation focuses attention on the capacity of servers, the mundane building blocks of

internet infrastructure that support online social environments, to be understood as worlds

themselves, as places with names, histories, and politics. This dissertation turns to game servers,

those that help to run virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, to explore questions related to

infrastructural forms, players’ memory practices (like the memorialization, commemoration, and

preservation of games), and struggles for control over games in light of processes that continue

to strip players of their agency. In studying player practices, I explore how relations between

servers and worlds shape and are shaped by gamer communities.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 12 months, this dissertation follows

distinct, yet overlapping populations of players as they engage with different memorial practices

and desires. Traversing multiple field sites, this study follows World of Warcraft players and

explores their nostalgic yearnings, onto a museum in Oakland working to preserve virtual

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worlds, finally landing in players’ homes as they remember gaming experiences channeled

through commemorative server hardware.

Through an analysis of the memorial practices that players perform through servers, this

dissertation contends with both the infrastructural qualities of servers and their impacts on users,

tracing the ways that the state of matter in which servers exist is seemingly in flux, as a result of

cloud computing. This dissertation therefore contributes to anthropological studies of both virtual

world sociality and infrastructure, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of the shifting

relationships between digital technologies and the worlds they generate.

Introduction

It had been an hour since we started chatting about World of Warcraft (WoW), sitting around

a table outside of a Panera Bread in Brea, California. Although this was meant to be an

interview, it was also the first time East, Sig, Adore, and Ember had seen each other in quite

some time, so I gave them space to reconnect in person. These four WoW players were former

members of a guild—a structured gaming community in WoW—called “The Church,” and as we

sat there, I marveled at how vividly and collectively they remembered specific moments from

their time playing WoW together. They recounted fond memories of exploring dungeons

together, attending in-person guild meetups, and forging lifelong friendships. At one point, Sig,

former leader of their guild, interrupted the conversation and asked: “Can we see it again?” East

thoughtfully combed his beard with his hand and responded with a nod.

Moments later he was walking back from his truck holding “it”—a large black rifle case,

about three feet long and one foot wide, which he placed on the table in front of Sig with a smile.

It felt like everyone was holding their breath as East opened the case to reveal the thing that had

initiated this gathering. The case no longer held what it was designed to contain. Its interior was

padded with grey foam, with rectangles carved out on the top and bottom to fit the shape of the

object it was now modified to protect: a WoW server blade. A server “blade” is the hardware that

is dedicated to running server software, forming the vital “back end” of WoW which supports

online gameplay. Servers are the things that allow players to share space together in a “realm”—

an individual instance or copy of the game world with its own population of players. Though the

current physical infrastructure of the game looks different today, there was a time when each

realm, of which there are dozens, ran on four of these now-obsolete server blades. This particular

blade is one that, from November 26, 2004 to June 9, 2010, helped to run the Darkspear realm,

the very realm where the members of The Church guild played together for many years.

I had learned about this group from a thread on the subreddit r/wow, in which the original

person posting was showing off their own server blade from a different realm. Reading through

the comments, another user’s remark caught my attention: “One of my guildies bought one, and

every time we get together, everyone signs it.” That commenter was Adore, who privately shared

with me the story of The Church’s Darkspear server blade and sent me photos from guild

meetups, where attendees proudly posed with the autographed server. After some back and forth,

she put me in touch with East to organize this meetup with some local guild mates, to chat about

their experiences and to see the blade in person. Before the meetup, East and I had a private chat

where he explained that the commemorative server had been purchased by a guildmate and close

personal friend of his, Lion, who had recently passed away. Lion, who had been ill for some

time, bought the blade and showed up to a meetup unannounced with it in hand, with the

intention of leaving something behind for the group to remember their bonds and experiences at

various scales: in WoW, on Darkspear, in The Church, and at these meetups.

Imagine for a moment that you lived in the Bay Area of California, and for five years

explored its towns and hinterlands with a group of friends—shared adventures and challenges,

but also shared quiet moments of storytelling and made memories. Now imagine if the Bay Area,

a place that captured an important time of your life, could be saved on an object small enough

that you could carry it with you, and furthermore that the Bay Area had otherwise ceased to exist

in the physical world. This somewhat awkward analogy captures some of the emotional power

and cultural meaning of the story I have just described.

The server, even as an artifact no longer sitting in a data center, carried so much significance

from its previous life as the host of a world. It was in seemingly pristine condition, the plexiglass

Figure 0.1: Members of The Church guild huddle around a World of Warcraft server blade,

indicating the signatures of their guildmates. Source: Author.

cover wrapped in plastic to protect it from scratches and wear. Yet even with the plastic wrap on,

I could see the silver Sharpie markings all over it—signatures and messages from fellow

guildies. Adore and Ember stood up to get a better look. I watched the four of them as they

enthusiastically pointed to each other’s signatures and lovingly called out their names: “there’s

Lion’s right there.” I learned that the guild’s membership extended well beyond Southern

California, with players even traveling from Brazil and Europe to attend annual in-person

“ChurchCons” where the blade sometimes made an appearance. As they scanned the object’s

surface and wondered aloud how certain people might be getting on, Sig made tentative plans to

post on The Church’s Facebook group about scheduling another guild meetup to get signatures

from a select group of people who had yet to wield the silver Sharpie. The server that once

united them virtually had now become a catalyst for in-person gatherings.

Throughout our meeting, the four of them would periodically point to the server, saying

things like “that was our server.” From moments like this, where “[t]he material artifact ‘points

to’ other phenomena (social meanings, history) as an indexical sign” (Beckstead et al 2011, 199),

to the practice of autographing the surface of the blade, what is important about the Darkspear

server blade for this group is its value as, in a very real sense, the actual place where collective

experience took place. It constitutes the place where a group of people’s affects, investments,

affinities, and memories of both a game and a social world. Yet during the time in question, it

literally was the world of World of Warcraft, the sociotechnical instantiation of a well-trodden,

deeply meaningful and real place that triggers memories and storytelling. Of particular import

here is that the technological foundation of a virtual place can act as an artifact to memorialize

the community that once inhabited that place.

At first blush, this server blade might seem to be like to a commemorative plaque at a

memorial site. In one sense the analogy is apt, since the blade is no longer plugged into an outlet

and is no longer connected to the internet. Yet in another sense, the analogy misses how the

server blade actually constituted the place of sociality within which these guild members

remember their unity, their past experiences and relationships, and Lion, an important individual

for whom they have collectively mourned. It was clear by their reactions and stories that

members of The Church saw this otherwise-mundane object as more than just a dead piece of

hardware or collectible item of WoW merchandise. On the contrary. While it was active, the

server was the place of sociality itself. As a disconnected artifact, it symbolizes and

memorializes collective experiences from many people who have and can still interact with it. It

overflows with life, especially when in the presence of those who inhabited it when it was “live.”

From the intangible memories and feelings evoked by its presence to the very tangible and

permanent markings placed there by guildmates, to the unusual things people do to it (like

licking it, as Sig had reportedly once done), it is an enchanting source of remembrance and

nostalgia, deeply evocative and strangely beautiful despite its mundanity.

This is one of four Darkspear blades in existence and only one of several hundred server

blades that were auctioned off in the early 2010s. As I stand watching the members of The

Church take a group selfie with decommissioned server hardware from an online game, I am

struck by the magnitude of the game’s influence on people, and marvel at how this object can

constitute both a world and countless players’ experiences. How can a server, an object that

normally lies unseen and so far away from its users, carry this much weight for these

individuals? What impacts can servers have on players, and what meanings and practices have

been evolving around them? What other server stories are there to tell?

What is a “Server World”?

This dissertation is about shifting relationships between digital technologies and the places they

create. It focuses attention on the capacity of servers, the mundane building blocks of internet

infrastructure that support social environments on the internet, to be understood and experienced

as worlds themselves, as places with names, histories, and politics. In particular, this dissertation

turns to game servers, those that help to run virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, to explore

questions related to infrastructural forms, players’ memory practices (like the memorialization,

commemoration, and preservation of games), and struggles for control over games in light of

processes that continue to strip players of their authority. In studying player practices, I explore

how relations between servers and worlds shape and are shaped by gamer communities.

The term “server” has a number of distinct but interrelated uses in English. Generally, the

term is used to describe someone who works in a restaurant or bar who brings food and drink to

customers. In law, a server is a person who hands off legal documents, like a contract or

subpoena, to a recipient. Server is also used in tennis to denote the player that begins the match

and first sends the ball to the other side of the court. The common meaning between these

definitions is that a server is someone who delivers something, like a message, a product, or a

service. In computing, we can understand a server as both a recipient of requests and as a

deliverer in response. Servers deliver messages, products, and services in the form of data

packets transferred over a network; in other words, a server is a computer at one end of a

network that makes certain services accessible to other computers in the network. According to

media historian Markus Krajewski, the use of this term to describe these machines constitutes a

metaphor that draws upon historical understandings of servants and servitude. In his book The

Server, Krajewski (2018) writes that, “the server metaphor represses some levels of meaning but

privileges others, and in that process forms an image that renders visible the services of those

mysterious network actors… the image of a diligent and quiet, present yet absent servant helps

others understand the notion of the server as a function of permanent data availability” (324–25).

The server is an agent of service, one that operates in the background and delivers the data and

information required for everyday interconnectivity.

There are millions of servers that make up the structure of the internet, including email

servers, web servers, media servers, file servers, and more, all dedicated to their particular roles.

Almost every action that the average internet user takes requires interactions with one or more

servers. In our everyday lives, even though we might not always be aware of it, we constantly

interact with servers. A key feature of servers is that they are infrastructural, and as such, when

they are working as intended, we as users barely notice them. They are often hidden from view,

located in distant, remote buildings known as data centers. By now, thanks to journalists and

technology companies like Google posting “insider views” of server rooms, you may have

actually seen a server, one of many boxes with blinking lights in one of many black cabinets,

neatly arranged in rows in data centers around the world. As the “back end” node of a network,

each of these boxes does the work of responding to data signals and requests for access in

isolation from users at the various front-facing ends of a network (the “end users”). Servers often

only make themselves known in moments when something goes wrong. For example, an

unstable connection or network failure might trigger the server to send a message to the user

saying something to the effect of “server error” or “the server is not responding.”

Most of the literature in infrastructure studies deals with material infrastructures, the

“material forms that allow for exchange over space” (Larkin 2008, 5). This includes things like

roads (Harvey and Knox 2012), pipes (Anand 2011), and undersea fiber optic cables

(Starosielski 2015). Servers are infrastructural objects that actually occupy both physical and

digital space. Like these other forms of infrastructure, servers are tangible, material things, heavy

metallic boxes sitting in data centers. At the same time, servers are also the name used for the

software programs encoded into the hardware components of server blades. Therefore, it can be

said that servers are an assemblage of material and virtual components, an inherent dualism in

which they have been designed to exist. However, what has been happening over the last decade

is that the state of matter in which servers exist is seemingly in flux, and in many cases this

seemingly material infrastructure can become “more virtual.”

What is sometimes called “server virtualization” is a process by which server systems

become integrated in a cloud-based system, in which developers can designate many server

softwares to run on one server hardware to improve efficiency. The entangled processes of server

virtualization have had immense impact worldwide, but in this dissertation I focus on the effects

that changing virtual world server forms have on their inhabitants. By virtual worlds, I mean

persistent, shared environments generated by computers, where people take on avatar bodies and

interact daily, forming long-lasting relationships and dynamic communities. These worlds are in

part powered by servers, which are responsible for enabling multiple people to co-exist in one

place together. Virtual worlds can take many forms, from the social sandbox worlds like Second

Life and Minecraft, to the more game-oriented massively multiplayer online role-playing games

(MMORPGs, or simply MMOs), WoW and Final Fantasy XIV. In this dissertation I will largely

focus on the server entanglements of players of the latter, specifically WoW gamers, though I

will make references to other worlds, such as Second Life, as points of comparison. I hone in on

more game-oriented worlds to focus on certain changes that the games industry has undergone in

the last decade, ideological shifts in business and product decision-making that have not only

necessitated alterations to infrastructural forms, but also immense changes to how games and

game worlds are designed and marketed as services. I bring into conversation anthropological

literature on infrastructure with scholarly work from game studies, examining how fans of online

video games experience infrastructures and sometimes assert control or authority over that which

might normally be out of reach.

Though servers might “operate in the background” of MMOs and virtual worlds, gamers are

acutely aware of their presence and impact on their daily lives, in a way that other users of the

internet might not always be. It is typically not through technical know-how that players come to

understand servers, but instead through the ways in which servers shape so much of in-game life.

Figure 0.2: The VP of Global IT at Blizzard Entertainment reinserts a World of Warcraft server

blade into a server rack at their headquarters in Irvine, CA. Source: Documentary, World of

Warcraft: Looking for Group (2014).

As has been the case in most MMOs, the population is often divided up across multiple servers,

which all run distinct copies of the world, in order to lighten the load on other servers. As an

analogy, imagine if there were multiple copies of Los Angeles, all identical in appearance and

essentially layered on one another, occupying the same space, but with different populations of

people living with them. Though not always the case, oftentimes when players first enter an

MMO, the system asks them to choose a server on which to play, a process which some players

describe as choosing a home or planting one’s flag. Even if players do not actively choose a

server, as is becoming more common in the MMO genre, the system typically will assign the

player to a server and the player is shown a message that might read something like “Looking for

World” or “Looking for Server.” Moreover, in-game time—often called “server time”—which

players use to organize events and meet-ups, is determined by the geographical location of the

server on which one is playing. Servers are undoubtedly integral to virtual world experiences, as

scholars of virtual worlds studies have highlighted in their work (see Boellstorff 2008; Taylor

2009; Nardi 2010). These virtual worlds, therefore, are more-than-virtual.

What this dissertation contributes to academic literature on virtual worlds is to take into

account the ontological perspective of understanding servers as worlds, proposing a theoretical

reframing of virtual worlds as “server worlds.” In putting forth this analytical approach that

largely operates infrastructurally, in the background of each chapter, to network all the chapters

together, I center servers as objects of anthropological inquiry in the studies of virtual worlds

and, more specifically, online game worlds like WoW: as foundational infrastructure that shapes

social interaction, as sites of meaning-making and resistance, and as tools for world creation and

re-creation.

Just as the forms that servers take are in flux, so are the virtual worlds they support.

Leveraging servers constantly running in the background, game developers are able to update

these games on the fly, to quickly fix bugs and add content. This has created a situation in which

virtual worlds, like other modern software, are frequently being modified and altered, with new

versions with the latest updated software replacing previous versions. Additionally, most virtual

worlds do not survive forever; sometimes developers take them offline permanently,

disconnecting the servers and causing the world to cease to exist. As a result of changing and

disappearing virtual worlds, many players are often nostalgic for lost worlds, and take up

projects to bring them back. Therefore, in light of these cultural and infrastructural shifts, I

analyze the place of servers in player practices around remembering, examining how passionate

fans of games use servers to act upon their nostalgic longings for past versions and for games

that are no longer online. I focus especially on the challenges they encounter when taking on

projects of world restoration, as well as the ways in which using servers for preservation

practices actually constitutes a kind of resistance, which in some ways can be seen as granting a

certain amount of otherwise unattainable infrastructural authority to end users.

Although this is a study of gamers, this is not a study of gameplay, per se. Rather, I follow

the lead of anthropologist Valerie Olson (2018) in closely examining systems of changing

relations, and treating the server, as she treats the “system” in her work on spaceflight programs

in the US, “as an ethnographic object—a relational technology—to examine socially

interconnected… efforts to naturalize as well as build sets of relations” (217). I offer close

examination of sets of relations between players of massively multiplayer online role-playing

games, developers of these games, and the infrastructures that support them, as well as the

memorial practices of gamers as they commemorate, preserve, and restore online game worlds.

Inspired in part by the work of Raiford Guins (2014) and others in the growing field of game

preservation studies who are invested in studying the “afterlife” of games, this dissertation

follows what I call a life path of game servers, marking particular “stages of life.” While the

server is not a living organism, terminology of life and death pervades discourse around them:

players describe an online server as “live,” a low-population virtual world as “dying,” and

decommissioned servers as “dead” hardware. They use such terms generally to describe servers

and virtual worlds in moments in transition, from one state of matter or being to another. These

paths are often not predetermined or linear; as such, I trace gamer narratives across the moments

of juncture and transition. Each of the chapters in this dissertation focuses on a distinct moment

in which the vital relationship between servers and virtual worlds takes shape, from servers

dying, to worlds being brought back to life using servers, to dead servers gaining new value in

light of the lives they impacted.

The Lives and Afterlives of Game Servers

The first chapter begins with an exploration of the vitality of game servers, and what servers

mean for players in their everyday lives playing World of Warcraft. I examine servers’ impacts

and effects on player social worlds when they are working as programmers designed them to

work, seated in data centers, connecting people together, and supporting social interaction. In

doing so, I argue that what makes game servers appear lively is that they have populations of

players using them. To tell the stories of server vitality, I begin by investigating servers “in

place,” highlighting their infrastructural qualities and illustrating those moments when servers

“surface” and make themselves known to players. I then move to defining servers “as place,”

explaining how server worlds are shaped by both hard-coded and soft-coded rules and defining

how WoW players have historically understood salient ideas of server community, server

culture, and server identity as core features of their play experiences.

As a specific case study of these concepts, I draw upon data collected during two summers of

ethnographic fieldwork with an LGBTQ gamer community, the Rough Trade Gaming

Community, on WoW’s Proudmoore server, which many players describe as the “gay server.”

The chapter ends with an exploration of the mortality of game servers, and the ways in which

WoW developers have altered their server architectures in light of so-called “dying servers” or

“ghost servers,” or ones that have lower active populations of players. I discuss important

changes that have been made to the way servers work and how the process of server

virtualization has immensely altered social worlds, leaving players feeling that they have lost

control of their worlds as a result of changing infrastructural forms.

In the second chapter, I turn to the next server life stage, one characterized by refashioned

and preserved servers. I follow the stories of players holding onto old forms of life by creating

what are known as “private servers,” or servers that are privately administered by individuals or

teams of people. These private servers run game server software that has been recreated by fans,

largely in order to keep certain outdated infrastructural forms alive and make accessible previous

versions of WoW that have since obsolesced, specifically the original or “vanilla” WoW. I argue

for an understanding of these private servers as forms of what Kari Kraus (2011) has called “folk

preservation,” or projects for the preservation of cultural artifacts conducted by laypeople, as

opposed to a more formal institution like a museum, library, or archive. I also build on

Alexander Galloway’s (2004) concept of “protocological power” to propose that, when players

go “back in time” using private servers, they are resisting the forward motion of the game

industry by wielding what I call “server power,” a rare moment when end users re-appropriate

and retake control of the infrastructure upon which a virtual world is run.

Tapping into survey and interview data collected from WoW players who had experienced

playing on or running vanilla WoW private servers, this chapter delves deep into capitalist

structures in place in the gaming industry, like the “Games-as-a-service” consumer model, which

have created the problem of “versioning.” A nightmare for players and for preservationists alike,

versioning is a process by which old versions of online games get buried under updates and

large-scale expansions to the game world. This chapter also outlines certain temporal instabilities

of private servers, or the limitations and weaknesses that stand to threaten their longevity as

active worlds and put players in a precarious state of potentially losing their game data and their

communities.

Virtual worlds and their underling infrastructure not only undergo numerous changes, but

also can be said to “die” when developers decide to disconnect their servers and take them

online. The third chapter examines virtual world death and people’s efforts to bring these lost or

defunct virtual worlds “back to life.” Turning from examining forms of folk preservation to

institutional preservation projects, in this chapter I look closely at how one institution, the

Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) in Oakland, CA, has become involved in

nostalgia-fueled necromancy, restoring network connectivity to offline virtual worlds. This

research was conducted with key staff members at the MADE, and is bolstered by interviews

with historians, journalists, game developers, and a legal scholar who has worked closely with

the MADE. Pairing this ethnographic data with a review of archival legal documents, I attend to

the ways in which the MADE has acted at social, technical, and legal levels to alter the structural

conditions that challenge their efforts.

These challenges include what I call the “worlds-as-a-service” paradigm (a play on the idea

of “games-as-a-service”) under which virtual worlds are understood to be services rather than

products, and the current US copyright legal regime, specifically the Digital Millennium

has worked to alter these systems, I recount two examples: (1) the MADE’s recent efforts to

restore the world’s first graphical virtual world, Habitat, using obsolesced server hardware and

reverse-engineered server software; and (2) how the MADE, alongside legal teams, historians,

and activists, have leveraged a segment of copyright law that enables certain work-arounds,

called copyright exemptions, to extend their efforts, in essence hacking or “modding” the

doctrine.

Finally, this dissertation ends just as it began, with an examination of the decommissioned

WoW server blades described in the prelude to this introduction. Drawing upon data collected

from a survey of almost 100 players who had purchased one of these pieces of server hardware,

interviews with a subset of this group, and a comprehensive review of Reddit posts about these

objects, the fourth and final chapter looks to the afterlife of “dead” server hardware: unseated

from data centers, circulated among players, and gaining new value and meaning as

commemorative artifacts. This chapter captures a rare moment when infrastructure changes

hands and players get the opportunity to own a server on which they once played, and the

multiple intersecting meanings that players attach to servers. I describe players touching,

holding, displaying, and protecting servers, examining how these individuals, through their

interactions with servers and other players, variously make sense of and value these objects as

doubtlessly nostalgic artifacts, ones imbued with social, memorial, aesthetic, spatial, and

historical value.

Because players generally expressed a sense of wonderment about these paradoxical objects

that both represent experiences and are understood to literally “contain” experiences and

memories, I employ Jane Bennett’s (2016) concept of “enchantment” to describe the multi-

faceted and difficult-to-define fascination players have with these at times seemingly magical

artifacts, literally inscribed with meaning across their material surfaces. Bringing the afterlife of

physical servers into conversation with the first chapter’s focus on server virtualization, this

chapters closes the loop and addresses how these server blades came to be in circulation in the

first place, examining how the changing material form of the server, in the context of WoW, has

impacted this style of virtual world commemoration, as well as players’ relationship to game

companies as consumers and fans.

We are now living in a world powered by servers, vital infrastructures that keep us

interconnected. This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of populations of people who

interact with servers in specific, and often incredibly direct, ways. These interactions are in some

ways distinct to specific communities of play, but they also illuminate broad cultural

understandings and practices of digital culture. In each chapter I approach the historic,

contemporary, and evolving relationships between gamers, game developers, virtual game

worlds, and the servers that run them from a different perspective. Ultimately, each chapter

addresses a manner in which forms of server ownership and control shape and are shaped by

gamers’ memorial practices and engagements with the past.

Chapter 1

Servers in/as Place

In 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, I made a new friend online. He was a lifelong

gamer, with extensive experience playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games

(hereafter MMOs), including Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. One night, after giving each

other a tour of our Animal Crossing islands, we decided to chat on FaceTime, and eventually the

topic of my research came up. After a little back-and-forth between explaining my research

topics and answering his questions, he got hung up on something I had said—that servers matter

differently for gamers than for the average person. He cocked his head inquisitively and looked

off-camera for a moment. Looking back at me, he responded: “What do you mean by that? I

mean, when I talk about servers, it’s just for figuring out how to meet up with friends in the

game. Servers are the world.” It is this exact notion that I examine in this chapter. It is not that

servers are like worlds—rather, they are the world. This ontological distinction is worth

exploring in order to uncover the cultural significance of servers. What social and technical

processes have made players tacitly experience servers as worlds? How do players develop a

sense of the “culture” of a server? In this chapter, I argue that players’ conceptions and

experiences of the game server as a place are shaped by both the characteristics of the server as a

piece of infrastructure designed by developers and the characteristics of the sociality that

emerges among the people that choose to play on that server.

Servers are unmistakably present in the work of those studying virtual worlds, and they are

clearly important to the lives of players who depend upon them for gaming and social

interaction. What differentiates game servers from e-mail servers or web servers is not a

significant difference in hardware components. In other words, the materiality of these worlds

are not contingent on the materiality of the servers, but rather a difference in the design of the

software: that the programs stored on them allow multiple people to occupy social space together

simultaneously. Servers are often described as “dedicated” to a task, like a Dropbox server is

dedicated to storage. The way game servers are coded make them dedicated to the tasks of co-

presence and synchronicity, making it possible for players’ avatars to stand next to one another

and to register the movements, actions, and communications of one player’s avatar on other

players’ screens. Because of the way the infrastructural networks of game worlds like World of

Warcraft (WoW) are designed, servers play an integral role in the place-making practices of

players. In the sections that follow, I will describe how gamers have come to experience and

inhabit servers as worlds, specifically focusing on the everyday experiences of gamers in MMOs.

In later chapters, I discuss unauthorized (Chapter 2), recreated (Chapter 3), and decommissioned

(Chapter 4) servers. Here, however, my goal is to illustrate player experiences when game

servers are working as developers intend them to, sitting in data centers and hosting social

interactions in virtual spaces.

While the hard-coded rules and technical structure of WoW servers can generate place and

powerfully shape players’ sense of place, the fact is that servers are changing form and, in some

ways, player sociality changes as a result. Many developers of MMOs and other virtual worlds

have largely moved to systems that relies on cloud computing, meaning that multiple servers can

run on one piece of server hardware. And as infrastructures of virtual worlds change, so do

players’ experiences of virtual place and ways of knowing and inhabiting the virtual world.

While this chapter is in some ways about community and identity formation on servers, it is also

about the social implications of server virtualization and the tension between the promising

effects of infrastructures and the affects of online gamers in the midst of a transition from one

state of infrastructural matter to another. The opening sections of this chapter are historical,

based on information about WoW servers that was true at the time. However, it is important to

know the past to know how things have changed, by seeing both the past and present through

players’ eyes. In moving between the past and present of MMO server environments, I ultimately

argue that, while MMO gamers have historically experienced servers as both infrastructure and

world, certain infrastructural shifts to a system that is “more” virtual and in the cloud has

decoupled these conceptualizations, transforming the “server as world” concept.

Servers “in” Place / Servers “in” the World

When WoW players think of servers, they are not typically thinking of rows of machines in data

centers; they are more often concerned with the placeness of servers (e.g., accessing the server

on which they have stored their character avatars or joining the same server as their friends to

play together). However, before turning to player conceptions and experiences of servers “as”

place, I would like to pause for a moment on the idea of servers “in” place and the effects that

the emplacement and materiality of online gaming infrastructure has on players, whether they

know it or not. A slew of media studies literature has concentrated on the places in which the

internet exists, focusing on the countless networks of “tubes” (Blum 2013), undersea cables sea

(Starosielski 2015), routers (Dourish 2017), and data centers (Vonderau 2018) that make up the

internet’s infrastructure. Servers are housed in data centers located around the world. Where they

are located can have powerful impacts on the people who access the internet every day, though

they may not always know it. For example, an online video might reveal itself to be region-

locked, only accessible and downloadable by users in the same region as the server on which it is

located. Yet sometimes knowing the location of servers offers its own set of opportunities and

consequences. Such knowledge might benefit a stock trader, for instance, who might

strategically migrate to an office closer to a banking server to get a faster connection that affords

more rapid decision-making regarding buying and selling stocks (Lewis 2014). For most internet

users, however, servers remain infrastructural and backgrounded; their materiality is primarily

felt when they are not functioning properly, causing disruptions to daily life.

Scholars studying infrastructure have long been concerned with issues around the visibility of

infrastructure and users’ everyday awareness of infrastructure, such as how things like roads

(Harvey 2010), water supply systems (Anand 2011), and cellphone towers (Tawil-Souri 2015)

are meant to go unnoticed or remain “invisible” to everyday social interaction, though they may

still be in plain sight. In such studies, the relative “visibility” (or people’s awareness) of

infrastructure is often defined in terms of breakdown, those “moments of failure” (Graham 2010)

in which the otherwise “hidden mechanisms” (Star 1999) of infrastructure reveal themselves to

us, bringing to consciousness the conditions of “flow and circulation” (Parks and Starosielski

2015) that sustain infrastructural operations. In other words, people tend to think about

infrastructure when it is not working as it should, or when it breaks down.

Such is the case for online gamers as well—in moments of breakdown, what normally might

go unnoticed comes into harsh focus. As a way of understanding gamers’ server awareness, I

pause here to look at how the maintainers of servers, or those who encounter servers firsthand as

a part of their daily life, discuss server communication. In the client-server model of network

computing, the “client” is known as the “front end,” the software located locally on the user’s

computer or device. Put simply, the client is the software that sends requests to a server for

access to data or a service. On the other end is the server, known as the “back end.” The server

Figure 1.1: The World of Warcraft login screen displayed after a player gets “disconnected from

the server.” Source. Author.

receives requests from the client and responds from the “back,” sending the messages to the

“front.” Even though front-end software is on the user’s device, the user is not always aware of

when a client is requesting or receiving information from a back-end server. This state is what

Heidegger (2008) called “ready-to-hand,” when things in the world—whether they be more

concrete, like technologies, or more behavioral, like social norms—go largely unnoticed, their

utility perhaps taken for granted in the thrownness of action and everyday life.

In thinking about game servers’ infrastructural “visibility,” or online gamers’ awareness of

servers, we might use a similar framework. Servers are ready-to-hand when they are operating

from the back end as intended. However, they become “present-at-hand” during moments of

disruption or breakdown, surfacing to the level of consciousness and making themselves known

to the front end with a server error message or the user being forcibly disconnected from a server

(Heidegger 2008; Schwenkel 2015). After all, when we are acutely aware of something in the

present or something is particularly important to us, we might say it is at the “forefront” of our

minds; and when we are not presently thinking about something, we might say it has been put on

the “back burner.” There is this idea that hidden or obscured things, much like servers, lie at the

back of the brain, literally “out of sight, out of mind.” So when do servers move from the back

end to the front end of the mind of the online gamer? Under what conditions are servers present-

at-hand? For online gamers, especially those that play MMOs, these moments of failure are only

the tip of the iceberg in terms of the presence of servers in their gameplay and social interactions.

Most of these moments of failure are less like breakdown, causing the server to cease to

function, and are more like partial breakdown, more temporary and mundane. Disruptions,

glitches, and moments when the game is “down” are all examples of partial breakdown, when

the experience of the game is interrupted and the server is operating at something in between

fully functioning and malfunctioning. This notion of a partial breakdown as disruption to

everyday life recalls the breaching experiments of the ethnomethodologists in the 1960s. Made

popular by Harold Garfinkel (1967), these experiments were a practice of intentionally

disrupting the social order through breaches of understood social norms, with the purpose of

seeing how people respond to such disruptions, revealing the normality of social order. In my

conception of partial breakdown, I understand that looking to these moments of more

unintentional disruptions can serve a similar purpose—to reveal certain tacit knowledge and

open up for further investigation the everyday experiences of players.

In MMOs and other virtual worlds, one common type of partial breakdown is lag, or “any

perceived temporal abnormality in the game simulation where the game player and the game

server do not agree upon the game state at a given point in time” (Brandt 2007, 8). Time delays

resulting from lag have historically “disrupted the feeling of shared space” in virtual worlds

(Kendall 2002, 7), and as Boellstorff (2008) describes, “lag is nothing less than an interruption in

the thrownness of temporality, a breakdown of time made possible by the gap between virtual

and actual” (106). Phenomena like lag, among others such as lowered frame rates and server

response time, are examples of moments when servers rise to player’s consciousness, becoming

part of the everyday routine of gaming. Like a slow water leak in bathroom plumbing, these

partial breakdowns are constant reminders of infrastructure working in the background, creating

a situation in which breakdown is not perceived as an end to game play (e.g., a server crash or

network disconnection), but rather as part of a routine, described by Jackson (2014) as a world

“always-almost-falling-apart” (222). These conditions even inspire players to research the

geographic locations of their servers, which is a quick Google search away for WoW players—

the general geographic region for each realm in WoW is publicly accessible knowledge. With

this information, players can strategically choose to play on servers closer to their home in order

to reduce server response time

and thus reduce lag.

Working through experiences of network lag, server crashes, and other forms of partial and

total breakdown, gamers experience and feel the existence of servers supporting their worlds.

They have uniquely come to experience the critical role of this infrastructure in the game’s

operation, even though they might still describe the servers themselves as simply “boxes in data

centers.” Yet, for how “backgrounded” game servers might appear to be, except in these

moments when servers are not working as intended, gamers still interact with servers all the

time. In fact, from an epistemological standpoint, it is abundantly clear that gamers in particular

Server response time, i.e., latency, is sometimes called “ping,” so named after the tool used to

determine network connection quality.

are aware of servers in place, even when servers are not breaking down and even if gamers are

not explicitly thinking about them. The way in which gamers think about servers as worlds gives

us an opportunity to think about the impacts of infrastructure on users’ sociality beyond moments

of breakdown. Most scholars of online gaming and anthropologists of virtual worlds typically

address servers or data centers in some way, highlighting this critical infrastructure’s role in

enabling the world (Castronova 2005; Candy 2012), influencing gameplay and sociality (Taylor

2006; Boellstorff 2008), or even serving as a site of fieldwork (Williams et al 2006; Goulart

2012). In the remainder of this chapter, I go just a step further, centering online gamers’

experience of server infrastructures insofar as they inhabit servers as places, while also

discussing those moments when the infrastructure has a hand in shaping and changing the social

worlds of players on servers.

Shaping Server Worlds through Code

People who play WoW are divided up amongst many servers, referred to by Blizzard as “realms”

and often colloquially referred to by players as simply “servers.” Every realm is a copy, an

identical version of the game world populated by a different group of players. Think of it this

way: imagine you and your friend decide to play World of Warcraft, and you choose different

realms to play on, without communicating with the other. Your avatars are both standing on the

same hill, overlooking the Orc city of Orgrimmar. Though you are seeing essentially the same

landscape, you see completely different players running through the streets of Orgrimmar, and

you might be frustrated to find that you cannot see each other. The reason for this spatial rift is

that these are discrete bounded places, identical worlds similar in structure and aesthetic, but

different in membership, separated as a result of the code and hardware governing them.

Although they may be running essentially the same software, it is the hard-coded rules alongside

the accepted social norms that principally differentiate the realms of WoW from one another. As

one player explained to me, “it’s the same world, but it’s different.” In this section, I explore

why WoW is divided up in this way, how players choose servers, and how particular rules for

gameplay and social norms are variably enforced by server code. This section refers to both

hard-coded rules, programmed into servers, as well as “soft”-coded rules, or tacitly understood

social norms, the latter being a formulation which partially draws upon Clifford Geertz’s (1966)

early concept of culture, which relied on cybernetic theories of “control mechanisms” as sort of

behavioral instructions and operational codes for human social life.

Imagining different servers as distinct places in MMOs is made possible because, in most

games like this, the server has also historically had its own set of boundaries. In WoW, it is not

possible to intentionally move freely between realms on a daily basis. As many interviewees put

it, choosing one is like choosing where to “plant your flag.” This is a consequence of WoW’s

“sharded” server model of distributing players across multiple server worlds, or shards, to reduce

the strain on any one server. Because servers have finite storage space and computing resources,

and are subject to the limitations of network bandwidth, developers will eventually need to scale

their server architecture to increase space and computing power to accommodate significant

growth in use of their service. Early infrastructural limitations at Blizzard paired with rapid

growth in WoW subscriptions required developers to add more servers to the back end, further

divvying up players across multiple server shards running the same software, thus lightening the

load on each server and making them less likely to be overwhelmed and crash. Doing so

increased server load, thus accommodating increases in traffic. And as more server hardware was

added, new realms were formed. Importantly, this is not the only solution—not all virtual worlds

use sharding. In the case of Second Life for example, the developers at Linden Lab have

established a system that reduces server stress and prevents crashes, in part by only allowing a

certain number of avatars and prims (player-constructed virtual objects) on any one sim (one of

several regions running together on one piece of server hardware).

One consequence of the sharded server model is that it generates a world in which many

copies of the same MMO run simultaneously, enabling something like a multiverse wherein

many identical worlds exist, dividing the player population among them. According to Richard

Garriott, creator of one of the first MMOs, Ultima Online, the idea of an MMO being divided

into multiple “shards” by servers has its origins in the production of this game (Burke 2015).

Originally, Garriott imagined all players being in the same world playing together, yet the

game’s sales were higher than anticipated. To accommodate the larger player base, the server

system was changed to one in which multiple servers would host copies of the world for different

groups of players, dividing the player population. To make sense of this division for players,

Garriott wrote a fiction of in-game lore in which a wizard named Mondain bound the world of

Sosaria into a gem of immortality, in order to magically control its destiny. When the character

called the Avatar defeated Mondain, the gem shattered into many crystal shards, each of which

contained a perfect copy of Sosaria that continued to exist in parallel to the other copies. This

story helped developers explain to players how the MMO was structured at the server level,

divided up into multiple distinct servers that contained exact copies of the game world.

Although Garriott imagined that one day the “shards” of Sosaria would be reunited, the gem

once again made whole, such a thing never occurred for Ultima Online. In fact, most MMOs run

on some version of a sharded server model, with players divided, rather than all playing

seamlessly in one world together. As a result of this division, players have an important decision

to make—choosing which server to play on, deciding where to “plant their flag” and call home.

MMO forums online overflow with curious players asking for help with this exact thing,

frequently asking for recommendations on servers to join (particularly if they are new to the

game, or if the game itself is new), or asking specific questions about the reputation or

population of certain servers. Barring any outside influence, when players first log into WoW,

they are presented with a long list of servers on a screen, left to choose based on distinct server

names and certain descriptors that reflect the geographic location of the server, the number of

players on that server, and a particular set of hard-coded server-wide parameters for gameplay, or

rules enforced by code, set by developers.

So how is it that a player decides which server to join, especially given that, in North

America alone, there are over 200 realms from which to choose? First and foremost, players are

funneled into a geographic region, which players lock themselves into upon creating an account.

Players might be in the Americas, Europe, China, or Korea, and each of those regions is divided

up into smaller regions, like Brazil and Germany, which help to determine the language spoken

on the realm. Within their “region-locked” realm selection screen, players can see a vague

marker indicating relative population size of each realm, including Full, High, Medium, Low, or

New Players, specifically inviting newcomers to the game. As will be elaborated in a later

section, population size can let players decide whether they want to be on a highly populated

server, where there is more competition for resources and more active chat channels, for

instance, or on a lower population server, where the world might feel a bit quieter and a bit

emptier.

Beyond just the choice of region and number of active players, there are two basic types of

Figure 1.2: Selecting a World of Warcraft realm. Source: Wowpedia.

realms one can choose from in WoW: PvP and PvE. On player versus player (PvP) realms,

members of the two player factions, Alliance and Horde, can attack and kill players who are

members of the opposing faction. PvP realms also feature peaceful areas, what are called “no kill

zones,” wherein players cannot attack one another. On player versus environment (PvE) realms,

the entire realm is a no kill zone, and players are unable to battle one another. The distinction

between PvP and PvE realms is important to understanding the culture of the server community

in that PvP realms can engender animosity between players of the opposing factions and make

certain areas of the game world feel unsafe for fear of being ambushed.

Yet player-on-player dueling can happen across realms as well, and who a player fights

against depends on the geographical location of their server. Each realm is located in one of

many data centers within each region; although this information is not visible in-game, it is easy

to find on the official WoW wiki page. Multiple realms located within the same data center are

grouped into what are called Battlegroups, which are groups of realms that battle amongst each

other in the PvP area called the Battlegrounds, wherein players fight other players from opposing

factions located on other servers. It is due to the close proximity of the servers that they are

connected this way, to optimize connection speeds and minimize latency issues and lag. The

location of the data center also determines the time zone of the server, colloquially referred to as

“server time.” Players use server time to organize events in-game, especially when coordinating

with players across different time zones.

Another type of server for which server-wide parameters for gameplay are set are known as

role-playing servers, or RP servers. An RP server is a unique kind of server world where

developers have a hand in suggesting a standard of gameplay by marking the server as such, but

where the rules governing gameplay are based on mutual agreement among players rather than

server code. Like other realms, RP servers are characterized as either PvP or PvE, but what

distinguishes them from non-RP servers is a set of standards for role-play. On RP servers,

players are encouraged to take on character personas and interact with the world in character.

This typically includes typing out their discourse in a way that resembles how they imagine their

in-game characters might actually speak to one another. And in-game locations take on new

meaning as spaces designed by developers but refashioned by player use. For example, as Chen

(2010) explains in her analysis of player-organized events on an RP server, players move their

avatars into a bounded space of the event, known colloquially as the “scene,” where they are

expected to remain in character. It is only when a player moves their avatar outside the bounds of

the scene that they may transition to out-of-character communication and action.

The rules of RP servers are designated and labeled by developers, yet are socially enforced,

making them more akin to “soft”-coded, rather than hard-coded, rules. Even so, like the other

sets of rules and gameplay mechanics used as labels that I have discussed in this section, these

server rules help shape the culture of the server. For example, PvP servers might make players

more distrusting of players in the opposing faction. Any given server might develop its own sort

of soft-coded rules, ones enforced by the players that play on that server, what I will refer to as

server culture. In the next section, I describe how one server in particular became known as the

LGBTQ server, or “gay server,” and how the characteristics, norms, and behaviors of this server

community exist beyond code, as soft-coded social rules that are understood by the broader

player community.

The “Culture” of a Server

This project is not just about developers’ rules enforced through code and the materiality of

information; it is also about social formations and the ways in which communities of players can

change the shape and general understanding of the server on which they play. These

sociocultural differences between server worlds are not visible from the outside; for example,

there are no in-game markers to let people know that a server has a large LGBTQ population.

What is it about servers that afford the establishment of these accepted social norms? How do

people come to identify with their server and call it their home? In order to illustrate the

importance of WoW realms for players more generally, I will use as a more specific case study:

the world-making practices of an LGBTQ gamer community in WoW—the Rough Trade

Gaming Community (RTGC) on the Proudmoore server. For LGBTQ people, gaming can be an

escape from a more exclusionary reality, wherein they might feel unsafe and unable to embrace

their own identities. Gaming can provide a space for reimagining their own worlds,

experimenting with new sexualities and gender expressions, and even coming out of the closet to

first reveal their identities to others (Sherlock 2013; Shaw 2015). While many LGBTQ people

yearn for connection and community in online games, other players of multiplayer games have

historically discriminated against players who are not white, heterosexual, cisgender males

(Pulos 2013). Though LGBTQ players still frequently find it difficult to feel safe in online

games, they can sometimes exploit the technical architecture of MMOs like WoW for projects of

queer place-making.

First and foremost, the technical structures of the server powerfully shape queer

understandings of the server. There was often an assumption that for an LGBTQ server to exist

at all, it would need to be separate from other servers, unlinked and bounded. As one long-time

RTGC member pointed out, “I don’t remember ever seeing anybody else on Proudmoore other

than the gay community.” Queer players have particularly benefited from the sharded server

structure used by Blizzard for developing WoW, because it does just that: successfully generates

a more or less bounded space, allowing players to form tight-knit communities that stand apart

from others. With players playing together in a closed-off space, they can expect to see and play

with the same people, getting to know one another, earning certain reputations (whether positive

or negative), and freely expressing their sexuality and gender without negative repercussions.

Social experiences on the realm over time help reinforce interpersonal bonds and create a sense

of community. Even the developer-determined, hard-coded rules of the server have an impact on

Figure 1.3: An impromptu dance party with LGBTQ players from several guilds on Proudmoore.

Source: Author.

server community. Leaders of RTGC chose to locate their family of guilds on Proudmoore for

several reasons, chief among them that it is a PvE server. With both Horde and Alliance guilds in

their network, the leadership wanted there to be a partnership between the two sides, rather than

any feelings of opposition, something that a PvE server affords. This may also help explain how

Proudmoore and other PvE servers have developed reputations, as evidenced by forum posts and

conversations with players, for being particularly “friendly,” especially to new players.

Proudmoore has become known as the LGBTQ server in large part due to the presence of

several large meta-guilds, or “collections of guilds under a common name linked by chat

channels, websites, and other online spaces” (Sherlock 2013, 165), that identify themselves as

specifically LGBTQ on both the Horde and the Alliance sides of the servers. Guilds in WoW

parallel guilds of the actual world in that they are based on semipermanent membership, a

particular social hierarchy with continual leadership, collaboration among group members, and

shared resources, all of which are also reinforced and shaped in some way by game code (Poor

and Skoric 2014). That several large LGBTQ-identified guilds coalesced on one server was no

accident, but rather a coordinated effort on behalf of the RTGC leadership team alongside that of

other meta-guilds, like the Stonewall Alliance, and other smaller guilds. One RTGC guild

member, Ben, described the relationship between servers and guilds in this way: “Oh, I mean,

the server is… in real life context, so let's say, I'm part of the Red Hat Society, and I want me

and my ladies to go out to Las Vegas to meet for whatever reason. Well, the server would be the

Holiday Inn Convention Center. And the guild would be the Red Hat Ladies’ Society.” With

many societies joining the server, the population of Proudmoore came to feel like it was majority

LGBTQ players and allies. Once the server achieved a critical mass of players with guild tags on

their avatars and in the chat identifying them as LGBTQ, there developed an expectation among

players that they would co-enforce of a kind of social code through chat, where expressions of

homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of hate speech would not be tolerated. Certain

guild members known as “officers” are often tasked with policing the chat channels and shouting

down any players who do not follow the largely unstated server-wide accepted norms and

behaviors, a practice of queer place-making.

In conversations with players from RTGC, they often referred to themselves as identifying

with their server in particular, what I interpret as forming a “server identity,” the feeling of

affinity or belonging one feels toward their server. Server identity is related to what Poshansky,

Fabian, and Kaminoff (1983) call “place identity,” or “a sub-structure of the self identity of the

person consisting of broadly conceived cognitions about the physical world in which the

individual lives” (59). The reputation of the community on a server can significantly impact

server identity, and thus the identity of the players within those servers. As Plunkett (2011)

explains, “places allow for individuals to express and affirm their identities” (171). Members of

RTGC felt that Proudmoore was a sort of identifier, often referring to themselves as members of

the “gay server.” In turn, they also often assumed others to be LGBTQ if they said they played

on Proudmoore, even though not all Proudmoore players identify this way. After all, Proudmoore

has historically been a populous server, and it has many overlapping server identities associated

with it that circulate among other communities. There are some instances in the game, e.g.,

during player-versus-player modes, where one’s server name is displayed above the avatars’

heads, allowing players to identify others by the server they play on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the

same kind of identification by server can happen outside of the game, in the actual world. As

T.L. Taylor explains in the opening of Play Between Worlds (2009), at a convention she found

people she knew from EverQuest by asking them to name the server on which they played.

Certain special community-organized events can powerfully shape the sense of community

on a server. The facilitation of annual “Pixel Prides,” or “Proudmoore Pride” celebrations as they

have come to be called, have solidified over time the server’s status as a safe haven for LGBTQ

players across all realms. Players meet up and travel across the virtual landscape in a

parade, using emotes and spells along the way, chatting with passersby and with one another via

voice chat. The celebration either ends in Booty Bay or The Darkmoon Faire, depending on the

year, at which points players hold a dance party, complete with a DJ or pre-recorded mix playing

on an external site. The Proudmoore Pride parade stands as an example of how moving across

the landscape on a virtual world server can powerfully shape players’ understandings of place

Figure 1.4: LGBTQ players and allies celebrate Proudmoore Pixel Pride at The Darkmoon Faire

in 2015. Source: Author.

and of community. On the one hand, participating in the event influences the meanings players

associate with certain places within the game world (e.g., note the double entendre in “Booty

Bay” as a location known for either pirates or posteriors). On the other hand, Proudmoore Pride

also impacts participants’ understandings of the server as a unique place, one with a community

that has developed a set of values and norms (i.e., what players understand as the “culture” of the

server) that accommodates embodied expressions of queerness. Importantly, Proudmoore has

become a destination for players from other realms to travel to during Pride, by temporarily

visiting the server. In the next section, I delve deeper into this topic of movement—how does

movement within and between servers impact players’ unique senses of place in virtual game

worlds?

Moving Between Servers

Players making new characters on the Proudmoore server in order to participate in Pride

festivities is an example of a critical component of place-making on servers in WoW—the

capacity for players to move between servers. Importantly, there are numerous instances where

players relocate to different servers, crossing infrastructural boundaries. For example, deciding to

play on a particular realm is not always a final decision. Some players choose a server and stay

there, satisfied with their decision and finding they have no reason to leave. Yet for most players

with whom I have spoken, moving between servers is an important part of social life in WoW

and of their own personal history. I argue that understanding the ways in which players traverse

the invisible walls that separate and distinguish servers from one another is key to understanding

the ideas of server culture and server identity in WoW. The ability to move between servers is

hard-coded, but the ways in which people make use of this affordance of the technological

infrastructure of the game are shaped by a number of social processes. Thus, this section

addresses both the affordances of boundary-crossing and players’ boundary-crossing as a social

practice that shapes and is shaped by server culture.

For many players, identity as a citizen of the world of WoW is inherently multiple:

embodying multiple avatars, existing in multiple worlds, participating in multiple communities.

A player’s sense of self and belonging often cannot be reduced to a single guild or server.

However, players more often have a character who they consider to be their “main,” and the

server on which the main resides and the guild of which the main is a member are usually the

ones with which the players share their closest bonds and identify with most strongly. A player’s

character is only permitted by the rules of the game to occupy one server and belong to one guild

at a time; yet players can have different characters on different servers, just as they can have

different characters in different guilds. Citing Heidegger’s understandings of embodiment,

Boellstorff (2011) writes, “virtual worlds pluralize being-in-the-world. Since no one lives 24

hours a day in a single virtual world without any form of actual-world sociality, and few persons

participate in only one virtual world… being-inworld is always a form of being-in-multiplicity”

(512). Pearce (2009) refers to the practice of moving between virtual worlds in one play session

as “world-hopping.” So, while players may have one server they consider to be their home, they

might also belong to multiple servers and “hop” between them. Therefore, the being-in-

multiplicity to which Boellstorff refers can also take place within a single virtual world

context—a player might have multiple avatars (i.e., alternative characters, or “alts”) in different

in-world places at one time, or multiple alts in different sharded places or servers.

A player might decide to play on another server for any number of reasons. They might find

the community on a particular server to be hostile or unfulfilling (as one anonymous commenter

on Reddit eloquently wrote, “My server is full of a bunch of assholes”), so they create a

character on a different server that has a server culture that feels more friendly. They might find

that they like to alternate between PvE and PvP gameplay, so they have characters on two

servers, one of each type, for varied gameplay. They might have friends who chose to play on a

different server than they did, so they start anew to play with their friends. When a player has

reached the maximum number of characters on one realm, they might choose to start fresh on a

new realm because they want to create more new characters. The developers of WoW and most

MMOs place a limit on the number of characters one player can have on any one server; for

instance, in WoW the current maximum is 50, though at one time it was only 18. For this reason,

character creation can represent two phenomena—both a potential rationale for finding a new

server on which to play, and one of two modes of moving between servers.

Figure 1.4: Image from the WoW Character Transfer screen on the official website, depicting a

player’s character running through a portal from one realm to another. Source: Blizzard

Entertainment.

Although it is possible to simply make a new character on another server, many players also

talk about moving their characters between servers, commonly referred to as server migration.

Blizzard has made this possible by creating a feature called Character Transfers (or Realm

Transfers). When a player wants to migrate or transfer a character to another server, they have to

complete certain tasks on their current realm, including ending active auctions, reading mail, and

reaching level 10, along with a few other limitations. Once these conditions are met and the

player has no unfinished business on their current realm, that player can pay a $25 fee to

Blizzard to move their character to a different realm. More recently, these migrations have been

Perhaps not coincidentally, in the world of Information Technology, server migration is

also the term used to describe the process by which data is moved from one server to another,

typically to improve loading speeds, change hosts, or make data more secure.

offered free of charge.

As a result of this ability to traverse server boundaries, identifying which server is a player’s

primary or home server can be tricky, and stories of server migration have become key parts of

many players’ understandings of place in WoW. For example, when I asked players in interviews

to tell me which server they played on, they were rarely able to give me a straightforward

answer. Take as an example one player, Claudia, and her history of server migration. She started

on the Gilneas realm, and that is where most of her characters are. She calls Gilneas her home

server, and often plays with her daughter on Gilneas: “I played with a lot of people in California,

but that’s because of my daughter, and Gilneas is basically on that time.” However, she also has

a son, who lives at home with her, who has characters on Earthen Ring, an RP server. In order to

play with him, she has made characters there as well and joined a devoted role-playing guild

with her son. Claudia also identifies as a lesbian and loves to play with like-minded individuals

who identify as LGBTQ. In order to play with other LGBTQ players, she paid the fee to move a

character to Proudmoore for a while so she could join RTGC. After about a year and a half of

playing there consistently, she decided that the community was too young for her, so she moved

that character from Proudmoore back to Gilneas. Even still, she told me that she sometimes logs

into Proudmoore just to attend the annual Pride celebration held there during Pride Month in

June, explaining, “I loved the gay pride parade that they have every year. I actually will make a

character to run over there and dance on Booty Bay every year.” It was easier for her to make a

new character, rather than initiating a Realm Transfer, as migrating through Blizzard’s system is

pricey and time-consuming.

Because of the way servers are networked together for most MMOs, players also often

unwittingly move between servers within their realm. In the case of WoW, realms have

historically been divided up into four servers managing one realm, and players move between

these multiple servers within that realm to distribute the server load to prevent the server from

crashing. Measures have been taken to make these transitions seamless, so the player does not

know when they are passing the threshold of one server to enter another. (Staats 2019, 134). He

later refers to the seams as “invisible boundaries” that a player would cross unknowingly as they

played the game (ibid., X). These sorts of encoded boundaries are of course distinct from the

more visible sorts of in-game boundaries that exist in WoW and other video games, a mountain

blocking what appears to be a potential pathway or even the walls on either side of the screen in

Tetris, for example.

In the case of unintentional server boundary-crossings, while moving one’s avatar across the

landscape of WoW, movement between servers is often not felt. However, as inhabitants of other

virtual worlds casually move between servers, sometimes they do feel the switch. For example,

in Second Life each “sim,” or region of the world, is hosted on a dedicated server. When an

inhabitant’s avatar passes from one sim to another, known as “sim crossing,” the movement is

felt in the form of a graphical blip where avatars might change positions and movement might

appear stunted. The world quickly skips a beat as objects in the world momentarily dissolve and

reload just as quickly. Interestingly, as a result of developer Linden Lab moving its servers to a

cloud-based system, in which servers are internetworked in a different way, developers report

that these instances of disruption resulting from sim crossing may actually be reduced (Pey

2020). In infrastructures studies, there is often a heightened interest in breakdown, though the

everyday experience is more of a flow, the flow of everyday sociality mediated by shifts,

changes, and partial breakdowns, and importantly even those partial breakdowns can be

controlled in some ways. Although unintentional boundary-crossings have little to do with server

culture in particular, it is worth mentioning here that they can still shape players’ relationships to

the server as a place more generally. This will become especially evident in the following two

sections, in which I describe how changes to WoW’s server infrastructure to one that also

depends on “the cloud” has changed the ways in which players pass between servers, not only

within one realm configuration, but also between realms, ultimately altering the very notion of

server culture.

Dead Realms and Ghost Servers

So far in this chapter, I have explored how players have come to understand servers as worlds

and how certain place-making practices within developer-made structures bring those worlds to

life. In other words, what gives a server “life” is that it contains and supports a community of

people. What happens when a server is no longer brimming with life, when population numbers

dwindle, and developers can no longer justify keeping the servers online? Curiously, players

have been using discourse around death to describe WoW server worlds, describing some servers

as being on life support, turning into ghost towns, or simply being “dead realms.” In the final two

sections of this chapter, I move away from discussing primarily LGBTQ servers to address this

question of server death. In this section, I ask what players are really saying when they say that a

server is dying. In the next section, I explore how developer modifications to the game’s

infrastructure (in response to so-called “ghost servers”) have shifted player conceptions of the

realm as a world, which has also affected the importance of categories like “server community”

and “server identity.”

To begin, let us take a look at how the population of World of Warcraft has changed over

time. At its peak, around 2010, the popular game had an active player base of around 12 million

monthly paying subscribers. This was a peak in WoW’s history, and since 2015, those numbers

have steadily decreased. To sustain a large number of active players has proven difficult for any

massively multiplayer online game, for a number of reasons. The hype for a game typically dies

down after a time, perhaps once the feeling of novelty has run its course, players have progressed

through all the currently available game content, or people follow their friends to other games.

New large-scale multiplayer games get released annually and often draw players’ attention away

from older games. Additionally, players over the age of 30 tended to tell me in interviews that,

while they had more time to invest in the game when they were in high school or college, they

now lack the hours to fully immerse themselves into time-consuming MMOs, especially as they

assume full-time jobs.

Whatever the reason, undoubtedly player investment in WoW has decreased over time, with

numbers reaching a new low of 5.5 million subscribers in 2015. It was that year that Activision-

Blizzard even made the decision to no longer make public their total quarterly number of

subscribers, claiming “there are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard

business performance” (Makuch 2015). The decision to hide this data from the public cast a veil

over the precise population numbers of WoW, and many players and media sources speculated

that this obfuscation might be a direct result of declining numbers. They proposed that the

development company likely made this decision to avoid dissuading potential new players or

return players from subscribing. Therefore, we can understand MMO population size as a

capitalist indicator of success or failure. It appears that the common sentiment among players,

fans, and outside onlookers was that WoW itself was “past its prime” and ultimately “dying.” So,

when the population size is seen to be declining, this links up to player conceptions of server

world liveliness. And subscriber numbers have continued to fall; according to the reports of data

miners in the community, there were around 1.7 million players in May of 2019 (Sara 2019).

Despite the novelty of Blizzard’s decision to hide overall subscriber numbers, for some time

the precise populations of individual realms have been obscured from view. Since the initial

release of the game, players had to rely on third-party sources like wowrealmpopulation.com and

wowprogress.com for approximate population numbers per realm, alongside the vague markers

of Low, Medium, and Full that Blizzard provides in the list of servers on the official realm

selection screen. This is important because, as one might guess, most players would prefer to

play on a more populated server, because it presents more opportunities for play and these realms

usually have more high-profile guilds that competitive or “hardcore” players find attractive. This

was part of the rationale for RTGC choosing Proudmoore as their home base: that it would make

gameplay more fun to be on a more populated server, even if a high population might mean

being confronted by a larger number of unfriendly players.

Deciding to play on a highly populated server certainly makes it easier to find others to play

with, but it comes with a fair amount of risk. Server load is the same across all realms, so higher

population servers pose a number of infrastructural challenges. For example, logging into the

game and entering a high population server in the first place can be difficult, with longer queue

times. One player told me that sometimes the queue time to enter their high population realm

was so long they would log in to enter the queue and walk away to make dinner and do chores as

they waited in “limbo.” Players have told me that these queue times are always exacerbated by

the release of major expansions and the release of update patches, the new content bringing

players back to the game in high numbers. I encountered this firsthand when I first started doing

fieldwork in 2014, right around the time that the expansion Warlords of Draenor was released.

When I tried to log into my realm on the night of the release, I was greeted with the image of an

Figure 1.6: A pop-up window on the World of Warcraft login page showing the wait time to

enter the Proudmoore realm. Source: Author.

enormous gateway, the infamous Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands zone, and a pop-up message

reading “Proudmoore is Full” and an estimated wait time of 278 minutes (Figure 1.6).

Additionally, high-population servers tend to produce more lag in general, especially in

dense zones like capital cities and raids. This makes gameplay staggeringly slow and difficult,

ultimately discouraging players from forming large groups that might cause more lag. Yet big

groups are a major component of everyday life in WoW—public large-scale boss fights and

dungeon raids are among the most popular in-game activities, and high population servers could

often not handle the load of so many players being in one area at once and would ultimately

crash, catapulting players out of the area or the raid and disrupting what are considered to be

some of the most challenging and rewarding features of gameplay in WoW.

Nevertheless, over time the number of low-population servers kept rising as players either

left the game altogether or moved to servers with higher populations. The remaining players on

low-population servers are left with the decision to either find a new home by creating a new

character and starting fresh or paying for a realm transfer, or else be forced to cope with the

feeling of emptiness and loneliness of their home realm. When people are playing on low-

population servers, they might move about the world and never see another player’s avatar. It is

worth noting that many players derive a great deal of pleasure from low-population servers. A

few interviewees extolled the benefits of playing on relatively dead realms, such as lack of

competition for rare items and creatures, less lag, and a lack of social interaction, something that

many players appear to actually desire. Nevertheless, these experiences of seeing altogether de-

populated zones, especially in a game that used to have upwards of 12 million players

worldwide, led players in forums and interviews to very frequently refer to such servers as

“desolate” or even “dead,” in the same sense as one might describe a party with very few

attendees.

I have seen some instances of players referring to such low-population realms as “ghost

servers,” perhaps inadvertently harkening to images of the haunting ghost towns of the American

West, now only ruins that once teemed with human life. The name “ghost servers” seems even

more appropriate in light of the frequency with which I have seen players talk in colonial terms

about their first experiences of World of Warcraft when it was a new game, recalling the thrill of

adventure and exploration, even referring to the game as a “new world” or “new frontier.”

However, ghost servers bear little resemblance to ghost towns. Ghost towns in the physical

world—and even areas in other virtual worlds like Second Life and Minecraft that are not always

bustling with users—indeed can be a source of tourism, destinations to travel to or stumble upon,

for people with a penchant for the creepy atmosphere of an abandoned settlement. Not so in the

case of ghost servers in WoW, where there is little user-created content that might at least

superficially differentiate one realm from another.

In this section I have argued that the liveliness of an MMO server is measured in terms of

population size—players see high population realms as more alive and thriving, while players

perceive low population realms as dead, dying, empty, or ghostly. Perhaps not coincidentally, the

term “ghost server” is also used by server maintainers to describe server hardware that is still

running in data centers, using up energy and costing a company money, but serving little to no

purpose. As of 2012, approximately 15% of all data center servers might qualify as ghost servers,

and companies were spending more than $24 million a year on “ghost server energy.” Ghost

servers, as in low-population realms, also might be referred to as ghost servers in the hardware

sense, as servers that are underutilized by users, but still running in data centers. In the section

that follows, I address how developers at WoW chose to handle this issue of some servers

serving larger populations as others remained underutilized and the consequences that followed

their decision to virtualize their servers.

Virtualizing Server Worlds

Developers at Blizzard have responded to the proliferation of low-population realms, which are

of their data infrastructure, also termed server architecture. To reduce the number of physical

servers required to run the realms (thus cutting costs) while also improving particular aspects of

gameplay, developers have gradually implemented a system in which multiple realms could run

on one physical server, a process many players refer to as “server virtualization.” As one forum

commenter eloquently explained:

You have to imagine, that a low population server and a high population server had the same

hardware. So the low population server would be idling around while the high population

would be crashing. With virtual servers you can have multiple low population servers on one

physical server and utilize its resources better. It also allows to move the virtual server on a

different physical host if it has issues.

In her ethnographic work on data centers and their local and global entanglements, Asta

Vonderau (2018) proposed the term “clouding” to refer to the processes by which the cloud’s

visibility is augmented over time. I build on this idea of clouding, a play on the idea of

infrastructuring, or making something “more” infrastructural, adding to it this notion that servers

can not only become more obscured, as Vonderau explored, but also more virtual. Where before

there was a trend in the realm of digital technologies toward miniaturization, the trend since 2010

is unequivocally toward virtualization.

Despite the promise of this new infrastructural order, players have since the 2010s lamented

that their social worlds have been disrupted and altered as a result. In order to increasingly

virtualize their servers and refine the WoW player experience, a number of modifications were

made to the way realms worked, including merging smaller realms with larger ones. These

changes had rather drastic impacts on the dynamics of the social landscape of WoW and changed

the way players understood and related to the concept of realms and thus to foundational ideas of

community, culture, and identity. In this section, I outline the changes that Blizzard developers

made to WoW’s server architecture and how these virtualizing measures impacted players’ social

worlds. I follow Vonderau in exploring server virtualization’s “planned effects as well as its

unintended consequences” (2018, 4). One such consequence is that, as game developers have

moved their server architecture to a cloud-based system, one that is “more” virtual than before,

the idea of discrete server worlds—“realms” in the case of WoW—has irrevocably shifted and

transformed for players. This section is about the social implications of server virtualization and

of the tension between the promising effects of infrastructures and the affects of online gamers in

the midst of a transition from one state of infrastructural matter to another.

In fact, as early as the 90s, researchers at Stanford were working on a concept design for a

server called the “Pocket Server” that was the size of a matchbox—small enough to fit in one’s

pocket to carry around as a wireless network hub.

Before discussing the impacts of virtualization on ideas of server culture and server identity,

I will briefly outline here five important changes that developers have gradually made to the way

realms and servers work: (1) cross-server play, (2) coalesced realms, (3) connected realms, (4)

sharding, and (5) phasing. With the introduction of (1) cross-server play, developers reported that

they wanted to solve the issue of “under-crowding” in in-game areas, or “zones.” Under-

crowding happens when zones are not well-populated, leading to players having trouble finding

play partners or feeling like a realm is empty (hence the player-borne concept of “dead realms”

or “ghost servers” discussed in the previous section). Developers integrated new search systems

into the game to help players find people with which to participate in raids (Looking for Raid,

also called LFR), dungeons (Looking for Dungeon, also called LFD), and other task-based

groups (Looking for Group, also called LFG). In cross-server play, players end up forming

groups with people from other realms , eliminating the need to cultivate a reputation on one’s

own server or to socialize to find play partners. (2) Coalesced realms (also commonly known as

cross-realm zones, or CRZs) also involve cross-server play, but they are different in that they are

but temporary moments when different players from different realms are joined together by the

system (and not by player choice) in the same zone to fill out a low-population zone.

Developers have introduced another measure to fix under-crowding: (3) connected realms,

also called virtual realms. Connected realms are, according to the Blizzard website, “a joining of

realms, where players from different realms function as though they were full members of any of

the other connected realms.” At various points over the last several years, developers have rolled

out a series of realm merges, uniting certain lower-population realms with higher-population

ones to make a seamless realm-like experience that is made up of multiple individual realms.

Rather than a starker merging of realms—a process which I imagine would eliminate some

realms, subsuming them into others—connecting realms is more of a light merge, in which

players get to keep their server’s name, but are not always aware of who is from their home

realm and who is from another realm within their now connected realms.

The final two server-performance modifications are sharding and phasing, both of which are

not unique to WoW. While sharding is a response to a technological problem, phasing is a

response for an issue of narrative structure, or keeping everyone in their respective “chapter” of

the story of WoW as a narrative-driven virtual world. Although distinct in the reasons for which

they were created, they functionally do the same thing: they are game design tools operating at

the server level to seamlessly migrate players into different instances of the world within the

same realm, usually unbeknownst to the player. (4) Sharding was intended to fix the problem of

zone overcrowding, as large numbers of players in one zone can cause the CPU of one server to

be overutilized, degrading server performance, resulting in immense lag and potentially a server

crash. When a zone gets too crowded, the system will splinter the realm (which as noted earlier

is also called a shard) to create a new temporary shard on another server, and then move some

players to the temporary shard to distribute the load across servers. (5) Phasing, on the other

hand, was originally intended to fix the problem of players being at different stages of the game

at the same time. Because players are at different phases of certain quests, the same zone might

actually look different. To work around this issue, developers decided to hide players in different

phases of quests from one another, meaning that even if players are in a group together, if one of

those players has yet to complete a particular leg of a quest, the server will “phase” them into a

new instance of the game. When players are phased, it typically interrupts gameplay and players

are left scrambling to regroup.

As a direct result of changes like phasing, which divide players within their realm, and

coalesced realms, which bounce players back and forth between servers full of people from

various realms, players ideas and experiences of the relationship between servers and virtual

worlds have shifted. Players have gradually become less tied to their realm, a concept of place,

which has a significant impact on the ideas of server culture and community I have discussed in

this chapter. This sentiment was shared across most players I spoke with, including Will, who

explained it to me this way: “So they have a new system now where everything’s sort of cross

realms, and I might be playing with a guy from whatever Silverhand or something. That sort of

changed my relationship with my server.” In many ways, these server enhancements improved

gameplay by making it easier for players to find others to play with, reducing partial breakdown

like lag, and more. However, many players have reported that these modifications to the game’s

infrastructure have other effects on their in-game experience, leaving them feeling lonely and

still plagued by network-related inconsistencies. One player, Dakota, explained to me that he had

joined a high-population realm because he enjoys being in lively in-game cities, but “as soon as I

left the city the world is empty… I want to play an MMO not a single player game… I want to

see the people from my server when I level up not a random guy from RP server that I’ll never

see again in my life.” Important here is that players explicitly want this kind of shared

sociality—to see familiar names and avatars over time; however, changing servers forms are

shifting the affordances for creating and maintaining these kinds of relationships. Another player,

Chris, argued that gameplay has been improved overall by changes like cross-server play, but his

social experience has suffered greatly: “from a sort of social end, I’m way less committed to

being locked into that server just cause it doesn’t really mean anything anymore.”

Without persistent worlds that contain independent communities that players have fostered

over time, players feel that their sense of server culture and server community has been

Figure 1.7: An example of cross-server play. In this screenshot of the World of Warcraft general

chat window, players from multiple realms (including Akama, BlackDragonflight, Nagrand,

Frostmourne, and Uldum) interact during an LFR-generated raid. Source: Author.

diminished or erased entirely. In her dissertation on the social affordances of certain game

mechanics in World of Warcraft, Nikki Crenshaw (2017) argued that changes like cross-server

play dealt a massive blow to the idea of server community, arguing that they diminished aspects

of social life and in-game communal spaces that players generally valued, such as persistent

player identities, persistent guild reputations, and repercussions for players’ actions. Yet these

changes made players lose a sense of “loyalty” to their server in particular, as Will explains:

“That made me less, I guess less loyal to the server I was on because at that point it didn’t really

matter. When you ran into people kinda out in the world, it was like, well, the odds that I see this

person again are exponentially worse than when you were tied to just a specific server.” Another

unintended consequence for communities like RTGC, who revel in the feeling of playing in a

secure safe space, has been the loss of a sense of boundedness. RTGC in particular has

historically valued this kind of bounded space, because they want to separate themselves from

the mainstream WoW community, which has not been friendly to LGBTQ players. As the

infrastructure has been altered to make the world feel more unified, like an interconnected

network rather than divided shards, the game no longer affords that sense of safe space, with

overflow from other servers and machinations in place that sometimes placed them in other

realms or servers, subjecting them to the occasional harassment that they were able to avoid in

previous years.

No doubt there are numerous benefits to having more populated zones in the game, and

Blizzard developers have made efforts to give all players access to those benefits by making

changes to the way the game works and the way their server architecture looks. In the official

WoW forums, a community manager from Blizzard published the following text within a post

about this very topic:

World of Warcraft is best when you have a community of other players around you, and

while numerous ways to participate in cross-realm play have been added to the game over the

years, there are still many aspects of the experience that are realm-based. From your history

with your guild to your interactions with the economy around you, a realm with a healthy

population provides more opportunities.

Here, a Blizzard spokesperson insists that realms are still important, despite players reporting the

opposite. The tension here is that infrastructure changes have been implemented while trying to

leave the realm concept intact, while players insist that their connection to their realm has been

irreparably damaged by the very changes intended to maintain it. This brings to mind the work of

anthropologist Brian Larkin, who, in his work on media infrastructures in urban Nigeria (2008),

has written about a kind of urban infrastructural layering, that “the physical shape of the city

emerges from the layering of these infrastructures of time” (5). In the case of WoW, this

infrastructural layering has been a process of adding new mechanics and features (cross-server

play, coalesced realms, connected realms, sharding, and phasing) on top of existing

infrastructure, modifications that have continued to shape WoW’s social landscape, the old ways

buried beneath layers of infrastructural changes include a move toward virtualization and

clouding.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I described how players make sense of ideas and experiences of place in World of

Warcraft and how server code and social interactions shape those understandings and place-

making practices. Certain hard-coded rules, like determinations about the nature of player

rivalries on the server and the sharded server model, can have just as much of an impact on ideas

of “server culture” as the sort of soft-coded, community-developed social structures and norms.

Importantly, just as gameplay mechanics and landscapes in the game world can change, so can

these hard-coded rules and structures, with developers now increasingly opting to move servers

to a cloud-based system. As a result of these changes, which have made it so that servers are now

more networked and less walled off from one another than before, servers are now “more

virtual” and the notion of a unified server world no longer exists in the way it did before such

shifts were implemented. In a sense, server sociality itself has become “more virtual” too, as

players feel that social components of WoW have diminished as a result of these changes. In

other words, the more virtual servers become, the less like worlds they appear to be.

For reasons of increased profitability, speed, and ease of access, the games industry in

general is rapidly adopting cloud-based models for organizing players and distributing their

content. This new era is marked by changing relationships between players and servers, as well

as between players and game development companies. As infrastructure changes, and social

worlds shift as a result of the virtualization of servers, there arises a tension between corporate

notions of progress and player-held beliefs about how social life online should be. For MMO

players in particular, gone are the days of individual realms with server cultures and feelings of

server identity or server loyalty, and server changes have fed players’ nostalgia. For a subset of

players, there is an urgency with which they wish to return the old days, when the server meant

something different, when the “world” was different. In the next chapter I describe critical

processes of reclamation and resistance, as players attempt to take servers into their own hands,

reframing notions of server ownership, rebuilding and reshaping server communities, and indeed

resisting the march of time.

Chapter 2

Private Server Temporality, Preservation, and Resistance

Just a few days before I began writing this chapter, World of Warcraft (WoW) turned 16,

having debuted on November 23, 2004. This immensely popular online game has grown and

developed over time, undergoing numerous changes during its lifespan. The geography of the

game world has drastically changed as developers add new areas, and some old areas are

flooded, scarred, or demolished. Developers have slowly refined and redesigned graphics and

tweaked game mechanics. The community of players has changed with it, redefining in-game

social dynamics and expectations of one another in gameplay. As discussed in the previous

chapter, changes to the server architecture have undoubtedly altered the social landscape of

WoW and how people relate to and understand WoW as a place. The server-as-world concept

continues to shift, at least in the context of WoW, as developers have transitioned their servers

into an internetworked cloud structure, with smaller, less popular servers being connected to and

fused with more populated ones. A lot has changed about WoW. One of the key consequences of

these changes is that players miss older iterations of the game. In fact, so many updates have

been made to the game and its infrastructure that many players have argued that the game is

unrecognizable from how it looked and felt in 2004.

In the context of online gaming, once a game world has been updated the previous version of

that game is typically inaccessible. The same goes for any piece of software—after all, why

would the average user want to go back and use a 2019 version of Microsoft Word when the

2020 version has newer features, sleeker design, and fewer bugs? Because these changes can

mean drastic modifications to social worlds, for many players of WoW, there has been a stirring

desire to experience the game as it once was when it was first released. Game development lead

at Blizzard Entertainment, J. Allen Brack, posted to the official WoW forums in 2016,

introducing the possibility of “pristine realms,” or servers that would turn off certain aspects of

game play that players found to damage the quality of the game. He explained that this was an

effort to “capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched.” It is clear from this proposal

alone that Blizzard staff had been considering the calls from increasingly vocal fans who feel

nostalgic for a time in WoW’s past to bring back older versions. For an even longer amount of

time, nostalgic fans who want to play older versions of WoW and see them preserved for future

gameplay have taken matters into their own hands. Many of these players, in a sense, have gone

back in time. But what does “going back in time” entail when it comes to online games like

WoW?

Enter private servers. Generally speaking, a private server is a physical or virtual machine

running server software that is privately administered by an individual or a team, as opposed to a

company or government entity. In the context of gaming, the term “private server” is often used

for servers running reimplemented game server software, typically clones of proprietary

commercial software, outside the purview of the company that owns the source code. Typically,

these servers are rented from a third party service provider, but they are sometimes found in the

homes of ordinary gamers. Since the first updates were patched into World of Warcraft, which

included bug fixes and changes to game mechanics, players with more expertise in programming

and operating servers have been using these private servers to run their own iterations of WoW

for a subset of the player base. Sometimes these expert communities are even running up-to-date

software to support their projects, though many, if not most, are running older versions even

dating back to the very beginning of WoW history, the original version of WoW released in

2004, often referred to as “vanilla” or “classic” WoW.

Vanilla is the term in computer programming referring to the first version of a piece of

software. Similarly, when fans of WoW talk about “vanilla,” they are referring to a place in time.

Vanilla indexes a time when WoW was a different game than the current instantiation

commercially available to a paying public. Think of it this way: over time, content has been

added to the game that has changed the overall flavor of the world: the virtual landscape, game

play, and virtually every visual element of the game world has been altered. Expansions have

added additional flavors. But vanilla WoW is the scoop at the bottom, a WoW without other

flavors or additives; it is an original, seemingly lost to time. Not only that, WoW players yearn

for a return to a specific period of time, where they spent time with specific people, in specific

guilds. Dozens of vanilla WoW private servers were in operation until 2016, when

NostalriusBegins, a private server boasting tens of thousands of active players at any given time,

was forced to shut down. That year, Blizzard Entertainment’s legal team served the development

team behind NostalriusBegins a cease-and-desist letter, forcing them to shutter the private server,

revealing the impermanence of even the most resilient private server communities.

Where Chapter 1 was more about place, Chapter 2 turns to the topic of time. On the one

hand, this chapter is about preservation, holding on to and saving a cultural artifact, vanilla

World of Warcraft, thus extending the length of its existence. On the other hand, the chapter is

about resistance against time. The consumer model that is the game industry’s forward

progression of time relies on the obsolescence of games and platforms to make room for new

iterations. While the majority of players move along with this temporality, continually

demanding new content, other players—faced with the rapid alteration and disappearance of

their online social worlds—are resisting this consumer model and attempting to revisit the past.

Amidst explorations of the “versioning” of online games and virtual worlds and of player

engagement with forms of folk, or non-expert, preservation through server emulation, I describe

how and why subsets of the WoW player population have been using private servers to play

WoW as it was when it was originally released, despite it being commercially unavailable. For

many of these players, their work is part of a process of preserving WoW, an engagement with

the history and temporality of the game as a series of moments in time, as a place, and as a

cultural object. However, in doing this work and playing on private servers, they are also actively

resisting the consumer models which continually force updates to the game, a practice that I

interpret as a form of what Švelch (2019) refers to as “patch resistance” against what Galloway

(2004) has posited as “protocological power.” I argue that, while these projects face certain

inevitable instabilities (social, legal, and technical) that prevent them from achieving permanent

control over game world temporalities, private server play and development are acts of resistance

that struggle against and reclaim a form of infrastructural power, or server power.

The Versioning of Worlds

In the early days of home video gaming, video games were delivered as full products, more or

less static from the developers’ side, with some exceptions.

The way software developers

distribute games and most other kinds of software has changed dramatically with the advent of

more sophisticated server systems running the internet and the increased adoption of mass cloud

computing. As a result of these broad-scale infrastructural changes, game companies have shifted

their distribution practices to digital game marketplaces, which have proliferated and saturated

Historian Henry Lowood told me stories of early game developers delivering updates to

computer games via floppy discs.

Figure 2.1: A sign of changing times. The two PlayStation 5 consoles, one with a disc drive and

one “Digital Edition” without. Source: PlayStation blog.

the market; according to the Electronic Software Association, “Gaming software delivered via

physical media, which accounted for two-thirds of sales in 2010, has now largely been replaced

by digital delivery” (Vaudour and Heinze 2020, PAGE). Models of Xbox and PlayStation

released since 2020 no longer have game disc readers, and these models are priced lower than

those that still retain a disc drive, perhaps to give consumers more incentives to buy into the all-

digital revolution in which digital delivery is more desirable than buying physical copies of

games (see Figure 2.1). Digital distribution, it appears, is the present and the future for software

generally, even digital content like books and music. With games being delivered to consumers

digitally and with increasing numbers of games that rely on an internet connection to play, the

current consumer model for games is one in which game companies view games not as products,

but as services that they offer. This model of digital distribution is commonly referred to as

“games-as-a-service” (GaaS), or a method used by service providers (game companies) to

distribute game-based services to client software via a single centralized server. In this section, I

explore how, under the GaaS paradigm, online games and virtual worlds undergo a temporal

process of “versioning,” in which updates to the game code create a system in which previous

iterations of games obsolesce in favor of newer versions layered over them.

The primary benefit of the GaaS model for players, developers, and companies alike is that

developers can update games on the fly through updates downloaded from servers. This allows

the developers to evolve a game over time, fixing bugs and other issues, responding to

community requests, and issuing expansions and add-ons that extend the life of the game past

what might be considered its typical “endgame” point. However, this is where GaaS becomes

contentious for gamers. When games are a service, players are often forced or coerced into not

only paying for the base game, but also continuing to pay for the ensuing “services” provided by

the company, if they want to keep playing the game (e.g., subscription fees, referred to by

players as pay-to-play) or at least to keep playing the game successfully (e.g., microtransactions,

referred to by players as pay-to-win). Many games under this model are free-to-play but often

include opportunities for players to make what are known as microtransactions, or small

purchases of in-game items or currency. Ultimately GaaS works because the game becomes a

monetized service that developers provide to the players, one that keeps players interested in

playing while keeping profits flowing by having players continually pay for incremental updates,

changes, and special items. GaaS keeps popular games that players invest in alive and online

much longer.

Developers at Blizzard Entertainment periodically deliver alterations to WoW in two primary

forms: patches and expansions. Patches are updated versions of the game code sent to players

that include changes like fixes to software “bugs,” additional items and content, and

improvements to graphics and gameplay mechanics, to name a few. Patches can be considered

Figure 2.2: A complete list of World of Warcraft expansions (left) and patches (right). Source:

Wowpedia.

major or minor, depending on the amount of content they add or the number of changes they

make. Expansions, on the other hand, are large-scale updates to the game that incorporate a large

amount of new content all at once, including new storylines, new characters and character

models, new items and activities, major graphical and mechanical overhauls, and, most notably,

the introduction of new landscapes, alterations to existing ones, and extensions of the size of the

world (including new zones, cities, continents, or even new planets). According to Debeauvais

and Nardi (2010), “for [players] the expansions are like mods of the original game” (48).

Messias (2020) compares online game expansions in particular to literature, writing that they

operate narratively, “much like volumes or chapters of a fantasy series. Each having its own title,

storyline, and corresponding code” (3).

This is the process of versioning. As is the case for all massively multiplayer online games,

when a new patch or expansion is pushed through and players log in to this updated world, they

are entering a new version of the world that has never existed. As one interviewee, Wendy,

explained it, “I think it was maybe the first time I had even experienced like… kind of being able

to see that the game that I was playing was progressing and it was a new different world to

explore that I had already known.” This new version of the world has a “corresponding code”—

such as 8.2.5—where the first number is the expansion number and the second and third numbers

correspond to major and minor patches. Newer versions leave behind the iteration of the world

preceding it; for example, when players downloaded and installed version 8.2.5 in 2019, version

8.2.0 was no longer available to those players. The older version of the world that existed before

the update is lost and obsolete, inaccessible to a subscribing public of players. In this way,

expansions are quite unlike books in the way that Messias (2020) described; you cannot go back

and see the world as it was like you might with a book.

Curiously, it is possible that players might be playing in different versions of the world at the

same time. Speaking on contemporary change in video games, media theorist Grant Bollmer

(2015) astutely points out that “the fact that the game changes over time leads to a situation

where, depending on the time of purchase, the platform, the number of updates and patches

applied, different players playing ostensibly the same game might necessarily enjoy different

experiences in markedly, or subtly, different worlds” (132). There are a multitude of versions of

WoW as a result of this process, and older versions are considered obsolete, buried under these

periodic updates. As Švelch (2019) explains, “the contemporary practice of video game updates

follows the logic of obsolescence and innovation… With the release of a new patch, the previous

version of the game becomes outdated and often loses some of its functionality, such as online

connectivity or multiplayer capabilities” (7). While much of the content from those older

versions is still within the game world, the game looks very different as changes and new content

have been layered on top of the original game. For example, the fourth WoW expansion, called

“Cataclysm,” drastically changed the landscape, flooding some zones, revealing previously

inaccessible areas, and casting a large glowing geologic scar over much of the map.

This process of the versioning of online games has led to a situation in which previous

versions obsolesce, following a general trend in the gaming industry of forward progress without

looking back. Newman (2012) wrote that the “game industry does a good job of selling a utopian

dream of continual upgrades” (46). This can be seen in the way that newer consoles are referred

to in terms of “generations,” a label which invoke a continuity of ages, of the desire on the part

of game companies to maintain a sense of forward motion. Newer generations force previous

iterations into obsolescence, especially as many new consoles don’t allow for backwards

compatibility, or the capacity for a newer console to run games from previous generations of

consoles. Obsolescence occurs when digital media are replaced by newer, faster, more functional

versions; consequently, certain data becomes unreadable between different "generations" of

software and hardware platforms, making it difficult to use and to preserve (Monnens 2009;

Swalwell 2009; Boellstorff and Soderman 2017). The same can be said for the progression of

virtual worlds. On the topic of the virtual world genre, Bollmer (2015) has pointed out that, “its

own history erodes and vanishes as technological progress moves ‘forward’” (70).

What has happened with World of Warcraft is just that—buried under the latest patches and

expansions that have progressed the game “forward” are versions that some players miss, to

which they long to go back and play again. For some time, there has existed a large, widespread,

and very vocal group of players who want to play the original version, before all the expansions,

as the game was when it was first released. Some players miss the way the game looked, some

players miss certain mechanics, some players miss certain places in the game that no longer

exist. Most notably, players miss the way the social landscape used to feel (see Chapter 1). These

players want to go back in time, to peel back the layers that the game developers have packed on

top of something they loved, something they feel has been taken away from them, now

seemingly lost to the relentless forward motion of capitalist technological progress under the sign

of games-as-a-service. In the following sections, I take a step back to describe the evolution and

uses of private servers, as a sort of historical background that sets the stage for describing how

they are used by players now—as practices that preserve old versions, allowing players to “travel

back in time” while simultaneously resisting the forward motion and rapid obsolescence that

characterizes the games industry.

Emulation as a Method of Preservation

In this chapter, I argue that private servers are a form of video game preservation that exists

outside the purview of a typical preservation institution, like a museum, archive, or library. They

should be classified in this way insofar as they have the capacity to accomplish some of the goals

of historical preservation, specifically the task of bringing the past into the present. Private

servers are one of three types of what Winget (2011) refers to as “artifacts of participatory

culture” or modifications to an online game which are not created by the formal development

team but by independent individuals. Referring to them in this way highlights the characteristic

involvement of fans of the game in the world of video game preservation. Generally speaking,

fans and players have been involved in the preservation of video game history for much longer

than preservation institutions took it up as a key interest. In other words, for some time the work

of video game preservation had been predominantly folk preservation: avocational, amateur,

distributed, and unauthorized (Kraus 2011). Some examples of folk preservation in video games

includes fans amassing software and hardware, creating hardware replacements, repairing

hardware, and collecting metadata and other ephemera, like game magazines, developers’ notes,

and marketing materials (Swalwell 2016; Guins 2014). A prominent example of a fan-produced

collection is the MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, a virtual project which currently

supports the ability for any user to play over 7,000 video games, all made possible by a process

called emulation (Ippolito 2016).

Emulation—which has long been the principal method for preserving video games—is a key

tool of folk preservation. It is process by which programmers create systems of software to

mimic and run the original game and console software on another device, like a personal

computer or another console (Winget and Murray 2008). New media scholar Jon Ippolito (2016)

writes, “to emulate is to translate the code for one hardware or software environment into

semantically equivalent instructions for a new environment.” In other words, emulation means

replicating the exact, or close to exact, operation of another hardware or software environment,

essentially to fool the original code into assuming that it is running on its original equipment. It

requires “careful attention to the relationship between hardware, code, use, and context for use”

(Lowood 2004, 4). For example, to play the original Super Smash Brothers on Nintendo 64, one

would need a Nintendo 64 console, a controller, and the game cartridge, along with a television

to connect it to and the appropriate cables and cords. Nowadays it is possible for people to

download a piece of software onto a computer that acts like a Nintendo 64, allowing the mouse

and keyboard to serve as the controller. Then a player can choose from any number of website

repositories to download a second piece of software called a ROM, which imitates game

software to be read by the emulator. Emulation can be used to recreate games or other non-game

programs, such as early versions of MS Paint. For some time, game fans have been actively

creating and using emulators to recreate and replay game software.

While emulation is certainly a popular practice among gamers interested in making games

more accessible, it has also become increasingly adopted by players and preservation institutions

alike as an option for video game preservation (Barbier 2014). Digital materials are more at risk

than their analogue counterparts due to their shorter lifespan. For example, books can last for

around two thousand years, while USB drives can last for around fifty (Houghton 2016). Game

hardware falls apart over time, as soon as 10 years after creation, due to processes like bit rot and

media decay, the natural and gradual processes by which digital information and hardware

slowly degrade over time, especially affecting magnetic storage devices and optical discs

(Winget and Murray 2008; Lowood et al 2009). Emulators have become popular for this kind of

work because they effectively translate hardware and software components of digital

technologies into software data stored in repositories online, offering a solution to the gradual

obsolescence and breaking down of video games, what Newman (2012) has referred to as their

“unexpected fragility.” Therefore, emulation makes for a more long-term option for keeping

them accessible, interactive, and playable.

Many players have nostalgia for old games and numerous fans who are also passionate

amateur programmers or professional-turned-rogue engineers have recognized this growing

desire for retro, classic, or forgotten games for some time and have used emulation to satisfy

these desires. The same desires exist for previous versions of online games that are no longer

commercially available, and these individuals are investing time, money, and resources to bring

these old worlds back to life and keep them online using emulation. However, emulation alone is

not sufficient for preserving networked games like WoW and other massively multiplayer online

games. Because these games store some data on the client side (i.e., the software located on the

user’s computer) and other data on the server side, emulating the user’s hardware and the client-

side software is not enough to reproduce the entire internet environment needed to make a game

like this function as intended. Any emulation of this sort would be partial at best, resulting in a

reproduction that would, in effect, be more akin to a simulation of the original experience rather

than a living breathing world (Winget and Murray 2008). For a game like WoW, originally

played on PC, the difficulty is not exclusively in creating a ROM of the game. The game is a

virtual world, an online game with networking requirements for multiplayer capabilities, and for

that reason it also requires a server emulator to run.

The server is the lifeblood of not only the social components of the game, but of the game

itself. And so the server must also be understood as the lifeblood of any preservation efforts that

seek to make the game playable. The game simply will not run without corresponding server

code that will fool the game software into assuming that it is still connecting to a server to which

it was designed to connect. However, one of the issues with the adoption of emulation as a viable

form of preservation for online games and virtual worlds, especially for folk preservationists, is

that although the game code is usually easy to acquire from a disc or cartridge, or even an online

download, the server code is proprietary and often not readily accessible to the public, except in

very rare cases. While code can sometimes be obtained—through a leak from within a game

company or by players hacking and illegally procuring it—it often must be created from scratch.

In order to make the server code that makes the networking components of the game work,

player-programmers with a unique set of skills and knowledges have to dedicate hours of free

labor to use what is known as packet transfer analysis to reverse engineer the server code

themselves. By sending code signals to the client, these programmers can interpret the responses

given by the client to figure out how the server and client should communicate with one another.

Using these responses as a framework, they can create a server to act closely to how the original

did. Once server code has been obtained or reverse engineered, it is often modified, circulated,

and distributed to other private server communities, to the point that most private WoW servers

apparently operate using copies of only a small number of versions of WoW server code.

Resisting Updates, Reclaiming Time

Every year, Blizzard Entertainment hosts a convention called BlizzCon, where fans convene to

celebrate their love for online multiplayer Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and

Overwatch, and there they also learn about updates to their favorite franchises. During a Q&A

session at one of the panels in 2016, which included such figures as J. Allen Brack, the executive

producer of WoW, one audience member asked, “have you ever thought about adding servers for

previous expansions as they were then?” To this Brack responded, “No, and by the way, you

don’t want to do that either; you think you do but you don’t.” Many dedicated WoW players took

this to mean that Brack was not in favor of ever offering a retail version of vanilla or “classic”

WoW, and “you think you do but you don’t” became fuel for what some of my interviewees

referred to as a “movement,” motivating people developing and playing on private servers to

continue their work and play in earnest.

Motivated by their own nostalgia and sometimes in part stimulated by statements like this by

game developers, players who want to play vanilla WoW again have been running and playing

on private servers using emulated server code in an attempt to go back in time and revisit

versions of the game that are no longer commercially available, and to have new experiences in

Figure 2.3: A list of three vanilla private servers from a website that provides a publishes

information and news about live private servers for World of Warcraft and RuneScape. Source:

DKPminus.

this familiar place and time. And these projects have been immensely popular among those

players looking to play these versions. For example, the vanilla WoW private server community

called NostalriusBegins (commonly referred to simply as Nostalrius), boasted over 800,000

accounts created. As the community manager of Nostalrius wrote on their website in 2015,

“Foremost, we’re all passionate about World of Warcraft. We love the game and want to see it

preserved: we are a kind of museum curators of the Vanilla game.” In this way, private servers

are a form of folk preservation, to protect and keep online these obsolesced versions. In this

section, I explain how private servers also constitute a form of resistance against video game

updates, one that questions the normative flow of time in the games industry by asserting control

at the level of infrastructure. I will argue for an understanding of nostalgic private servers,

especially those running vanilla WoW, like Nostalrius, as wielding a kind of “infrastructural

power” or “server power” used by players in the service of taking control of WoW time, to

enable “saving” and revisiting old WoW versions.

According to media scholar Švelch (2019), the current modes of control in video game

culture have changed drastically in the last two decades with the increased reliance by the games

industry on cloud-based infrastructures. He has written, “The autonomy to choose whether to

update or not has been replaced by self-maintaining online gaming platforms and by the growing

acceptance of the “games as service” paradigm by both the industry and the audiences” (6). He

argues that this change has meant a change in the nature of patches, from a form of technical

support to a “tool of iterative game design and control over the way the game is played” (6).

Gameplay is now regulated in a way it had not been previously, with contemporary automated

mandatory patches giving way to a new form of control on behalf of game developers through

internet protocols. Media theorist Alexander Galloway (2004) calls this phenomenon

“protocological power,” or the power inherent in the language of the internet that guides how

data is transmitted across distributed networks. Players have notably reacted and rebelled in

various ways, including finding unauthorized workarounds to opt out of otherwise mandatory

patches. Drawing upon Galloway, Švelch refers to these defiant acts as “patch resistance” and

“video game update resistance,” which he explains successfully resist protocological power by

defying the forward march of time insisted upon by game patches, but notably do not extend to

the level of infrastructure.

I propose that players and developers of vanilla WoW private servers are practicing a form of

video game update resistance that does indeed tap into the infrastructure underlying these

systems. These amateur developers reverse engineer or otherwise acquire their own versions of

WoW server code, giving them the tools to establish a connection with the WoW client software.

This in turn allows them to recreate their own instance of WoW, ones in which they have the

power to modify, regulate, and populate. By recreating server code on their own terms and

having control over which version they are playing, private server developers also give players

more control over WoW time. This is similar to Švelch’s understanding of resistance, but it is

importantly a resistance that happens not in the moment of the patch download, but as a

retroactive resistance, one insisted upon well after-the-fact, to recreate lost and buried versions.

In resisting the forward flow of time, in a sense, private servers afford “saving” or holding

onto something that players felt was taken from them. The idea of saving is a very familiar

concept in the world of gaming. Just as Microsoft Word allows you to “save” your documents in

a particular state, or how Instagram allows you to save drafts of posts, most video games have

the option to save progress before logging off or turning off your console. This logic of saving

one’s game, freezing it in a particular state, was taken up originally not by video game

developers but by players of analog games (Tobin 2016). Things like keeping score on a piece of

paper, verbal anecdotes of previous game play, and annotating chessboard states are all examples

of saving in games. Later, with the advent of digital games, players learned to hack the game

software to save a snapshot of a set of conditions as a file. Inspired by the pioneering work of

such players, file-based saves went on to become the norm in digital gaming, with the

introduction of features like in-game save points and autosaves. I bring this history into this

discussion to point to the interesting parallels between this fan-produced lineage of the game

save and the modern practices of player-led “saving” of virtual worlds. Insofar as private servers

can be used to restore and save a previous version of WoW, connecting to a private server also

means connecting to a game save state suspended in time. Players want to save WoW and have

emotional affinities to periods of time in the history of WoW. Yet the game has been around for

16 years and, at this point, has multiple expansions and countless updates and patches layered on

top of it. Many players frequently reference the early days of WoW as a long lost “golden age”

or the era of vanilla WoW.

While this research was conducted primarily with players who have played the original

version of WoW on private servers, it is worth noting that not all WoW private servers are

vanilla private servers. Original, vanilla, or “classic” servers certainly get the most press and

arguably have garnered the largest player base, yet players have historically created and played

on private servers for every expansion in the WoW timeline. Private servers usually advertise

themselves as having content up to a particular expansion. For example, a server running The

Burning Crusade software has content from classic WoW plus The Burning Crusade (TBC)

expansion, and a Mists of Pandaria (MoP) server would have content from classic and sequential

expansions, up to and including the release of MoP. In fact, as of this writing, the most popular

server on the private server listing website is one running Wrath of the Lich King (WOTLK), the

second expansion. TBC and and WOTLK are particularly popular because they both represent the

period following the vanilla era, but preceding the Cataclysm expansion, which brought dramatic

changes to the landscape and game mechanics. The pre-Cataclysm era is one that players

frequently referred to positively in interviews, illustrating a notable sea change in attitudes

toward the game after this expansion, and thus the desire to play on servers running software

before this moment.

While private servers resist the linear flow of time by freezing a normally rapidly evolving

game in a save state, they can also reproduce the linearity of retail WoW in the form of

“progressive servers.” Many private servers consider themselves to be “progressive,” which

denotes engagement in a practice of rolling out content updates to the game code in a similar

fashion to the original WoW timeline. In this way, they are replicating the model of forward

“progress” of patches and expansions layered on top of the base game. This is a different kind of

preservation, one that not only preserves the world and gameplay, but also attempts to preserve

and curate the flow of time. While progressive private servers resist flows of time, allowing users

to “go back,” they also promote a “moving forward,” a desirable feature for many players who

want to experience the game as it really was over time, and not just at one moment in history. I

argue that, while these so-called progressive private servers strive to recreate the normative flow

of time established by Blizzard, by rolling out updates and expansions in a similar fashion to the

original game, these servers are still a form of resistance, a reclamation of time to be determined

on players’ own terms. Player-developers determine which patches get rolled out and when

based on the popularity of the server and the readiness of the community to take the next step

together.

With all this is mind, there is still something to be said for the desire to momentarily relive

the past. It is true that preservation projects are meant to have longevity; they serve to collect and

maintain historical objects for future generations. However, not every player wants the stability

of a long-term community. In fact, many expressed to me the desire to simply be able to go back

when they wish, with many of these nostalgic players maintaining a subscription to retail WoW.

Such players want the availability and easy accessibility of older versions of the game world,

especially vanilla, without the necessity of commitment or fear of losing data. Most private

server players I spoke with are not dedicated to playing one game at a time; they want the game

to exist in particular states and to have the freedom to choose, rather than having that choice

made for them.

Oftentimes players are highly motivated by momentary bouts of nostalgia. For example,

Darren plays retail WoW but shyly admitted to routinely playing on vanilla WoW private

servers, specifically to revisit areas of the game that do not look the same anymore in the retail

version, such as Thousand Needles, which was flooded with the release of the Cataclysm

expansion. As he explained, “I distinctly remember that I wanted to go back to Thousand

Needles without the water in it… just being there was the most relaxing, pleasant thing you can

imagine. I wasn’t doing anything; I was just running around.” Darren feels immense nostalgia for

those areas of the world that have changed, and private servers give him the opportunity to see

them again, a feeling he described as a “coming home.” There is also a large subset of players

who have never played vanilla WoW in the first place. These players have expressed a curiosity

about the past, a certain “anemoia” or nostalgia for a time one has never known, a swelling

desire to revisit vanilla almost like an anthropologist or historian, with questions to study and

phenomena to observe. One player, Ford, who admitted he felt that he missed out on the true

vanilla experience, had a very particular experience in mind: “I also wanted to experience the

lack of flying mounts and how that impacted Player versus Player in the game.”

The versioning of game worlds has led to a situation in which a subset of players feel that

their worlds are being overhauled and buried under updates, patches, and expansions. By

refashioning server code and reprogramming game code, players are resisting these waves of

developer-made changes and creating their own servers on which to play WoW, forming

communities of their own. In doing so, players are wielding a kind of “server power,” an

infrastructural form of control that gives players the ability to resist the flow of time and recreate

the world as it looked at different periods of time. In the next section, I outline three ways in

which people have tapped into server power using vanilla WoW private servers in ways that

question game developer’s original intentions when designing the game.

Wielding Server Power in Three Ways

Players have been creating and running private WoW servers since just after the game was first

released, reverse engineering code and emulating their own iterations of the game world. While

this chapter has largely worked through the motivations and practices of those using private

servers to play earlier versions of WoW, people have multiple reasons for wanting to play the

game on private servers. Perhaps the principal reason for the emergence of these alternative

communities playing unauthorized versions of WoW is an issue of cost. Players pay not only an

initial price up front, but also a monthly subscription to continue to have access to the servers.

Additionally, whenever a new expansion is released for the game, adding a large amount of new

content to the world, players must pay for that software as well, in addition to their monthly fee.

As Wendy explains, “[my friends] were just like, ‘well I can’t pay for all the expansions, can’t

pay the monthly subscription, so I’m just gonna go on a private server.’” Creating a private

server gives players the opportunity to play the game for free, offering an alternative to the pay-

to-play model of what is known as “retail WoW.”

Many players, even in the early days of WoW, opposed or could not afford the monthly fee,

and opted to play on private servers instead. It is a common story to hear that some players,

perhaps especially younger players, never played retail WoW at all for this very reason. As

Mabel explains:

I’d always been jealous of people who had the internet and like the $15 a month to play

Warcraft and I really wanted to play. But even then, or at least especially then my first year

out as an adult in the world, I was like $15 a month like Jesus Christ. I can't afford that. And

then… my friend Eric was like well did you know there's a way you can play WoW without

having to like pay for it strictly speaking? I was like, Oh my god, really?… And that is how I

ended up on the private server that was known as aniWow. And that was my first ever taste

of World of Warcraft… My first experience playing WoW was in a private server.

Avoiding the subscription cost of WoW may be a rather prominent rationale players give for

deciding to play WoW on a private server, and it is indeed a common stereotype of private server

players more generally. However, the idea that all players who play on private servers are only

doing it to play the game for free is a myth, one that ignores and diminishes the fascinating work

being done by private server gamers. In the previous section, I explored how private servers give

players a tool to resist the forward motion of time in the games industry, to resist versioning and

take control of their experiences. In this section, I show three other ways in which players have

historically used private servers to assert control over the game: modding, theorycrafting, and

machinima.

The first is very commonly discussed among private server players—technical modification,

or “modding.” Because private server programmers are working with the code themselves, they

can alter the game parameters from the inside, something not afforded to retail WoW players.

Private server administrators can “mod” the game to make hard-to-get items more easily

attainable, redesign user interfaces, give out in-game currency, change how players interact with

non-player characters, and toy with the gameplay mechanics, such as the amount of damage dealt

to a player by an enemy’s attack (Debeauvais and Nardi 2010). Oftentimes, specific mods are

highly visible to those searching for server communities to join on private server websites, as

programmers frequently use perks, such as immediately advancing a character to the maximum

level, to promote and market servers to entice new players. As one interviewee, Stan, explained,

“around that time there was a private server, where you could get instant 70. So, some of my

friends, we jumped on that instead, because we all hated the leveling.” These “instant” boosts to

the highest level allow players to engage with so-called “endgame” content more quickly and

avoid the “grind” of leveling.

Modding is also popular in part because it offers an alternative style of gameplay from retail

WoW, a way for players to reimagine their own versions of World of Warcraft and to have new

game experiences. Typically, servers running relatively “pure” or un-modified WoW software

are referred to as “blizzlike,” while those running heavily modded WoW software are referred to

as “nonblizzlike,” a distinction emerging from player comparisons between the authenticity—

and sometimes overall quality—of the experience to that of the “official” retail version offered

by Blizzard. These modding practices fit into a broader history of gamers breaking the rules of

games and otherwise acting against designer intentions (Consalvo 2007). Aarseth (2007)

explains that player subversions and transgressions are moments of “hope” when players see the

possibility of escaping the submission that their game playing implies. For example, modifying

game code also allows private server developers to invent and install new games within the game

world. Interviewees mentioned some instances of servers where developers had designed games

within the game world, like mazes and puzzles for players to navigate. As John explains, “they

also had like obstacle courses, or you do these jump challenges where you're jumping across

benches that are in the sky and trying not to fall and stuff like that. So those are my first few

reasons I jumped on to a private server, just to mess around and have fun.”

The practice of modding also affords players the opportunity to use private servers to engage

in a second activity, what is known as “theorycrafting,” or a method of testing out certain

strategies, character arrangements, and items to determine best practices for gameplay. By “using

statistical analysis and mathematical modeling, theorycrafters seek out underlying formulae that

govern WoW, largely in an attempt to play better” (Paul 2011, 1). Theorycrafting, which requires

some knowledge of the code of the game as well as the use of third-party applications, is possible

to do in retail WoW—many players do it (Paul 2011). However, a large subset of players prefers

to use private servers to theorycraft to more easily access in-game content, quickly acquire and

assemble items and gear, and otherwise break some of the rules in order to get at this hidden

knowledge. Private servers might be thought as a “sandbox” version of WoW, one that players

with a theorycrafting mindset can tinker and toy with, creating what some refer to as a

“theorycrafting environment.” Oftentimes these theorycrafters (and even more casual players

who are simply practicing dungeons and raids) learn better strategies to transfer that knowledge

to other players and apply it to gameplay in retail WoW. In this way, private servers can function

not as an alternative to retail WoW, but rather as a supplementary component.

In a conversation with digital media preservation scholar Henry Lowood, I learned of another

popular use of private servers, one that constitutes both a form of play and filmmaking:

machinima. Machinima—another form of modding—is, in short, a genre of animated films

created using video games (Lowood 2008); filmmakers produce these videos by synchronizing

footage from a game to prerecorded or voiced over dialogue and other bits of audio. Lowood

explained that in addition playing the game on private servers, players have been using these

servers to make machinima for over a decade. Machinima is a very popular art form in the world

of gaming. For example, the web series Red vs. Blue, which uses footage from the sci-fi first-

person shooter game franchise Halo, has been running consistently for almost 18 years. Ng

(2016) explains that “recording and creating films in game worlds expands those worlds” and

“stretches the possibility of that world and of being in it” (290). As such, machinima is also quite

popular among WoW players. Players can download graphics from the game, including shots of

landscapes and 3D character models, which they then load into 3D-modeling software and video-

editing software to make their films. Though machinima filmmakers do not need to use private

servers to make their films, many extol the benefits offered by some of these less-populated

WoW realms, including emptier landscapes for cleaner shots and more easily accessible code.

From creative pursuits like making digital films, to more practical scenario-running to

determine best practices for gameplay, to modifying and toying with game code, players are

utilizing the power that holding onto WoW server code gives them, engaging in many

fascinating activities using private WoW servers that allow them to assert a certain amount of

control over their version of the world and their experiences inside and outside of WoW. Such

activities as the ones I have laid out here change the design intentions of game developers and

are thus forms of play that reconfigure notions of server ownership and game ownership.

Importantly, player practices like theorycrafting and machinima are uses of private servers that

only require momentary use of the server, rather than long-term play as is the case with other

vanilla WoW private servers like Nostalrius briefly discussed previously. Numerous challenges

keep long-term private servers from staying afloat. In the next section, I explore the various

technical, social, and legal issues that plague private server projects and threaten the longevity of

their existence as forms of preservation and as forms of resistance.

Temporal Instabilities

Despite these desires to recreate and stabilize temporalities, using private servers for either

preservation or recreation is far from perfect; these projects are largely unstable. In vanilla WoW

private servers, there are elements that players report make the world “feel” like retail WoW,

such as the visuals and graphics, which are ripped from official Blizzard-owned code. Such

elements lend themselves to a feeling of stability, that the game is functioning as intended, and

help players feel like their worlds might have longevity, as retail WoW has demonstrated.

However, the private server experience is lacking in many ways, as evidenced by many players I

interviewed lamenting the negative aspects of everyday life on private servers. Things such as

seemingly perpetual lag and the looming fear of legal retribution were frequently mentioned in

interviews as factors that tend to dissuade people from playing on them. Vanilla WoW private

servers are characterized by certain inherent instabilities, commonplace patterns of experience

across private server player narratives wherein private server play is disrupted, with the worlds

eventually being shut down only to be replaced by new ones.

To further illustrate the challenges of resisting a game company’s temporalities and the

limitations of infrastructural power, in this section, I bring together player experiences of

instability, breaking them down into three forms—technical, social, and legal—and arguing for

an understanding of private servers as temporally unstable objects. Working through examples

learned through fieldwork, I read these experiences of instability alongside Kari Kraus’ three

characteristics of folk preservation (amateur, distributed, and unauthorized). In so doing, I do not

intend to establish a one-to-one relationship between these categories, but rather to analyze how

players experience private servers not only as a form of video game update resistance and an

assertion of server power, but also as always already unsustainable projects that destabilize both

preservation and play.

Technical instability

Perhaps the most common characteristic of life on private servers that tends to frustrate players is

technical instability. Because the servers are running unauthorized versions of the game, these

projects lack developer support, like from Blizzard Entertainment, WoW’s development

company, as well as institutional support, like from a museum or other preservation institution.

Without ties to a corporation or an institution, administrative teams struggle to maintain the

technical stability of their servers. An administrator of the Elysium private server revealed to me

that the unpaid volunteer members of these teams vary widely in background expertise, typically

comprising both amateur and career programmers who are fans of the game and living lives of

their own, often with full-time jobs as government agency employees, IT security experts, game

developers, or students. On the one hand, volunteer administrators must take on the

overwhelming task of fixing bugs, conducting server stress tests, responding to player requests

and community concerns, and performing other general technical maintenance on both server

and client side. At the same time, they must also fund these projects, which are extraordinarily

expensive to run due to the high operating costs of renting server space from a third-party

provider. These projects often rely on donations from their players to continue operating, and

frequently programmers simply run out of money, or the donations are not sufficient to cover

costs. This can become one of the many reasons these projects get taken offline, taking with

them the data of all the players who made their home there.

On an everyday basis, because of this lack of support and unpredictable funding, the users of

these unsupported and unauthorized private servers report frequent server issues. I frequently

heard reports of graphical glitches, missing or incomplete elements of in-game quests, and lag,

common occurrences characteristic of everyday life on any given private server. Many players

also lamented server-specific network issues, like frequent server downtimes due to errors and

maintenance, unstable connections, and server overload causing longer queue times to entry,

making it difficult to even connect to the server in the first place. Stan told me about the

difficulties experienced when the new, highly anticipated Elysium server was opened for the first

time: “I remember when Elysium launched. You could wake up in the morning, put yourself in

the queue, go to school, go to work, shop, go home, and you will still be a queue. It was that bad,

and that was one server.” What often happens is that players quit playing on these servers as a

result of having experienced a number of these technical downfalls, complaining that the quality

of these projects is not up to the “standards” that have been set for them by the retail version or

even by other, perhaps better-funded, private servers that boast a “blizzlike” experience.

Social instability

Players leaving private servers is also a consequence of another defining characteristic of life on

private servers—social instability. Players might leave because of technical instability, but they

also might leave for a number of other reasons, for example, to play other games or to subscribe

to and play retail WoW, or even simply because of a lack of free time to devote to play. For these

reasons, among others, population numbers on private servers are highly variable, leading many

players to refer to the liveliness of private servers, mirroring conceptions of retail server

worldliness I explored in Chapter 1. Several interviewees explained to me that low or fluctuating

population numbers can lead to these worlds not feeling “alive” and for certain servers to be

considered “dead servers.” With the sheer number of private servers and the cyclical closing of

old servers and opening of new ones, the project of preserving WoW is a largely distributed

process, with no central leadership. This is all exacerbated by the release of a retail version of

vanilla under the name WoW Classic, which I will briefly discuss later. Many players have

flocked to this authorized, official version, and many private servers have agreed to cease

operations. While there are still holdouts who believe that what Blizzard is offering is not enough

or feel attached to their private server community, private servers have certainly taken a hit in

what can accurately be described as an exodus. For example, on dkpminus.com (a popular

private server listing site), of the top 20 WoW private servers listed as of 11/19/20, 11 of those

servers are categorized as Wrath of the Lich King (i.e., the third expansion) and only 1 is vanilla.

Additionally, as I explained briefly in the previous section, there are many different private

server communities available for each expansion, and populations of interested players are

distributed across a number of different private servers with distinct leadership teams. Many

servers offer similar experiences; for example, when I was conducting this research, there were

four popular vanilla WoW servers that players could choose from, along with many smaller ones,

all offering a “blizzlike” vanilla experience. Despite this redundancy, fans create new servers

with some frequency, offering more stable connections, a different community experience, or

perhaps a set of desirable mods to the game. To keep up with these changes in the ecology of

private servers or to even find a server to play on in the first place, players must follow trends on

third party websites and the wowservers subreddit. There they are able to track changes in

population numbers and read player-reported accounts of what the quality of the experience is

like on the server and in the community’s chat channels, like Discord or other online forums.

Leadership on these servers is unstable as well, especially given that they are performing free

labor, and changes in leadership frequently result from squabbles among the team, scandal (e.g.,

questionable use of donation money), and burnout. Generally speaking, there is a palpable lack

of centralized leadership involved in using private servers as a means by which fans are

preserving WoW.

Legal instability

On top of the technical and social issues that plague private server players and developers,

private servers also operate in a precarious legal state and are sometimes forced to shut down

because the emulation of server software to run a private instance of a copyrighted online game

world is classified as copyright infringement under US copyright law. A key example of this

comes from a federal lawsuit in 2010, in which Blizzard sued a company called Scapegaming,

which ran a private server and collected over $3 million in profits through micropayments from

players. The federal court ruled in favor of Blizzard and awarded the WoW game development

company $85 million in damages for “willful infringement.” During the case, Blizzard argued

that the private server infringed on four copyrights, including the base game, the first two

expansions, and the server code itself (listed on the letter sent to the Copyright Office as “World

of Warcraft--server”).

With this case, Blizzard’s legal team has suggested that it is perhaps

willing to take down any attempts to profit from their intellectual property, even if they are not as

litigious as they could be.

On a daily basis, private server players do not seem to think much about the potential legal

impact of their play on their own lives. As one player, Paul, put it, “Connecting to a private

server is not illegal, but hosting one is, in a way.” In this way, most players I spoke with were not

worried about legal retribution for playing on these servers; however, they did worry some that

the server would be forcibly shut down, which meant losing their game progress and social

community. Many private server communities have survived for years without incident or any

contact from Blizzard, likely in some part due to developers of private servers working to get

around these potential legal threats by hosting

their servers in other countries, ones with more

relaxed rules around copyright infringement. Nevertheless, after Nostalrius was asked to shutter

its operations, the Blizzard legal team continued to occasionally serve cease and desist letters to

other new private servers; in the case of Felmyst, a vanilla WoW private server, they received a

letter just five days after their server opened and were forced to close.

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. v Alyson Reeves et al, 2:2009cv07621 (2009)

These server hosting services located in other countries are often called “DMCA ignored

hosting services.”

Temporal instability

The technical, social, and legal instabilities discussed above also lead to private servers being

inevitably temporally unstable. In their work on strategies for preserving console games,

Guttenbrunner et al. (2010) wrote that emulation projects, often labors of love, are typically

abandoned or discontinued by their authors. Ultimately, what this means is that these private

servers, emulation projects for virtual worlds, are largely temporary; they come and go, with

some projects failing and new ones being created all the time. The culture of private servers is

one overshadowed by the precarious nature of their existence. To play on a private server is to

embrace precarity and instability. In an interview, private server player Wendy explained this

precariousness in terms of authenticity and ephemerality:

Whenever I would play, always in the back of my mind, I'm like, “oh, this is just a private

server.” Like, not that it's not real, but if—not sure how to describe it, but it's just sort of like,

“oh, this is not World of Warcraft, like, this isn't the World of Warcraft, even though it's the

same game. It's the same interface... Just, in the back of my mind I was thinking maybe this

doesn't matter or I don't care… Maybe the server is just going to be gone at some point.

Players like Wendy fear their server might lose support, experience dwindling population

numbers, or even be threatened or forcibly shut down by game developers citing copyright

infringement. Therefore, players are reluctant to dedicate their time and energy to developing a

character on one of these servers, only for their data to be lost and all their hard work consigned

to oblivion. Dipper shared this sentiment, reflecting on his preemptive departure, saying that the

“reason why I quit Light’s Hope was because I didn't want to get too attached to a character that

was going to get deleted because they’re going to shut down.” In many ways, then, playing

vanilla World of Warcraft on private servers feels only like an approximation, one that forces the

player to succumb to a cyclical time characterized by servers closing and opening, in which

vanilla WoW becomes an uneven and unending temporal loop, unless a player chooses to leave.

As evidenced by the forms of instability discussed in this section, private servers, despite

being popular projects led by passionate fans, are ultimately impractical as solutions to the

question of how to preserve virtual worlds in an interactive format long-term. In Chapter 3, I ask

what museums and other preservation institutions are doing to advance these complex and

difficult projects, but what I want to assert here is this: What private servers do successfully is

send a message. Fans desperately want companies to listen to them and their concerns, and with

how much many people invest in these game worlds, fans want some amount of control and

agency over the availability and temporality of these worlds. The story of private server

communities cannot be boiled down to simply a desire among players to play games for free.

The existence of private servers is one way for fans to explicitly communicate with the

developers of these games to say that they want to play games that are no longer available online,

as well as older versions of actively online games, and that fans are willing to take part in

keeping these lost worlds online. But do these companies listen?

Conclusion: WoW Classic

During the opening ceremony for BlizzCon 2017, J. Allen Brack, who one year prior had told an

audience member who asked about classic WoW servers, “you think you do but you don’t,”

suddenly began speaking to the audience about ice cream. And as he did, fans in the audience

and on Twitch streams began to exclaim the word “vanilla!” Brack said, “Ice cream is one of my

favorite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate and I love cookies and cream… But I understand

that for some of you, your favorite flavor is vanilla.” The crowd erupted in screams and

applause. At that opening ceremony for BlizzCon, Brack was announcing the release of a version

of WoW that hadn’t existed for 10 years. And as a knowing wave of understanding erupted in

this huge hall of the Convention Center in Anaheim, California, a video played on an enormous

screen, showing a female gnome from WoW standing in front of a giant green portal. She looked

to the riled-up viewers and spoke, “Someone once said that you can’t go home, but they lacked

vision and a temporal discombobulator!” Rapidly, a montage of cinematic videos from WoW

played in reverse, ending on a clip from the original WoW trailer, showing a dwarf

walking through snow. The WoW logo appeared, with the word “Classic” emblazoned below it.

The audience went wild for what felt like a solid minute.

Importantly, the corporate restoration of WoW Classic as a commercially available game

world is an example of the kind of outputs private servers can yield, the spaces of possibility

generated by resistances and battles for control. By wielding server power, players can not only

assert control over the flows of time that feel so out of control; they can also send a message in a

gaming culture ruled by systems like “games-as-a-service” in which players increasingly feel

like their voices are not heard. However, while players can tap into server power to compel

corporate decision-making, the reverse is also true. As Foucault (1979) wrote: “Where there is

power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of

exteriority in relation to power” (95). That a company can make these decisions means they also

can wield server power toward corporate gain. By now, WoW Classic is widely regarded as a

commercial success, with thousands of active players playing the game through a retail WoW

subscription. Though this announcement might never have happened without private servers, it is

critical to recognize that these acts of resistance fueled a common course of action, with Blizzard

also buying into this mode of temporality. And it was Brack himself which fueled the movement

in the first place, when he insisted players did not want this thing that they had been begging for

and indeed had been playing surreptitiously on private servers. Moreover, after Blizzard

Figure 2.4: Dozens of excited BlizzCon attendees play a demo of the then-unreleased WoW:

Classic in 2018. Source: Author.

pressured Nostalrius, once the most popular vanilla WoW private server, to stop offering its

services, a WoW development team at Blizzard invited members of the Nostalrius team to a

meeting at Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, California in 2016. No news of what happened during

this private meeting has been made public, but one year later Brack stood on stage at BlizzCon

and announced WoW Classic. Undoubtedly, the wave of popularity of private servers motivated

Blizzard to listen to the demands of players and supply them with a retail version of this game

that so many wanted to return to, but critically this was ultimately in the service of gain for

Blizzard as well. The announcement and subsequent release of Classic meant that, while some

stayed active despite the news, countless vanilla private servers now faced a new temporal

instability as a result, because what they had been begging for was going to be available for

them, without the precarity and instability from before. The era of vanilla private servers appears

to be waning.

Through explorations of the “versioning” of online games and virtual worlds, and player

engagement with forms of folk, or non-expert, preservation through server emulation, in this

chapter I have described how and why subsets of the WoW player population have been using

private servers to play WoW as it was when it was originally released, despite it being

(previously) commercially unavailable. Many of these private server players have expressed that

their work and play are part and parcel of a process of preserving WoW in particular states, an

engagement with the history and temporality of the game as a series of moments in time, as a

place, and as a cultural object. As I have explored here, they are also actively resisting the

consumer models which continually force updates to the game, a practice I refer to as a form of

patch resistance against the infrastructural power of game developers. Server emulation and

private servers allow players to struggle against and reclaim a form of server power that has the

potential to generate spaces of possibility and open productive channels of communication

between players and developers. However, it is crucial to understand the ways in which this

server power might also be passed back to its originator, wielded once again by the game

developer in the service of resolidifying the station of the corporate entity.

CHAPTER 3

Restoring Offline Worlds at a Video Game Museum

A wave of nostalgia swept over me sitting inside the museum. I was on a faded black leather

couch in front of a row of flatscreen and cathode-ray tube televisions, holding a grey controller

for the first PlayStation. Looking toward the TV closest to me, the distantly familiar title

sequence for the video game Legend of Dragoon (2000) appeared on the screen. The

combination of visuals and music immediately reminded me of the hours I spent with my

childhood best friend holding a controller just like the one I was currently gripping (see Figure

3.1), playing this exact same video game, which was so large that it had to be spread across four

discs (a fact which the museum volunteer who set up the console for me remarked upon with

surprise).

A little boy of maybe 10 years sat a few feet from me on the couch, his hands holding a

Super Nintendo controller, his eyes fixed on a screen displaying a map I immediately recognize

as being from the Secret of Mana (1993). A little girl, who I assume is his sister, calls out to him

to play a round of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008) on a Wii console. Out of the corner of my

eye, I see the boy turn around and give an insistent response, “I can’t come right now!” He turns

back to his game, “I’m having an adventure!” Across the room, an adult woman sits alone on a

small chair, silently wiggling the joystick of an Atari controller as Tetris blocks fall in front of

her. She bears an intense look of concentration, as if to drown out the cacophony—a mixture of

electronic sound effects, buttons clicking, and people chatting and laughing—that filled the

museum space.

This is just another day at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, or the MADE, in

Figure 3.1: Playing Legend of Dragoon on an original Playstation at the Museum of Art and

Digital Entertainment. Source: Author.

Oakland, CA. The museum is located in an historic beige sawmill building with a huge sign

above it that reads “VIDEO GAME MUSEUM” in bold white letters, clearly visible from cars

driving along Interstate 580. The MADE is one of the few specialized video game museums in

the country, and their entire collection is playable. For an entrance fee of $10, members of the

public can enter the space, which contains small exhibits on video game history, informational

displays about certain gaming artifacts, and, most notably, many shelves packed with original

and recreated game boxes, representing a catalogue of over 6,000 titles on almost any game

console. And visitors can play any of them.

After reading the last two chapters, you might be asking: what about World of Warcraft?

Does the MADE offer access to online games and virtual worlds? Well, yes and no. During my

first visit, I noticed some evidence of virtual world history in the museum. Prominently displayed

on the back wall was a poster for one of the first popular fantasy MMOs (and my point of entry

for online gaming), EverQuest, featuring the instantly recognizable image of the scantily clad

staff-wielding Paladin Princess, Firiona Vie. The MADE also did have a range of online PC

game discs on its shelves, including original boxes for World of Warcraft and its various

expansions, all haphazardly clustered together on a small shelf near the front of the space.

However, these games were not playable. As I discussed briefly in Chapter 2, it is not possible to

simply slide the disc of one of the WoW expansions into a PC and immediately be able to sit

down and play the game, as they require servers and an online account to run. Especially

complicated is the process of rendering playable a virtual world that has been taken offline, any

connection between client and server severed. This is the focus of this chapter—how is the

MADE working to make disconnected virtual worlds playable once again, and in engaging with

the challenges they face, what do their preservation practices reveal about processes that

increasingly rely on servers?

According to the MADE’s founder, the museum’s primary goal is “to preserve our digital

heritage in a playable form.” For them, that heritage includes MMOs and virtual worlds that are

no longer online, especially ones that are considered games. This work of restoration and

subsequent preservation poses numerous challenges, and in this chapter I explore two

interrelated issues: (1) the games industry has shifted to a consumer model that views games like

this as neither worlds nor products but instead as digital “services” dependent upon servers, what

I refer to as “worlds-as-a-service;” and (2) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits

circumvention of technological protection measures that copyright holders have placed on that

server software. In essence, these regimes create a situation in which the power to control the life

and death of a virtual world is in the hands of whoever owns and has control over the server. In

recent years, leadership at the museum has been making moves to incorporate virtual worlds and

online games that have been taken offline into their collection, moves that open the door for new

ways of imagining long-term solutions to video game preservation on a grand scale. Despite the

lack of support from game developers (most of whom have historically not supported such

preservation projects), folks at the MADE, alongside legal teams, historians, and activists, are

leveraging a segment of copyright law that enables a potential workaround, essentially hacking

or “modding” the doctrine, to make possible the restoration of offline virtual worlds.

In the last chapter, I wrote about the ways in which players can reassert control over the

temporality of online game worlds by recreating or accessing server code and running the world

on their own “private” servers. This chapter shifts to look at more institutional forms of

preservation that can offer avenues for controlling the life of game worlds themselves by

changing modes of server ownership. In exploring the challenges facing proponents of virtual

world restoration and preservation, I highlight the tensions between preservation institutions,

game companies, and copyright legal doctrine, relations which also generate certain spaces of

possibility for reshaping ideas of server ownership. In our current situation, in which the games

industry has shifted from viewing MMOs and virtual worlds as products to viewing them as

services, institutional projects of virtual world resurrection—projects that extend the life of

online game worlds and make possible the revival of their communities—are dependent upon the

modifiability of copyright law. To explain this point, in this chapter, I delve into what it means

for a virtual world to “die” (rather than just to change over time, as discussed in the previous

chapter), what it means for copyright law to be imagined as “moddable,” and how the MADE is

leveraging copyright mods to bring dead virtual worlds back to life.

Virtual World Endings and the Aftermath

Imagine for a moment that you started playing a new massively multiplayer online role-playing

game called Wildside.

It was fairly popular when released in 2015, and there were massive

queues to join any of the 10 open servers. When you finally joined a server, you immediately

made a friend who quickly became someone you played with almost every single evening after

work. Eventually, after making more friends in the game, you and your friend decided to start a

guild, and over the course of three years, the membership of your guild climbed to 200 members.

Every evening, you spent hours with your friends that you met in Wildside, teaming up to fight

bad guys, trading resources with one another, and chatting through text and voice chat software.

All things considered, the game was moderately successful among MMO fans. It had

received some bad press because players online were saying that the game was too labor

intensive and repetitive, but that is the way you and your friends liked it! However, around the

fall of 2018, you started to notice that the world felt a bit empty—the overall Wildside player

population had dropped to an all-time low. Even your guild size was declining, with a roster of

50 active members. Then in late 2019, the game development company behind Wildside

announced that they were discontinuing server support for the game. Wildside was going offline.

This was nothing new to you, of course, because being an MMO gamer inevitably means having

This is a fictional MMO, whose name I created as a portmanteau of Wildstar and

Planetside, two MMOs that are no longer online.

to cope with your worlds’ potential to disappear. Nevertheless, you and a few dedicated friends

continued playing the game for a few more months, awaiting the day and time that the

developers had announced the game was going dark.

Today is that fateful day, a day that many players have started referring to as the

“apocalypse.” You log into Wildside and find a few of your friends in the game world’s largest

city, surrounded by more player avatars than you had seen in over a year! The avatars are

dancing, running around, and casting spells, and the general chat window on the left side of the

screen is scrolling so quickly that you cannot keep up with the conversation. The game feels so

alive in these final moments, almost like it felt back in 2015. And then all of a sudden everything

goes silent. Avatars are starting to rapidly disappear one by one. Your screen freezes, and a grey

dialogue window pops up on your screen: “You have been disconnected from the server.” And

just like that, Wildside vanished.

In the last two chapters, I discussed at length how online games and their underlying

infrastructure can change over time, with developers adding updates that come with the addition

of new features and modifications to existing ones. These changes can fundamentally alter the

way the game world looks and operates, so much so that players might assert that the resulting

world is completely different from the original one they purchased. But as this vignette suggests,

online game worlds are not only modifiable; they can be terminated. New versions of online

games like WoW are often temporary, but so are the worlds themselves. Virtual worlds tend to

go offline, to get seemingly blinked out of existence. Players often say that virtual worlds “die,”

rather than to say they are underpopulated or “uninhabited” because they become literally

inaccessible. In this chapter, I will be discussing institutional projects of virtual world restoration

and preservation, but to fully understand the stakes involved in worlds being brought back to life,

it is important to first understand the conditions of virtual world death. How can a whole world

just come to an end, and what does it mean for the player communities in the aftermath?

For game companies, it is a difficult task keeping virtual worlds alive. They are notoriously

expensive to continually operate and update, with the high costs of maintaining a team of

developers and keeping servers up and running. Therefore, for a world to be kept online, that

world has to make money by sustaining a player base that is subscribing, buying in-game items,

and watching ads. However, keeping a dedicated player population is challenging, especially in a

commercial environment in which the market is dominated by a few lasting titles, with WoW,

Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, and Elder Scrolls Online being among the

largest. New MMOs roll out every year or two, but few achieve the lasting endurance of these

big names. Additionally, much like players who invest time playing large-scale single-player

RPGs, most MMO players cannot play more than one title at a time, as these worlds are

incredibly time-consuming and immersive. In an interview with journalist Noah Davis (2012),

games scholar Jesper Juul explained the challenges in this way: “There is a very natural limit to

the size of the market. People will keep launching these games in hopes of capturing some of that

slice, but most of them are going to fail.” Developers of online game worlds that are unable to

build and sustain a dedicated player base, and thus to continue turn a profit, will not be able to

afford to keep their titles online. Sometimes, despite achieving some form of success, a game

company might still decide to take a game world offline for internal strategic reasons, as was the

case with NCSoft when they decided to take City of Heroes offline.

As for the players who make up the remaining population of a dying world, when these

worlds get taken offline it can feel apocalyptic, especially given that virtual worlds leave no ruins

Figure 3.2: A first-person view during a virtual world apocalypse. Meteors fall from the sky in

Planetside marking its final day online. Source: GameWatcher.

behind. When they are gone, players cannot even revisit the remains of the world. Sometimes the

end of a virtual world can even take on all the drama and excitement of an actual apocalypse. For

example, when Rogue Planet Games, the company behind the sci-fi MMO Planetside, decided to

stop supporting the game in favor of their sequel Planetside 2, they designed a meteor shower

that slowly killed players’ avatars, thus permanently removing them from the game. The event

ended in a standstill, with a few players surviving the onslaught, resisting the end of the game

world. Similarly, the developers of Final Fantasy XIV, whose numerous design flaws inspired

them to take the game offline and re-release it as FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, designed a villainous

red moon that slowly descended toward players. Players were then presented with a server error

message, which was followed by a cinematic video of the world ending, setting the stage for the

story of the game to continue in the re-release.

More often, however, the developers do not create a gamified apocalypse narrative, but rather

opt to simply write a letter to the community containing the day and time after which the game

will no longer be accessible. The game development company Maxis did just that with The Sims

Online. After re-branding the world as EA-Land and making numerous unpopular changes

(including fusing all zones into one megacity), player numbers declined, and the company

announced the world would be closing four months later. The final day, often referred to as “EA-

Land Sunset,” when the virtual world was shutdown, players held an in-world party before being

delivered a network error message saying the connection to the server was lost. Even if the

imagery does not have the same dramatic flair as a meteor storm or a descending red moon, it is

not hyperbole when players describe these events as apocalyptic—an important world and social

space that they have spent a lot of time in is suddenly going to become inaccessible. Many

players cling to those final moments; there is even a whole genre of YouTube video that has

emerged, with players posting video footage from their perspective of the final minutes of life in

a dying game world, capturing the often quiet and peaceful, but sometimes chaotic, moments

before the developers finally pull the plug on the world, the game, and the community.

What happens to these communities after the world ends? Though players may have a client-

side program launcher still present on their computer, there is no server to which that client can

establish a connection. The world is simply not there. But this is typically not the end of the

community, as they often have forums and other spaces online in which to gather, mourn, and

plan next steps. Players have several options to pursue, and the easiest and most common is to

find another game world. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, games scholar Celia Pearce (2008) urges

for an understanding of players’ involvement in game worlds as “trans-ludic,” highlighting the

ways in which players exist across multiple games and often recreate similar versions of

themselves in different worlds. Some dedicated MMO players even frequently practice “world-

hopping,” or moving between a few different worlds in one day. So when a world ceases to exist,

there is a chance that many players will have other worlds to fall back on or escape to. Pearce has

written extensively on the concept of virtual world diaspora—how player communities tend to

disperse to other game worlds, sometimes seeking to recreate not only community structures and

social norms, but also entire environments, avatars, and objects that resemble those from their

lost world (Pearce and Artemesia 2009).

As Pearce has shown in her work, players tend to grow strong attachments to these worlds,

and their communities are resilient. Players will often find ways of reconnecting with each other

once again, even if in smaller groups, and rebuilding their community in some fashion.

Sometimes, that process of rebuilding includes resurrecting the world that was taken offline. In

one interview, Alex at the MADE even described bringing a world back online as more than just

preservation of a world, but characterized it as a kind of “community revival,” stressing the

reinvigoration of the players when they can be in their worlds again. Player nostalgia is a

powerful sentiment, and players’ desires to visit lost worlds can actually motivate them to spring

into action to recreate the worlds for themselves. Just as players have invested time and resources

into recreating out-of-date versions of still-online game worlds (as discussed in Chapter 2), they

have been involved in reverse engineering server code to create private servers that restore

access to game worlds that developers have taken offline. There are countless stories of

community-led restoration projects, or projects of “community revival,” from The Matrix Online

to City of Heroes. Ultimately, however, as these projects are instances of folk preservation, they

are too often labors of love subject to the instability common among private servers, resulting

from insufficient technical support, issues with their social structure, or potentially even legal

trouble. If these sorts of projects had institutional support, backed by a formally recognized

archive or museum, what difference would it make? In the sections that follow, I discuss the

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challenges posed by the consumer models and legal regimes that govern virtual worlds and how

the MADE has worked to overcome these challenges.

The MADE’s Mission

In summer of 2008, a lifelong gamer and career games journalist named Alex Handy was

walking through the flea market at Laney College in Oakland and happened upon a collection of

ROM chips (pieces from the hardware memory storage hidden inside of game cartridge shells)

that amounted to 27 games for the ColecoVision and the Atari 2600 consoles. One set of chips

stood out from the rest, as they contained 12 versions—in fact iterative revisions—of an

unreleased Atari 2600 game called Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park. This rare find

showed the development process for a game that was never made available to the public. In an

interview a decade later, Alex explained to me that this was the catalyst for his decision to create

a video game museum: While these artifacts had little resale value, they held immense historical

significance and might otherwise be lost. In Chapter 2, I explained that the team behind

Nostalrius saw themselves as, in their own words, “kind of museum curators” of vanilla WoW.

In much the same way as these and many other private server developers, Alex—a dedicated fan

and collector of video games—acknowledged the importance of player-led stewardship,

especially as pieces of gaming history get discarded or fall into disrepair.

This is a core principle on which the MADE was founded: that players and fans of video

games are the primary stewards of video game history. But what does this mean for a small video

game museum? While attending my first meeting at the MADE, I realized that it is run primarily

by volunteers and a few paid staff members, all of whom are involved in several activities

critical to the functioning of the museum. They, often alongside Alex, work on exhibitions, help

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Figure 3.3: Volunteer-made Perler bead pixel art adorns the street-facing windows of the

Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. Source: Author.

curate the collection, repair gaming hardware, put together fundraising efforts, staff the museum

during open hours to help visitors learn history and find games to play, teach free coding and

game development classes, put together community events at the MADE, and organize MADE

presence at other venues, like the Vintage Computer Festival and the Game Developer’s

Conference. Every time I went to a volunteer meeting, there was a new enthusiastic volunteer (or

five!) ready to learn how they could help preserve video game history. On their own, some of

these volunteers had even engaged in folk preservation practices at home, crafting emulators,

repairing consoles, and amassing their own collections of video games and memorabilia. In a

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sense, the work they are doing at the MADE is extraordinarily similar to private server projects

in that they are preservation efforts intended for players, led by a team of players. What sets the

MADE apart is its recognition as a legitimate, formal institution of history and learning, one that

is funded by a community-backed Kickstarter and museum grants, has nonprofit status, and

partners with other formally recognized organizations invested in preserving software, like the

Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive. At the same time, though, it is

important to keep in mind that these are not museum scholars or professional curators; even Alex

has said, “It’s wonderful to be way out there on the cutting edge, but at the same time we have no

idea what we’re doing…we’re learning every day.”

What makes the MADE an interesting case in this study of the preservation of virtual worlds

is evidenced by its core tenets, the four primary goals set forth in their official mission statement,

which are as follows:

(1) “the preservation of historic artistic works in the digital media;”

(2) “the education of the public in the process of creation for digital works of art and video

games;”

(3) “the exhibition and curation of individual artists and creators, their works, and their

biographies;” and

(4) “that all exhibits should be playable: games are to be played, not viewed from afar or

watched on video.”

It is especially on this fourth goal that I would like to pause and examine: What does

playability mean? Alex and others have made it clear that archives and other cultural artifacts of

video game preservation (like videos of gameplay) are just as important as the more interactive

work being done at the MADE and other video game museums around the country, like the US

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National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas and the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester,

New York. The work they do differs, however, from the work being done at academic archives.

Of Stanford’s Preserving Virtual Worlds project for example, Alex said, “If we are Yin, this is

Yang. This paper talks about every nook and cranny, and how they would be saved. Very

academic. We're much more rubber-to-road, focusing on getting the game back up and running,

but this other work is just as important… but video is always less desirable than actual hands-on

gameplay, we feel.” This follows the assertion by Ermi and Mäyrä (2005) that “there is no game

without a player” (16). In other words, a “game” is actualized in the instance of being played. As

Alex has pointed out, institutions like Stanford and the Smithsonian have a number of limitations

in this regard. “Stanford University has the world's largest curated collection of video games, but

you can't go see them. They're locked away.” Additionally: “if you go to the Smithsonian exhibit

about video games, there's like 20 games to play.” Ultimately, the MADE and others believe that

to deny play is to deny the game as a cultural form. The MADE offers an example of a video

game–specific preservation institution that is working to collect and display objects of video

game history while also making the games accessible to the public, reflecting the interactive

nature of the medium and thus actualizing the objects in the collection.

Also core to the MADE’s mission is understanding video games as cultural heritage and,

more specifically, as game heritage. What I mean by heritage here is a particular status that is

ascribed to an object as worthy of preservation, one to pass down to future generations. As

Barbier (2014) puts it, “Heritage is the sum of all these preserved objects drawing a link between

the past, present, and future” (3). Digital games are increasingly being recognized as not only

representations of forms of heritage (such as games like Assassin’s Creed which draw upon and

refer to actual histories), but also as forms of cultural heritage in their own right. For example,

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the Library of Congress has begun to document and archive games in earnest, and in 2020, the

International Journal of Heritage Studies devoted an entire issue to the relationship between

games and heritage. The meaning of heritage in games studies has evolved recently, with

scholars urging museums to consider not only forms of “tangible heritage,” like hardware and

other game-related objects, but also forms of “intangible heritage,” like gamer’s ideas and

values, their cultural practices, and the larger societal structures that give meaning to tangible

objects when curating video game exhibits (Nylund et al. 2020).

Newman (2012) has suggested that preservation institutions shift their focus from preserving

games as artifacts to preserving play as an activity. The MADE purports to do just that—

investing resources into curating a space that makes room for playing and sharing games and

creating and communicating new meanings among communities of players. The activity of play

in the MADE then becomes a way of valuing both tangible and intangible heritage, recognizing

that these worlds are both artifacts and experiences, historically and culturally. Thus, regarding

MMOs, the MADE’s core mission of player-led stewardship that prioritizes the playability of

games also includes sociality as inherent to games and as part of their associated intangible

heritage. Reflective of the medium, Alex and the MADE believe offline virtual worlds should be

restored to a state in which, amid completing quests and exploring landscapes, social interaction

and community can also thrive.

In response to the increasing number of virtual worlds that are no longer online and the

tendency of many game companies to not take good care of their data (perhaps especially server

code), the MADE has now turned its eye toward making dead virtual worlds playable and thus

inhabitable once again. The preservation of virtual worlds poses innumerable challenges. On this

topic, McDonough et al. (2010) have written that, “Installing EverQuest in 2050 will not reveal

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much about the virtual world that emerged from the software, how it was built or used, even if

future writers and historians have access to everything needed to run a fully functioning version

of the game” (49). On the other hand, Alex follows the philosophy of Jason Scott, the head

archivist for the video game collections at the Internet Archive, who insists that we, in the

present, do not get to choose what might be important to people in the future. In the sections that

follow, I discuss some of the challenges faced by the MADE, like digital distribution and server

contingencies, as well as certain legal obstacles, and how the museum staff and collaborators are

working to overcome each.

Servers as Worlds, or Worlds as Services?

In this section, I discuss the ways in which the lives of online game worlds are “extended” and

how the structures (consumer models) put in place by game developers to extend the lives of

games are the very structures that threaten their longevity by making preservation efforts even

more challenging. Players themselves are frequently involved in activities that might be said to

“extend” (Unger 2012) the lives of games and virtual worlds in various ways: such as replaying

the game over again and participating in para-ludic activities characteristic of participatory

cultures, like making fan art, writing fan fiction, and making mods to the game (Consalvo 2007;

Jenkins 2012; Vaudour and Heinze 2020). These practices tend to extend the game into other

worlds, extend the narrative of the game beyond what developers have written into the game’s

stories and lore, and ultimately make the game at least, in some ways, feel like it “lasts” longer.

With the increasing digitization of the games industry at large, players are now also participating

in a more and more prevalent system called “games-as-a-service,” or GaaS, which I introduced

in Chapter 2. By way of updates and patches, the GaaS model extends the life of a game beyond

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its initial release. Here, I propose a reframing of this model as “worlds-as-a-service” to

specifically consider the virtual worlds that are impacted by these measures of extension and the

challenges by which preservation institutions like the MADE are confronted as a result of the

rising dominance of digital distribution and network-contingent worlds.

In Chapter 2, I explained how game companies have shifted over time to a model of

providing gaming as a service, rather than as goods. Prior to 2002, for example, when Unreal

Championship on Xbox became the first ever console game to receive a downloadable patch

update to fix performance issues (Guinness World Records 2021), it was usually the case that,

once the game had been programmed onto a cartridge or disc and shipped out to the world, the

data was set in silicon. From one day to the next, the data on the cartridge or disc would typically

not be altered by developers. However, when game consoles and computers used for gaming

increasingly become connected to the internet, everything changed; the video game as an object

was no longer static and unchanging. Today, many video games no longer require a physical

manifestation to be sold by retailers like Walmart and Best Buy, as they now also exist in digital

marketplaces to be purchased online by player-consumers around the world.

With the digitization of the video game economy, developers could take advantage of these

new networking capabilities and send updates to games. Where games were once delivered as

full products, game development companies and publishers now rely on servers to digitally

distribute games to which they subsequently deliver updates over time. These previously

unmodifiable objects became immensely dynamic ones, which could be modified, expanded, and

improved upon after being manufactured and shipped to consumers. Updates, patches, and

expansions are often monetized now in such a way that players have the option to buy into future

updates (with so-called “season passes”). Increasingly, these companies also sell games through

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subscription models, like the monthly fee that WoW players pay, which contrasts with the

previous business model of purchasing a singular game. Ultimately, GaaS works because the

game becomes a monetized service that developers provide to players, one that keeps players

interested in playing while keeping profits flowing by having players continually pay for

incremental updates, changes, and special items. GaaS keeps popular games that players invest in

alive and online much longer. However, because these worlds are reliant on servers to operate, if

the game company no longer sees that service as profitable, they can discontinue support of the

service. Such worlds also fall under the sign of GaaS in that they are often subscription-based

services or at least include expansions or microtransactions into which players buy. Therefore,

online game worlds that players often describe as being “dead” or “taken offline” are just

services that are “no longer supported.” For this reason, offline or “unsupported” virtual worlds

are not really gone, but in a sort of stasis mode, where the community still exists and the server

software (supposedly) still exists, but the clients do not have servers to which they can connect.

The service has been suspended, but the world is not gone, suggesting the possibility of a return,

a hope for revival and restoration, and a renewal of a service.

I propose thinking of persistent online game worlds as falling under a different, intersecting

category: “worlds-as-a-service” (WaaS). WaaS is my own term, generally referring to worlds

that are supported by servers, whether behind a paywall or not. While at first glance it may seem

a bit redundant, the term does do a different kind of work, shifting from GaaS as a contemporary

business logic to WaaS as an analytic. On the one hand, WaaS can gesture toward virtual worlds

in general, not just the ones that are explicitly game-oriented. On the other hand, transforming

“games”-as-a-service and to “worlds”-as-a-service can signal the importance of sociality to these

worlds and highlights the importance of recognizing that not only are these games being updated

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through patches and expansions, but they are also social worlds being constantly updated by the

users themselves. Here I speak not of user-generated content or in-game items but of user-

generated sociality, the behaviors and interactions of the player communities that exist in them

that continue to exist in some form or another once the worlds are no longer supported. In this

way, my framing of the WaaS paradigm acknowledges the conflicting nature of understanding

worlds not only as experiences and communities but also as consumer services supported by

servers. After all, virtual worlds rely on servers to exist, and, at least nominally, servers are

designed to provide a service. For my purposes, I also propose understanding WaaS as including

both digital distribution and network-contingent games.

While understanding worlds as services makes more room for seeing the possibility of

restoration, a space of hope and potential, the WaaS paradigm itself makes restoring and

preserving unsupported game worlds logistically much more difficult. For one thing, because

game worlds are constantly updated, patched, and expanded, it is extraordinarily difficult for

preservation institutions to make the call on what version to preserve. Some players might urge

institutions to preserve “vanilla” versions as we saw with private server players of World of

Warcraft to hold onto an “original” or “classic” artifact. Yet there is also a case to be made for

choosing to restore a version of the game with all the patches, all the expansions, and all the

possible content added to the world. On top of this conundrum, user-generated sociality means

that these worlds are constantly evolving socially as well, begging the seemingly unanswerable

question: How do you preserve an experience? However, before these kinds of questions can

even be asked, a museum would have to attend to figuring out how to preserve the underlying

infrastructure of these worlds, the servers which run on specifically designed server software that

is also proprietary code owned by game companies. Often, this server code gets updated over

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time alongside the game client and therefore is also an unstable object. Furthermore, some game

companies have historically admitted to discarding server code once a game goes offline, as with

Blizzard (in the case of World of Warcraft Classic) who was forced to rebuild game client

software and server software in a piecemeal fashion from partial backups.

In addition, within this prominent consumer model, the notion of ownership has changed,

which has significant consequences for any attempts to bring any version of no longer supported

worlds online. The increased adoption of providing games and worlds as services follows a

general trend in business marked by a transition from a product-centered logic toward a “service-

dominant logic” (Dubois and Weststar 2021, 1). The term “servitization” was coined by

Vandermewe and Rada (1988) to describe the processes by which businesses have transitioned to

offering certain services in addition to or instead of products. Conceived as a way of yielding

higher profits and garnering more customer engagements, the adoption of servitization might

include a business offering certain “after-sale” services, like maintenance, repair, insurance, or

even a more long-term investment in the entire product life-cycle, what are called “product-

service systems” like Microsoft 365 (also called “software-as-a-service”). Increasingly, because

of the shift to a more customer-centric model of offering services, many industries even beyond

gaming have opted for subscription-based services, like Spotify and Netflix, which rely on

servers to provide the service of on-demand streaming and distribution of content and media

updates. This is what I seek to highlight with the worlds-as-a-service concept—not the particular

monetizing strategies involved in the production cycles of games-as-a-service, but rather the

reliance on servers, those underlying vital infrastructures on which virtual worlds and their

subsequent preservation projects rely that provide the service of virtual world access. The world

itself is the service.

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Games are offered not as products that players own, commodities to be bought and passed

around, but as services that players access through a licensing agreement. Similarly, MMOs and

other virtual worlds were only ever worlds offered as a service, even if early versions might have

had physical discs that players used to install the client-side software. In the words of Rob

Walker, a copyright lawyer who worked closely with the MADE as a part of his work at the

Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, “Basically, we’re

subscribing to everything and we own nothing… You don’t own software at all, you own

licensing.” Henry Lowood at Stanford confirmed this trend, saying of this “new regime” that,

“all the paradigms about what the carrier media are, how software is distributed, who controls it,

you know, all those things have completely changed in the last few years and in the direction of:

You generally don't own anything anymore.”

Even if players have been subscribing to World of Warcraft since its initial release, they have

only ever been paying to continue to have access to a service; they never owned the game or the

server. They are not copyright holders, and they have never owned any part of WoW. This

applies even to the avatars and items they have spent hours crafting and collecting within the

world, a condition they contractually agreed to when they signed the End User License

Agreement before ever entering the world in the first place. Rob put it this way: “If we take the

server down, it’s gone… everything’s online and as soon as it’s shut down, it’s gone.” Thus, the

goals of the museum (of historical preservation) and the goals of player communities (to play

these games and inhabit worlds that are no longer online) are both in conflict with the idea of

worlds-as-a-service, a governing principle that on the one hand extends the longevity of virtual

worlds while also making it more difficult for them to be resurrected.

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Case Study: NeoHabitat

To better understand the stakes involved in the reliance of virtual world preservation projects on

servers, let us take as an example the steps the MADE has recently taken to restore a virtual

world. The MADE has successfully restored one world so far, the world known as LucasFilms’

Habitat, released in 1986 for the Commodore 64 PC. While World of Warcraft is sometimes

regarded as one of the first “games-as-a-service” games, I would argue that Habitat was

technically the first title that might be categorized under “worlds-as-a-service.” Habitat made

waves when it was released as the first-ever “graphical” virtual world, as up to this point all

virtual worlds had been text-based (e.g., Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs). Habitat was a world

provided as a service to a paying public—users had to pay $0.08 a minute to access the beta

version on the Commodore 64’s QuantumLink online service, which made the world accessible

to multiple people at once. In 1989, LucasFilms was approached by the IT company Fujitsu,

who, according to Stuart Cass from the Reno Project,

“wanted to invest in the future of

cyberspace” (e-mail message to author, November 2019). As a result, they ended up purchasing

the intellectual property rights to Habitat. QuantumLink, on the other hand, was purchased by

AOL and eventually terminated in 1994.

Fast forward to early 2014: Alex from the MADE met Chip Morningstar, the programmer of

the original server architecture of Habitat, and they chatted about restoring access to the virtual

world. Chip handed over the source code for Habitat, and Alex had to contact Fujitsu, who gave

the museum permission to make the code open source. With a team of former Habitat team

members, former QuantumLink engineers, and museum volunteers, the museum held a

The Reno Project is a website that Stuart started in 2013 with the goal of documenting the

history of the virtual worlds that ran on WorldsAway technology. WorldsAway was the

successor to Lucasfilm’s Habitat.

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Figure 3.4: Logging into NeoHabitat for the first time. Source: Author.

hackathon, an event in which the team engaged in collaborative coding and reverse engineering

in order to create a server that could communicate with the source code. The team worked to

translate from an older programming language called PL/1 to the more modern Javascript and

reverse engineered and converted old database backups to a file that could be read by the source

code. They even had an original Stratus server, the hardware on which the QuantumLink

network software once operated, delivered to them by an enthusiastic volunteer. The server sat in

the corner of the room on the day of the hackathon, surrounded by both circulation fans (to keep

it cool) and engineers, who huddled around it as they brainstormed next steps. It seemed like all

the pieces were in place to restore Habitat without trouble.

Yet even with all the software, hardware, and expertise at their disposal, the team realized

they were missing an essential piece of the puzzle: third-party QuantumLink billing server

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software code that was technically owned by America Online (AOL), which is now owned by

Verizon. While AOL initially showed signs of cooperation, ultimately Verizon refused to hand

over this missing code, and the project was put on hold for two years until Randy Farmer, who

first wrote the original client for Habitat, decided to take matters into his own hands and fully

wrote a modern Habitat server on his own time. Three years after the project start date, Habitat

has now been reborn as NeoHabitat, and is publicly accessible to play online. NeoHabitat’s

success was reliant on the original developers being alive and on board with the project; yet even

with all the tools and support at their disposal, the project almost did not come to fruition as a

result of one critical piece of code being locked away by a corporate entity. As the server is the

lifeblood of the world, the world could not be accessed without this missing code. In the next

section, I explain how, when confronted by the limitations posed by worlds-as-a-service,

especially regarding game and server ownership, the MADE has made use of the modifiability of

worlds once again.

Reimagining Copyright Exemptions as Mods

Normally, we might think of the written word of law as more or less stable doctrine, though the

law and how it is interpreted can and often do change. Courts provide readings of the law that

may bolster or nullify existing laws. Legislators can introduce and pass new laws that alter

existing laws by amending or replacing them. Copyright law is a unique class of legal doctrine in

the US for which certain exceptions can be made in special cases, a rule that is built into the

structure of the law itself. The MADE has made use of these “copyright exemptions” in order to

break down certain barriers presented by contemporary copyright law and the contingencies of

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worlds-as-a-service that make virtual world preservation particularly difficult. In this section, I

draw comparisons between exemptions and modding to propose the idea of the copyright mod,

an act of resistance against the system of copyright that works from within it to make practices

related to modding more easily accessible for the purposes of restoring offline virtual worlds. In

this way, the MADE seeks to change the relations of control between fans (including players and

preservationists) and game companies by participating in the digital rights movement toward a

free and open culture of participation.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was introduced by media industries and

passed by Congress in 1998, allegedly as a measure to bring copyright law into the digital age,

though Gillespie (2004) has argued that this dramatic addition to copyright law was put in place

as a result of corporate panic about digital piracy. Gillespie has written that this act is only

nominally about copyright, regulating not only limitations of copying but also “every facet of the

purchase of use of cultural goods” (239). Among the many controversial aspects of the DMCA,

one of the most troubling lies in Section 1201, which contains language that prohibits the

circumvention of certain technological protection measures (TPM) that developers of digital

works design into the software itself. TPMs are put in place essentially to control access to the

software and determine what users can and cannot do with it. According to Section 1201, to

circumvent TPM is “to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or

otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the

authority of the copyright owner” (DMCA 1998). As an example, circumvention as described

here would include the work of private server gamers who work to reverse engineer server code

or get around encryption locks on segments of server code. Gillespie (2006) refers to the

introduction of TPM and the anti-circumvention enforcement under the DMCA as a new kind of

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legal regime, marked by a dependence upon technologies themselves, rather than law, to regulate

access and use; in other words, a shift from “the ‘code’ of law to the ‘code’ of software” (1).

The broad reach of the policies introduced by the DMCA to copyright law have been widely

criticized. Perhaps its greatest critics have been proponents of the intersecting free culture and

digital rights movements, groups of activists who feel that the DMCA and other regulating

structures run explicitly counter to their belief in “a culture that is participatory in mass-cultural

products” (Postigo 2012, 7). Such a culture is charactered by mutuality, solidarity, and

interactivity and includes people increasingly claiming the right to be heard rather than being

spoken to (Deuze 2006). Participation in the media industry and its products is already

happening in earnest (Jenkins 2006), and modding is a key example of this kind of cultural

participation around games in particular. As discussed in Chapter 2, modding is “any form of

noncommercial modification of a proprietary digital game” (Unger 2012, 514). Though the

actual ends may be distinct, both modders and preservationists at the MADE engage in practices

that extend the lives of games, such as manipulating and recreating code and refurbishing and

tinkering with hardware. In this section, I rely on Unger’s definitions of mods as “products of

collective intelligence and skills” and modding as “a form of culture where fans actively engage

with cultural artifacts and change them within,” specifically aligning such activities with the

MADE’s practices, especially regarding server recreations and hackathons held for NeoHabitat

(Unger 2012, 514). Yet mods themselves have been the source of much copyright controversy,

especially because they involve people tinkering with proprietary source code. Modding as a

subversive act of “user-led innovation” (Scacchi 2011) and institutional virtual world

preservation as perhaps “user-led restoration” in some senses both seek to work toward this free

digital culture of open participation by user-consumers.

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According to activists and organization in the digital rights movement, the key to achieving

this culture certainly involves promoting cultural change, but critically, it also means broad

technological and legal change through both traditional political institutions and forms of

extrainstitutional protest (Postigo 2012). Both institutional and extrainstitutional avenues of

pursuing changes to the existing system rely on incremental change toward a future of a more

free and open participatory culture that values the cultural commons and cultural ownership. For

the MADE to ensure that the DMCA does not limit their work in the future—as was the case

with NeoHabitat—they have engaged in the legal work of such incremental change through what

I will refer to as “copyright mods.” As laid out in Section 1201, the DMCA allows for the

Librarian of Congress, under the guidance of the Copyright Office, to, in a sense, “modify” the

law to permit the legal circumvention of the anti-circumvention prohibition for some classes of

works and some organizations, like non-profit libraries, archives, and educational institutions. In

special cases, the Copyright Office will hear cases and comments from proponents, opponents,

and the public and deliver rulings granting certain “exemptions” that allow institutions like the

MADE to develop workarounds to access TPM-protected content and devices in the service of

certain non-infringing uses of particular classes of works. These exemptions can be renewed and

even expanded every three years through the same rule-making process. Therefore, the DMCA

itself offers a specific avenue for copyright reform, albeit temporary and renewable, that works

from within the system of copyright law.

Considering this idea that people can reshape copyright law in the service of restoring access

to and subsequently preserving online game worlds, I propose thinking of copyright law as

modifiable, or moddable, and thinking of copyright exemptions as mods in the same sense that

gamers use mods to extend the lives of games. These “copyright mods” are not permanent

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Figure 3.5: The MADE’s Twitter feed, featuring tweets about the DMCA exemption process.

Source: Author.

changes to the law, but rather small “modifications” that “tinker” with the law to shape it to

certain needs. They are products of the collective intelligence and skills of users of digital

technologies, and they change the coding of law from within. Importantly, what copyright mods

do is create space for incremental change, much like patches or updates to the source code of

expansions as mods to the original game, copyright exemptions are like mods of copyright law,

expanding what is possible in the face of limitations presented by current legal doctrine. In

essence, they create new “versions” of copyright law that allows new classes of works to be

preserved. Copyright mods are essentially updates to the system and move copyright law closer

to being in alignment with the evolving space of digital technology innovation. These mods can

even become permanent expansions upon which other mods might be built. For example, the

Internet Archive successfully argued for exemptions in 2006 and again in 2009, at which point

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the Copyright Office extended indefinitely the Archive’s ability to make available software

programs and video games that were originally distributed in formats that are now obsolete.

In 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully proposed and made the case for an

exemption from the Copyright Office to allow museums, archives, and libraries to circumvent

TPM on video games in order to make them playable, so long as the copyright owner has ceased

to provide access to the server. Notably, this exemption applied only to games that are played

locally but require user authentication through an external server. The Copyright Office chose to

omit online multiplayer games from this exemption. Then in 2017, in advance of the 2018 round

of decision-making regarding exemptions, the MADE partnered with a legal team from

Berkeley, as well as other experts, to propose an exemption that would allow them to expand

upon the 2015 exemption to include MMOs and other game worlds which required server access

to be able to play the game over an internet connection. The Librarian decided in favor of a much

more pared down version of what the MADE had proposed, with several caveats such as the

prohibition of server recreation (through processes like reverse engineering), the requirement that

the server code must be obtained legally from the developer or copyright owner, and that all

preservation activities must be confined within the premises of the museum, archive, or library

involved in circumventing TPM for these purposes. In what follows, I offer a very brief

overview of the two exemptions, framed as a MMO patch log, using the language of the

Section 1201 Patch Log - Video Game Preservation

Patch 2015 37 CFR §201.40(b)(8)

8. Proposed Class 23: Abandoned Software—Video Games Requiring Server Communication

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Where access to an external server necessary to facilitate authentication for local gameplay is no

longer provided, circumvention is permitted to:

• Restore access for personal gameplay on a personal computer or video game console; or

• Allow preservation in a playable format by an eligible library, archive, or museum. Such

activities by libraries, archives, or museums must be carried out without commercial

advantage and the video game may not be made available outside the physical premises

of the institution.

• This is limited to “lawfully acquired video games requiring server communication.”

Patch 2018 37 CFR §201.40(b)(12)

8. Proposed Class 8: Computer Programs—Video Game Preservation (extension of previous

patch, plus an expansion)

When access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate authentication for gameplay is

no longer provided, circumvention is permitted for purposes of restoring access:

• For personal, local gameplay; or

• To allow preservation in a playable format by an eligible library, archive, or museum

(including discontinued video games that do not require access to an external computer

server for gameplay), where carried out without any purpose of commercial advantage

and without distribution outside the physical premises. Includes circumvention of

computer programs used to operate video game consoles to engage in preservation

activities.

• This is limited to “Video games in the form of computer programs, lawfully acquired as

complete games” meaning the client and server code are acquired together.

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The process of gaining the exemptions involves a time for comment from all relevant parties

and a roundtable hearing among members of the Copyright Office, the opponents to the proposal,

and proponents of the proposal. For the MADE and other groups in the digital rights movement,

the process is important not only for extending the realm of possibility for video game and

virtual world preservation but also for extending the ways in which particular institutions are

perceived by the government moving forward. A key example of this comes from the hearing, in

which the Electronic Software Association (ESA, the opponents) launched several critiques of

the proposed exemption and of the MADE as an institution. For instance, the ESA charactered

the MADE as “a clubhouse where people gather to play games” and repeatedly asserted that the

goals of MADE are to enable recreation and gameplay, rather than preservation for scholarly

purposes. With the granting of at least some version of what the MADE proposed, the exemption

also does the work of legitimizing the MADE as a place of both scholarship and recreation. After

all, according to game archaeologist Andrew Reinhard, “it’s ridiculous for developers or the

ESA to think that somehow we can divorce fun from scholarship” (e-mail message to author,

December 2018).

Through the work of generating the new copyright mod, involving the push and pull of all

entities involved in the rule-making process, the MADE was successful in “breaking down

barriers” as Alex put it, ones put in place by the DMCA that protect copyright holders while

preventing the fulfillment of important preservation projects that protect cultural heritage. In

arguing for an understanding of the MADE as a place of scholarship, rather than just recreation,

the hearing made room for the MADE to further solidify its status as a legitimate institution,

granting further legitimacy to its efforts in the future. For Alex, this all was a step in the right

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direction toward a more open future, a small modification made possible through user-led action

and innovation. However, as the current exemption does not allow for server recreation and the

multiplayer network of an online game or virtual world must be confined within the walls of the

museum, the mod will need extensions as it is incomplete, according to the legal team at

Berkeley, in its current state. Nevertheless, the power of users to reshape the conditions under

which they may restore and preserve online game worlds is shifting as more and more

modifications get added, extended, and expanded. Ultimately this started with the museum

dealing with online games that require certain authentication servers, but from this small seed

grew larger consequences, opening up further questions of institutional legitimacy and cultural

ownership and taking incremental steps toward perhaps broader technological, legal, and cultural

change.

Conclusion: Ephemerality

On August 27, 2020, the Twitter account for the MADE posted a tweet that read, “As you may

have heard, we will be closing our current space and moving our collection into storage. Do not

fear, we’re not going away forever! Just until we can create the video game museum of our

dreams.” Due to the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the MADE was no longer inviting

visitors into their space, and as a result of a dearth of funds, the MADE was forced to pack up its

games, hardware, and ephemera and go into a stasis mode. In a series of tweets, journalist and

activist of copyright liberalization Cory Doctorow urged readers to donate to the shuttering

museum, writing:

In 1991, [Bruce Sterling] gave a landmark keynote at the Game Developer’s Conference in

which he lamented game developers’ technological amnesia—the fact that old game

platforms disappeared and when they did, they took the games that ran on them with them. 1/

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Figure 3.6: A view of the MADE in its final days. Source: Twitter, Cory Doctorow.

Imagine an art form where anything more than a few years old is inaccessible without

specialized equipment, and after a decade, most of it disappears forever! 2/

Since Sterling’s talk, preservation efforts have sprung up to ensure that the history of video

games isn’t lost. One of the most important of these is [The MADE], a museum that

preserves both hardware and code. 3/

They even secured a DMCA exemption to let them crack games so they’d remain playable.

As you might expect, the plague has been hard on The MADE. They are mothballing their

entire collection—a unique, important, vital history of an otherwise ephemeral medium… 5/

Just as the game industry’s pattern of abandonment has highlighted the ephemerality of the

video game, the closing of the MADE highlights the ephemerality of the video game museum

itself and, with it, the ephemerality (or even “temporal instability;” see Chapter 2) of virtual

world preservation. According to their copyright exemption, “As with games generally, the

recommended exemption for preservationists does not extend to circumvention to enable online

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multiplayer play, which is an activity that would extend beyond the walls of the preserving

institution.” Still, virtual world preservation projects must be confined to the space of the

museum. But what if there is no sanctioned museum space in which to do this work? What

happens to abandoned worlds in stasis? As of this writing the MADE is in a similar stasis, with

all preservation projects on a temporary hold as they raise funds and plan next steps. There is a

powerful symmetry here, one that highlights the “unexpected fragility,” as James Newman

(2012) puts it, of video games but also of preservation institutions.

We are in a world of ever-increasing digitization, including the virtualization of games and

the prominent adoption of providing games and worlds as services. As disc drives disappear and

servers continue to virtualize, how will our relations with the materials of gaming change? In the

chapter that follows, I build on this point, exploring the very materiality of servers themselves

and their fate once infrastructures undergo processes of virtualization. Servers that no longer

serve their original purpose change hands and serve new purposes, reflective of their lives as

components of world-generating infrastructures. Some players have come to value these

obsolescent artifacts of past virtual worlds as nostalgic mementos, as keepsakes from their

experiences, and as symbols of community and love. The next chapter is a culmination where the

layers of server meaning fall back on themselves, revealing at the same time the server as a

place, as a carrier of memory, as an artifact of digital heritage, and as an emblem of changing

forms of technological ownership in the virtual age.

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Chapter 4

The Enchanting Afterlives of Decommissioned Servers

Up to this point I have discussed at length how specific groups of nostalgic players and

particular preservation institutions are working to preserve or restore virtual worlds. I have

focused on the efforts of groups whose end goals have been to see these worlds brought back to

life, the connections between the software and hardware components reproduced, and the

capacity for multiplayer play brought back online. The memory work in the space of video game

and virtual world preservation that I have discussed thus far has been the labor of resurrecting or

resuscitating lost worlds, whether complicated by the existence of multiple versions, obsolesced

due to hardware limitations, or “unplugged” completely. In this chapter, I move away from

discussing the preservation and restoration of virtual worlds themselves, turning my analytical

gaze to the afterlife of the server hardware used to power these worlds. What can we learn from

people’s engagements with servers that have been turned off and are no longer in use?

In 2011, Blizzard Entertainment auctioned off decommissioned WoW server hardware,

known as “server blades.” On the surface, this process benefitted a charity and put the otherwise

trashed computer waste to good use. However, it also introduced new, fascinating commodities

to players, who bid upwards of hundreds of dollars per server at these auctions. But why? What

is it about server blades that players find so valuable and meaningful? To find out, I surveyed

approximately 80 people who won one of these auctions, interviewed 20 of them, and read

through dozens of forum posts on Reddit and similar sites, following conversations about the

blades and what they meant to people, even to those who did not actually own one. Through this

process, I have found that the server blades do not always mean the same thing to different

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players, and players’ reasons for wanting to own one range widely. In this chapter, by juggling

this multiplicity of intersecting meanings, identities, and relations associated with these artifacts,

I argue that there is something unequivocally enchanting about dead hardware.

I use the word enchanting for these difficult-to-define sets of affects primarily because

players frequently had a difficult time explaining exactly what gave these objects so much value,

prestige, and interest. Several players said there was something “magical” about the way servers

work or that they had been in some way captivated by seeing them for the first time, sometimes

brought to tears. “Enchantment,” the quality of being under a spell or filled with delight, is one

productive and generalizable way to conceptualize the fascination many players have with these

objects. In choosing enchantment for this chapter, I am also nodding to Jane Bennett’s (2016)

conception of enchantment as a characteristic of moments of wonder in everyday life, as “an

affective force” (1) that is unexpected, surprising, and visceral or as a “pleasurable feeling of

being charmed by an as yet unprocessed experience” (5). For Bennett, enchantment is not so

much a way of knowing or believing, but rather feeling, a form of “active engagement with

objects of sensuous experience” (5). Similar to the way in which Harvey and Knox (2012) drew

upon Bennett’s earlier work on enchantment to argue for an understanding of roads as retaining

an infrastructural promise for the future, I draw upon this notion of enchantment to argue that

server blades are “more-than-material” (523), abandoned and repurposed infrastructure

representing a promise for the recall and retention of the past into the future.

In other words, servers are enchanting because players are nostalgic. Throughout this

dissertation I have written about the ways in which nostalgic yearnings for gaming’s past have

acted as driving affective forces for players in their interactions with private servers and

abandoned worlds, but the server blades are unique in that they represent a moment when the

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Figure 4.1: One of the four server blades that ran the Proudmoore realm. Source: Blake,

interviewee.

virtual world as a set of a places and memories literally materializes and enters the player’s

personal home and collection as a souvenir. This is especially poignant in the present moment,

when more and more of our lives become digitized or virtualized, as material remnants become

cultural artifacts to which memories and affects “stick” and carry that significance as they

circulate (Ahmed 2010). Through describing the enchanting nature of server blades as material

artifacts of nostalgia, I also describe how they became marked as objects worth preserving and

holding onto and as artifacts to be cared for, as well as how players in various ways have taken

up the tasks of stewards of history—just as they have been doing for years, even before museums

like the MADE took up the same tasks. Ultimately, in this chapter I argue that, although people

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associate different meanings with server blades and have different rationales for purchasing

them, what unites these meanings is that the server blade is a material commemorative

manifestation of a player’s entire experience playing and socializing on that server; it is an

“affectively charged” object (Herrmann 2015), one that encapsulates and symbolizes a collection

of moments in time while also serving as a nostalgic memorial and souvenir.

I begin this final chapter by providing background knowledge regarding the WoW server

blades—commemorative objects that have been purchased and re-circulated over the last

decade—including how they were introduced and designed by Blizzard.

One the one hand, my

goal here is to paint a detailed picture of what these blades look like and the context of their

distribution. On the other hand, I want to illustrate how Blizzard communicated to its player base

that its used servers were objects worthy of preserving and collecting, especially through literal

inscription onto the surface of the server. In the four sections that follow, I extend this analysis to

the attitudes, affects, and activities of players, exploring how they variously make sense of and

value these objects as nostalgic artifacts, ones imbued with social, memorial, aesthetic, spatial,

and historical value. In each section, I consider what impacts the ownership of these obsolete

pieces of hardware has on players, as well as players’ relationships to each other, the game, the

company, and the past. The final section addresses the issue of infrastructural virtualization in

the context of WoW and how the changing material form of server blades has impacted this style

of virtual world commemoration as well as player relationships to game companies.

Aside from press materials, online discussion, and a couple of short online articles, little has

been written on these server blades. To give due diligence to the complexity of meanings,

practices, and contexts surrounding them, ample attention in this chapter is devoted to

description and historical background.

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Breathing Life into Dead Hardware

As Beckstead et al. (2011) point out in their study of war memorials, “much of human life

revolves around objects that are, at first glance, intrinsically non-significant, but which become

highly valued as a result of cultural processes” (193). Drawing from work by virtual world

preservationists, scholars, and my own interlocutors, I have shown throughout this dissertation

that virtual worlds pose a number of seemingly insurmountable challenges to their own

preservation and longevity and that specific communities and institutions are working to find

new ways of saving online games, now understood by players and institutions alike to be

culturally and historically important. Obsolesced WoW server blades getting sold at auction

represents yet another novel way of preserving virtual worlds, uniquely breathing new life into

virtual world hardware while also animating players’ imaginations and memories of the game

world. In this section, I detail the history of the blades themselves, explaining how, through

contextual framing at BlizzCon and in press materials, Blizzard has marked otherwise forgotten

and trashed server hardware as commodities worth purchasing, cultural artifacts worth

preserving, and valuable personal mementos for players.

At BlizzCon

The hype over the WoW server blades began to swell in October 2010 at BlizzCon, Blizzard’s

annual fan convention, held at the Anaheim Convention Center, just under 20 miles northwest of

Blizzard Headquarters in Irvine, California. Every year at this convention, fans gather to share

their passion for Blizzard’s products, attend panels to discuss games and learn about upcoming

releases, purchase official merchandise, and show off their cosplay of characters and creatures

from Blizzard games. On the main floor of the convention that year, amongst the bustle of

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enthusiastic fans and elaborate displays, Blizzard had arranged an exhibit featuring one of the

four blade servers that helped to run the WoW realm called Dalaran, which is just one of

hundreds of realms that players have occupied since the game’s inception in November 2004.

The server blade was presented unmarked and behind a large glass enclosure, sitting next to

an empty server rack—a piece of technical architecture that originally held a number of these

blade servers—from an official Blizzard data center. Next to this display, they had posted a sign

that read, in bold lettering:

We preserve the retired server blades that hosted WoW’s realms in our archives.

Enclosed in this display is an actual blade from a WoW server rack, which hosted the

Dalaran, Dalvengyr, and Black Dragonflight realms in years past. In the near future, a

limited number of blades like this one will be going up for auction and the net profits will

be donated.

At base, this sign served to plant the seed, in the minds of attendees at least, that soon players

might be able to own one of these objects. And with the display of the large server rack standing

next to the blade, the infrastructure of WoW—albeit empty and decontextualized—was for the

first time publicly made visible for players to see and inspect for themselves.

However, another more curious seed that had been planted that day, at least for BlizzCon

attendees, was the idea that used and unplugged servers, ones that would otherwise be discarded

and replaced in other contexts of data hardware upgrades, were in fact historical artifacts that

Blizzard seemed to value so much that they had been preserving them for some undisclosed

amount of time and in fact storing them in “archives.” This sign discursively marked servers as

objects worthy of holding onto, imbuing them with a historical significance that many attendees

understood, perhaps especially those players who played on the Dalaran realm who might feel a

more personal connection to the server blade on which they played.

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At Auction

A year later, in October of 2011, just seven years after the birth of the game, Blizzard announced

that they would be auctioning off a selection of “retired” WoW server blades. In a post on the

official WoW website, Blizzard explained that they had decided to implement some major

changes to their server architecture. Rather than disposing of the decommissioned server

hardware that had helped to run the game world for many years, they would be entrusting players

with their care, auctioning pieces of this infrastructure off to benefit the St. Jude’s Children’s

Research Hospital. Blizzard has a long history of managing annual (sometimes biannual) WoW

fundraising events to benefit charity. Typically, these events work by encouraging players to

purchase in-game items or virtual companion pets, with the knowledge that the proceeds will go

to a non-profit organization like the Make-A-Wish Foundation. A notable example comes from

November 2012 when WoW players were given the option to purchase a pet called Cinder

Kitten, a tiny virtual cat engulfed in flames and wearing a helmet; thanks to widespread player

participation in this sale, Blizzard was able to make a charitable donation of over $2.3 million for

the American Red Cross’s Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

In October 2011, over two thousand server blades representing about 500 realms (for years,

each realm had four dedicated server blades running it) were put up for auction on eBay in both

the US and in Europe, in several waves over the course of four weeks, with final bids ranging

from $100 to over $1000. In interviews, players explained to me that lower population servers

had lower final bids and vice versa, most likely as a result of higher population servers having

more players actively placing bids. Eventually, the server blade auctions allowed Blizzard to

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donate over $330,000 to the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

Interestingly, the 2011

server blade charity event is an outlier in Blizzard’s history of charity events in that it is the only

time a physical object was up for sale, yet the physical matter of the server blades carries

significance well beyond this historical fact.

Blizzard made these servers valuable to players through commodification, turning them into

commemorative collectibles by drawing upon players’ memories and nostalgia for WoW.

According to Bach (2015), nostalgia can be thought of as a “collective phenomenon that emerges

through the effects of commodification, which transforms everyday objects into nostalgia objects

and thus makes them capable of transmitting cultural knowledge” (124). Commodification can

mark items as valuable, worthy of preserving, and worth purchasing. It can transform objects

into symbolic carriers of meaning, moving nostalgic commodities into the realm of “secondary

production” (de Certeau 1984), where consumers attribute new symbolic meanings to them. It is

through this process of commodification that Blizzard extends their assertion that the server

blades are essential pieces of their history, further augmenting the value players attributed to

them.

Server Aesthetics and Memorial Inscription

Now let us take a close look at what these things actually look like. After all, it is through “the

texture of a thing’s aesthetic surface that things are experienced” (Alexander 2008, 782). The

server blades that were advertised and sold were not simply unmarked slabs of metal and silicon

that Blizzard planned to box up and send out to the highest bidders. They were even unlike the

The auctions were so successful that the developers of another popular online game, EVE

Online, emulated Blizzard’s efforts by crafting and auctioning off their own server blades in

2015 to benefit Barnaspítali Hringsins, the Icelandic Children’s Hospital.

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Dalaran blade that had been showcased at BlizzCon one year prior. Instead, they had been

refashioned into something more than just a server blade. Looking at the server blade straight on,

the right side of the surface is all circuit boards and RAM cards, a complex assemblage of

hardware computing components put in place by Hewlett-Packard (HP). This part of the server

blade remains a black-boxed mystery to most players; despite being completely visibly exposed,

some understanding of the technical operation of computing hardware is required to make sense

of this otherwise purely aesthetic feature. The hard drives had been removed from all the blades,

so no data remains stored in them. Over the top of the circuitry was placed a thin sheet of

plexiglass with the WoW logo delicately etched into the center of the surface, with magnets

along the edge to attach the transparent cover to the blade.

However, what really distinguished these objects from any given HP server blade and

transformed them into valuable commodities was on the left side, where designers had placed

what official Blizzard press releases referred to as a commemorative plaque. Typically found

affixed to a wall, statue, or building in public spaces, commemorative plaques have been used

around the world to mark something or someone as historically significant and worthy of

remembrance and thus, by association, make the location of the plaque a place worth visiting.

Commemorative plaques frequently feature descriptions of historical events and important dates

(such as birth and death dates of a figure being memorialized), providing information to visitors

from any background and guiding their interpretations of memorials and landmarks toward a

shared understanding of the history of the site (Foote and Azaryahu 2007). The decorative

commemorative plaque affixed to each server blade had a few key components. Below the WoW

logo at the top was the name of the realm the server had helped to host (e.g., Azuremyst), with

smaller text underneath listing the start and end dates of the period during which the server was

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Figure 4.2: A close-up of the commemorative plaque on the left side of a Wildhammer server

blade, showing the dates of operation, the inscription, and developer signatures. Source: Will,

interviewee.

in operation (e.g., “October 24, 2008 - June 15, 2010”). At the bottom was placed an assortment

of etched signatures from key WoW developers, like Mike Morhaime (cofounder and then-CEO

of Blizzard) and Jeffrey Kaplan (vice president of Blizzard), names that many players recognize

and respect. Despite these autographs being copied renderings rather than unique signatures on

each blade, seeing their names on the plaque gave some players comfort—a sense that the blade

was “from” the developers—and also added value to the blade, just as an autograph from an

actor might enhance a movie poster.

Perhaps the most impactful aesthetic feature of the plaque, and the one players pointed to and

discussed most frequently in interviews and in public online forums, is the inscription engraved

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in the center, which reads:

Blizzard has carefully preserved and archived our retired server blades, releasing only a

limited number for a noble cause. To us, this server blade is more than just hardware:

within the circuits and hard drive, a world of magic, adventure, and friendship thrived.

From fishing in quiet lakes to defeating Arthas in Icecrown Citadel, this blade was home

to thousands of immersive experiences across the world of Azeroth and beyond. We

thank you for the safekeeping of this important part of our history.

At first glance, this inscription leaves behind a number of breadcrumb trails to follow in terms of

identifying why the server blades are important to players. It references players’ play experiences

by referencing activities commonly performed at locations in the game world and waxes

sentimental by referring to the server as a “home” where “friendship thrived.” One player, Wren,

told me he did not know that the blades had an inscription on them when he placed his bid and

won his blade. When he received it in the mail and read those words for the first time, he said he

teared up because, “Well it's true, like you, I spent so much time in those circuits, with those

people.” One forum commenter compared the inscription to poetry, explaining, “I got chills

when I read that plate. That truly is a great piece.” These expressions of WoW players at the

sight of the inscription powerfully exemplify the enchantment players feel toward these objects.

Conveniently, “enchantment” is also an internally coherent term within WoW—it is a learned

trade skill that allows one to improve in-game equipment using the magical residue of

disenchanted items. To sell an enchantment, one must put the spell onto a piece of Enchanting

Vellum, an object created through a profession in WoW called “Inscription,” practiced by

Scribes who “weave words of power.” Inscription “allow[s] the enchantment to be treated and

moved around as a physical item” (Wowpedia 2021). It might follow then that the inscription,

the powerful words etched onto the surface of the blade, is paramount to the ability of the objects

to carry more affective weight, which allows them to enter circulation as a commodity.

In her work on the reconstruction of urban Vietnam, Schwenkel (2013) offers a way for us to

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think about how enchantment can be controlled or engineered in some ways and how perception

of a phenomenon can be altered and feelings shaped by the way a process of remembrance and

preservation is purposefully designed. Schwenkel analyzes how the Vietnamese government has

“harnessed” certain “socialist affects” through material ruins in order to “produce new, feeling

subjects committed to the work of socialist nation-building” (2013, 252). Similarly, Blizzard has

harnessed certain affects through textual devices, such as mentioning friendships and specific

locations in WoW, to contextualize the blade as deeply personal and trigger or engineer an

affective response of enchantment from players. Furthermore, in interviews, players frequently

used terminology and phrasing from the inscription (such as “within the circuits” or “more than

just hardware”) to describe how they value the blade within the context of their own life history

and experience with WoW. These words printed on every server blade have had an impact on the

myriad ways in which players relate to the blade, the game, their memories, and each other.

However, what is at work here is not just affective engineering, but also what Middleton and

Brown (2007) call a “deepening” of memories, where through the objectification of memorials

and inclusion of resonant narratives, social and individual memories meet and expand, having a

strong impact on people in their life course. In part through the commodification and

objectification of the server, players might feel a deeper connection to their memories of the

game, their guild mates, and their experiences.

In these preceding two sections, I have described how Blizzard transformed these otherwise

mundane objects into valuable commodities and meaningful artifacts through repackaging and

inscription, pointing to the personal experiences of players and identifying the server blade as the

place that hosted those experiences. I have briefly explained how many players drew upon the

rhetoric laid out by Blizzard to explain why the server had value, indicating how I understand

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their affect to have been in some ways directed and their memories “deepened.” The following

two sections expand on this, drawing upon data from interviews, which reveal a complex array

of ways in which players find the server desirable and important to them and their personal

history. When I first learned about the blades, my first question was: Why are players buying

these things? In other words, what is it that gives these objects value and what makes them worth

owning and preserving? While they are not valuable to everyone (e.g., to quote one dissenting

forum commenter, “It’s just hardware”), in the next two sections I explore why these things

matter to the people that do care about them, taking a closer look at the affective ties symbolized

and strengthened by the server blades. In the first of these two sections, I outline their

significance as pieces of infrastructure, especially to players who also have worked with servers

occupationally. In the second, I focus on the values generated by players’ understandings of

server blades as worlds in and of themselves.

Fascination with Unplugged Infrastructure

Because players have been taught over time to see servers as the power source of virtual worlds,

when the metaphorical “plug” is pulled, players imagine themselves being untethered from the

server. This understanding that players have of the connective tissue between servers and

network connectivity is further reinforced in “moments of failure” (Graham 2010), when the

infrastructure of virtual worlds “surfaces” to the level of consciousness (Schwenkel 2015).

Servers reveal themselves to us on the user end of the network in the form of messages displayed

on a user device’s screen. In the context of online games, that text might read something like

“you have been disconnected from the server” as a player is yanked from the game world. But

what can happen when the server is unplugged and put into circulation outside of a data center?

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What new kinds of understandings, practices, and feelings might this generate? What does the

distribution of unplugged infrastructure do in the world?

I argue that there is something unequivocally enchanting about server blades out of place.

The very idea that these blades were once housed in a data center in some undisclosed location

might make them seem like forbidden fruit, once out of reach and now in plain sight. In the

context of WoW, players do not discuss servers on a daily basis. To quote one poignant

commenter on a forum post regarding the server blades, “What the fuck is a server?” Players do

not really think about servers except when they malfunction or when talking about moving from

one server realm to another. Part of the enchantment of the server blades is that they are surfaced

infrastructure, once hidden or backgrounded and now ready-at-hand (literally in-hand). From the

standpoint of the user sitting at the computer, what the server does can feel like magic, as Emery

explained:

I understand the reality of: I have a front-end client, there is a back-end server, there is

communication going on between the two of them, and, on the server, magic things are

happening with software that make this all come together, and I get something happening

on my screen.

Like Emery, for the majority of players WoW servers have remained a black box, or “simply

used and not entirely understood as technical objects” (Hertz and Parikka 2012, 427). And this

sense that servers are doing something magical dates back to the days of MUDs in the 1990s,

when special users—those who acted as governing forces and had direct access to the MUD’s

servers—were known as “Wizards.”

Having little direct technical interaction with WoW’s infrastructure, many players have for

some time fantasized about what it might look like. In 2009, Gamasutra reported on a Game

Developer Conference keynote by lead WoW developers where they gave audience members a

behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of various technical aspects of WoW, working to

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separate “the ‘universe’ of WoW (its design, production, and implementation) from the in-game

universe of barbarian shamanism and magical power” (Staff 2009). But it was not a “look” at all.

While some comments praised the keynote, several lamented not getting a visual depiction of the

servers that Blizzard was using to operate WoW. For example, one commenter asked, “No

pictures of a datacenter?” Likely due to a desire to understand what makes WoW “tick” or just to

uncover something out of sight, WoW players have had this fascination with servers and data

centers for years.

Unlike public works infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, and telecommunications

infrastructure, such as cellphone and radio towers, that are in plain sight, cyberinfrastructures

like data centers, routers, and servers remain largely out-of-sight for everyday users. And while

many players have expressed a desire to pull back the curtain and expose the otherwise unseen

magic of servers, Blizzard had for some time kept the inner workings of WoW’s infrastructure

intentionally vague. In the 2014 documentary World of Warcraft: Looking for Group (2014),

these players got their wish. The filmmakers included a segment where Robert Van Dusen, the

Vice President of Blizzard’s Global IT department, brings the camera crew into one of the data

centers and pulls a server blade out of a rack to show it off. Before doing so, he explains: “There

is a high level of security. Whether it’s malicious or accidental, we want to make sure that people

stay outside of our areas. This is actually the first time we’ve actually let cameras into our

cages.” The mystery, security, and exclusivity of the server blades is likely a big part of what

makes them so appealing as collector’s items.

Yet for those players who also happen to work in information systems as a career, their daily

interactions with servers color their perceptions of the WoW server blades. As components of

infrastructure, servers must be cared for and managed by a class of maintainers. According to

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Young’s (2021) review of scholarly work addressing the comparisons between users and

infrastructural maintainers, “maintainers inhabit fundamentally different perspectives to the user

on the nature of technology itself” (13). In other words, by being intimately involved with the

inner workings of infrastructure, these individuals develop a particular view of servers that

strongly differs from the average player’s view. The players I interviewed who worked in

systems administration, technical support, or programming each expressed that they felt a unique

connection to the server blade because of their occupation. Of course, none of them worked with

these particular servers, but they attributed this bond not only to their personal attachments to the

game and the importance of the friendships they made while playing, but also to their affective

relationship to this type of hardware, which they came into contact with on a daily basis. Even

the developers of these worlds can have similar affective connections—for example, Philip

Rosedale, former CEO and founder of Linden Lab, has a Second Life server blade hanging up in

his office.

Dakota told me that it was important that he bid on one of the blades because, “they’re

always someone else’s at work. You know, they’re always a customer’s or client’s blade server

that I was working on… [the WoW server blade] is kind of useless and it didn’t function, but it

was nice to have one of those as my very own.” This suggests that the server blades disrupt a

dynamic in which an ethic of infrastructural care that exists in the workplace does not typically

extend into the home and that there may be some desire for this connection. Spencer put it this

way:

As an IT system admin I can relate to this. When you maintain, service, and uphold a

piece of hardware for decades, you form a sort of bond with it. When you know that this

exact clusterfuck of transistors serviced thousands and thousands of people for decades

and you finally turn off the lights, there is a sense of sadness. I bet many feel the same

about their cars, boats, trailers, and other equipment they've used for a long time.

Nostalgia, man.

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Servers are temperamental objects—they can experience “stress,” and they can be

“overwhelmed” and crash. They need to be cared for, and maintainers tend to form bonds with

them as a result. It is for this reason that, even for those who did not work personally with the

WoW server blades, some IT workers can still appreciate the sentiment and indeed feel that

connection through the hardware. They typically describe the feeling as a particular kind of

nostalgia for their experiences both with systems and with the game.

The commemorative server blade also carries special aesthetic value for server maintainers,

in part due to their deep admiration for and fetishization of computing hardware. For example,

some argued that they appreciated the blade as an art piece that has only gained value over time,

even acknowledging their unique perspective as maintainers. Carmen explained it this way: “To

me, having Sunstrider [the name of a WoW realm] on my wall is like having a Monet or a

Rembrandt on my wall… But that's a relative thing obviously. I'm a systems administrator, geek,

programmer and an ex-WoW player.” Simon (2007) discusses the special relationships between

gamers and their machines, that hardware can become foregrounded in certain communities and

treated as spectacle. For example, many personal computer modders who are also gamers would

bring their modded computer cases to LAN parties, where the attendees would “revel in the

material guts of their computer systems,” privileging the visual presence of hardware, a

“machine aesthetic” that becomes essential to the overall gaming experience (Simon 2007, 175).

This enchantment with looking at circuit boards and RAM cards is further evinced by the

popular subreddit r/ServerPorn in which posters share photographs of their server set ups and

wire cable organization schemes.

For most of these players, occupation is but one source of meaning in a complex

constellation of meanings they draw upon when interpreting these objects. Emery told me that he

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Figure 4.3: Circuitry under the skin. Emery showing off his tattoo. Source: Emery, interviewee.

decided to buy the blade “because of the very deep personal connection to the realm; that piece

of hardware relates to my profession, the purpose that the game served in my life, and the growth

that I realize as an individual because of it. It’s my personal centerpiece.” His passion for IT and

for WoW runs so deep that he got a tattoo as a permanent tribute to this confluence of interests.

The large tattoo is the Horde tribal symbol from WoW, filled in with what gives the appearance

of skin being pulled back to revealed “circuitry under the skin.”

For Emery, the server blade

and the tattoo share some connective tissue in what they symbolize, specifically his occupation

and his relationship to World of Warcraft, more specifically his realm and other in-game

He has plans to extend this left arm tattoo into a full sleeve, but as of this writing he is still

planning out the design that will further signify the meaningful connections that can be made

between WoW and the hardware that is used to run it.

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allegiances like the Horde and his guild. Though largely dissimilar in form, the tattoo and the

server blade both represent this connection between a person and the technology that he believes

has molded him as an individual, the technology he remains fascinated with and enchanted by

still.

Server Blades as Places and Souvenirs

Servers are also enchanting in that they are an object that has the ability to contain an entire

world. As a reminder, WoW, like other virtual worlds and MMOs, works as a social space by

connecting its player base through a collection of servers. In the context of WoW in particular,

every live server hosts a discrete copy of the world, and players choose which server they want

to join. These servers are categorized by game developers through different parameters for play

and time zone, and players have come to understand that at least at one time, each server hosted

its own community, with unique reputations, norms, and histories. In this way, players view

WoW servers as places, akin to neighborhoods, and use spatial terminology to describe them—

after all, the cluster of servers that form one distinct WoW server world is called a “realm.” So,

when Blizzard turned old server hardware into commemorative commodities, players jumped at

the opportunity to own a physical piece of the thing that once housed their experience in this

virtual world. In other words, they conflated the server with the place and at the same time

valued the server blade as a souvenir from that place.

In the documentary World of Warcraft: Looking for Group (2014), Van Dusen explains that,

generally speaking, “The world you interact in is all contained within data centers,” and more

specifically, of individual servers: “It’s essentially what creates the world.” This idea is

understood generally among players: that servers host the game world, that the game world is on

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servers, and subsequently that servers, in essence, are the game world. Reflecting on her time in

the game while pointing at their server blade, Adore, who I introduced in the Prelude to this

chapter, explained, “It’s amazing to think those little circuits that we can carry around were an

entire world to us.” And it is this conflation that gives the server blade some of its value. That a

player can hold in their hands an entire world invokes a sense of wonder. As one forum

commenter wrote, “It's so crazy that an entire living breathing world can fit on your desk. On

that server.”

To think of a server as a place also assumes that the server “contains” places and thus it

follows that perhaps the WoW server blades at one time “contained” people. This notion of

containing of a sort of lively essence channeled through an object or place brings to mind the

idea of haunting, like a haunted house, characterized by the inhabitation of spirits in place. Many

players wondered if the servers still contained data that corresponded to player characters and if

they might contain something of an avatar afterlife: “it’s like owning an entire world where

thousands of people lived out their fantasies, died, played, loved, hated, destroyed, and got

destroyed. that's a hell of a thing to own. People literally threw away their real lives to dive into

that server and lose themselves in another world. If I were into mysticism, I’d say it must be

haunted” (forum commenter). Though players might imagine the servers as haunted, containing a

kind of spiritual essence or even whispers of the past, that the server blades are actually devoid

of data (according to the official Blizzard FAQ about the blades and interviewees’ personal

accounts) perhaps makes them more akin to ruins, an uninhabited symbol of the past that no

longer serves its original intended function. Though the hard drives had been removed and thus

all data wiped from the server, for many players the value was not in the presence of actual data

or lively essence. Instead, players value the blade as a reminder of their time in WoW, something

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like a memory cue or a container of memory, as Will explained: “There was a place mentally I

kind of go when I think about that hardware and it's very easy for me to sort of visualize my

character and my friends’ characters sort of being stored in there like a time capsule even though

I know the drivers were all removed.”

Players repeatedly reflected on the idea that the server was like a miniaturized version of

WoW, a tiny world they can hold in their hands and carry with them. This recalls a similarly

enchanting object that could not be more physically distinct from a server blade. Think of a snow

globe: a little object that contains a tiny visible world trapped inside a sphere, a world that fits in

the palm of one’s hand. Snow globes typically feature some kind of recreation of a scene or

monument seemingly frozen in time but that comes alive when it is upturned and the “snow”

magically dances inside the clear dome. The snow globe has historically been a popular souvenir,

especially during the post-war tourism boom in the United States during the 1950s (Hart 2018),

and you can find snow globes in souvenir shops at almost every tourist destination around the

world (Armstrong 2014). Though now relegated to the ‘kitsch’ or ‘tacky,’ snow globes remain

enchanting in that they capture the liveliness of a world within a handheld object. Server blades

are a bit like snow globes in that players imagine a world inside of them, and they have this

liveliness, or a capacity to come alive under the right circumstances. However, they are quite

unlike snow globes in several critical ways. Importantly, the snow globe depicts one scene,

frozen in time; the server blade not only represents a place but a multitude of places and

experiences, relations, and moments. Ontologically, it is a place that players spent much time,

rather than just a representation of such a place, which is a big reason why so many players value

them as commemorative souvenirs of their time in WoW.

In interviews, players had some difficulty describing exactly why they found the blades

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meaningful and would frequently draw on analogies to actual world examples to explain their

value. One player, Wren, explained that the server blade auctions were comparable to the

demolition of Hubba Hideout in the Embarcadero in San Francisco. With its multiple slopes and

staircases, Hubba Hideout had been a popular spot for skateboarding fanatics. When it was

destroyed, frequent visitors to the spot lined up to receive pieces of bricks, material traces of a

place that no longer existed:

It was this huge line all the way down the Embarcadero of just these like skaters that

wanted a piece of the Embarcadero because it was the iconic spot in the Bay Area to go

show off skateboarding, and they’ve since like repaved it so it's all concrete and like

people still skate there but when it happened, having a piece of that was so important.

Much like the skateboarder’s brick that Wren described, the server blade has the function of a

souvenir; it is a memento of a place in time, a catalyst for remembering. In her book “On

Longing” (1984), Susan Stewart writes, “The souvenir may be seen as emblematic of the

nostalgia that all narrative reveals—the longing for its place of origin” (xii). The server blade has

acquired value for the player because it is an object of nostalgia, nostalgia for an older WoW lost

to time. Players cite their memories of playing with others on their server as important reasons

why the server blade is such a precious item to own.

Just as the skateboarder’s brick might remind the nostalgic skateboarder of a particular time

skating with friends, the server blade might remind the nostalgic gamer of a particular time

raiding with guildmates. They are both physical remnants of a place that symbolize a different

time. However, the server blade is quite dissimilar to the skateboarder’s brick insofar as it is not

just a piece of a place. It is true that both in some way represent a place they once served to

support, functioning as infrastructure and, specifically, infrastructure of play. But they differ in

that the brick is a mere representation, whereas the server blade is the place itself. Because

servers are the objects that “host” players, the server blade operates as both place and souvenir.

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In a very real sense, it is ontologically the place it represents and it acquires its value as a

souvenir through both its placeness and its capacity to symbolize a network of memories,

relationships, and experiences for which the nostalgic player yearns.

The Player as Amateur Collector, Curator, and Conservator

Players value the WoW server blades as symbols of their past experiences and their connection

to people and the game world, a constellation of affective meanings I have termed

“enchantment.” The blades also carry historical value, situated firmly within the legacy of

WoW’s history. Servers have long been valued as a part of WoW history—photographs of the

first physical WoW server and the first server blueprint are both included in former WoW

developer John Staat’s The WoW Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development (2018). And

as noted by the inscription on each of the commemorative blades, with phrases that characterize

each blade as “carefully preserved and archived” and an “important part of our history,”

developers at Blizzard have positioned them as a historical artifacts worthy of preservation and

“safekeeping.”

Given the history of fan involvement in games preservation being paired with the advent of

the WoW server blades being in circulation among players, it is apparent that servers are an

essential piece of the material culture and history of WoW, alongside collector’s editions boxes

containing original game discs, strategy guidebooks, and figurines depicting characters from the

game. Indeed, WoW server blades have not only appeared on display in people’s private homes,

but also in preservation institutions across the country, including the Computer History Museum

in California and the Strong Museum of Play in New York. However, before ever making it to a

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Figure 4.4: An Arygos server blade sits on display in the Computer History Museum’s exhibition

“Make Software: Change the World,” a showcase of socially impactful software that included

World of Warcraft. Source: Author.

museum, the server blades entered the homes of ordinary gamers who largely understand them to

be both historically and personally significant. Strikingly, players handle the server blades

somewhat like historical artifacts in a museum, adding them to their personal collections of

gaming and WoW memorabilia, displaying them in creative ways, and taking care of them to

prevent any damage. Museum studies scholar Flora Kaplan has written that the primary tasks of

many museums are to “collect, conserve and display the ‘things’ of culture, belonging to the

material world” (1994, 1). In this section, I do not want to over-romanticize museums or

overestimate players’ own investments in formal historical stewardship. Instead, what I set out to

do is to draw comparisons between the player’s home and the museum primarily to organize the

section in terms of how server blades enter players’ collections, how players curate displays of

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their server blades, and the ways in which players care for and conserve them. As Susan Stewart

(1984) pointed out, collections are a form of art and play. Ultimately this section is not only

about the blades’ historical value, but also about further explicating what these blades mean to

players personally by taking a closer look at their practices of acquiring and keeping physical

artifacts of their own personal history.

Collections

Players frequently told me that they bid on one of the server blades to add onto their collection of

gaming memorabilia or WoW-related possessions, which in some way contributed to their sense

of self and identity as a gamer and WoW player. Fan culture, and especially the culture of fans of

games, is a consumerist culture of collecting that has even launched secondary markets for

trading, buying, and selling collectible merchandise for cartoons, movie franchise, television

shows, and games. Games themselves often involve collecting, and collecting itself could be

considered a game (Jones 2008). Gamers amass large collections of objects such as figurines,

books, consoles, games themselves, and peripheral gaming hardware. For WoW players, these

collections often include collector’s edition boxes released with game expansions, action figures

and Funko Pop! dolls of characters from the game, merchandise from annual BlizzCons, or

special commemorative items directly sent to players by Blizzard. Many players who purchased

a server blade told me that this object feels like it “completes” their collection of WoW

memorabilia, in some way completing a narrative of their experience and selfhood through

objects (Chin 2016). As Belk (2006) has written, “The act of collecting something also sacralizes

it and it should accordingly be ‘priceless’ for the collector, who is as unwilling to part with the

object as they would be to part with a child” (540). Players in forums have frequently referred to

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the WoW server blade as the “holy grail” for WoW collectors, as it encompasses a number of

meanings for many players. When it enters the player’s collection, it becomes invaluable, and

players usually refuse to give it up.

However, some players explained that they may decide to sell their blade if they no longer

have room for it. For this and other reasons, server blades, previously sitting in peoples’ closets

in some instances, have begun to recirculate in secondary markets. As Acland (2007) has pointed

out, “Accumulated artifacts do more than gather dust… They can become an essential part of

secondary markets, from garage sales to antique collectibles, altering both commercial and

semiotic value” (xv). Players who want a server blade but were unable to win one of the original

auctions often seek them out on digital secondhand marketplaces like eBay and craigslist, though

nowadays they typically carry a large price tag, sometimes upward of $4,000. They have even

been spotted in brick-and-mortar secondhand shops as well. In one instance from 2017, a player

in the UK reported he had discovered one of the blades on sale in a thrift store for around £200.

In these cases, meaning might be carried across the exchange, through stories exchanged

between buyer and seller, further enhancing the sentimental value of the thing.

Display

While some players reported that their server blade was sitting in storage or in a closet—a part of

their collection but not yet part of a curated display—the majority had decided to put theirs on

display in some fashion. The idea of a decorative server as a historical object to be placed in a

player’s home may seem odd to some at first, but they also serve to represent players’ personal

histories. As this forum commenter put it, “They are mementos, no different from collector’s

editions that give you an item from the in-game world you have spent a lot of time in.” How do

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Figure 4.5: A Wildhammer server blade surrounded by World of Warcraft memorabilia,

including figurines and collector’s edition expansion boxes. Source: Will, interviewee.

players choose to incorporate these mementos into their curated exhibitions in their home? In

their descriptions of their strategies for displaying their server blades, it was around certain kinds

of related objects that the server blade sometimes sits. For example, several players had their

blades displayed on a bookshelf with other memorabilia from WoW, such as figurines and

strategy guides, displayed around it and on top it, as a way of transforming a room into a

dedicated “gaming room” in their home or building up an existing gaming room. Just as objects

get added to exhibitions in a museum, the meanings embodied within the blades get “reanimated

through its role within particular exhibitions” (Shelton 2016, 484). The blade affixed to a wall or

lying on a shelf gets added to a unique exhibition, a very personalized gaming museum all their

own.

For owners of server blades, their visibility is critically important for them to see it and to

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show it to other people. Along those lines, Will compared it to another familiar memorial object:

It's kind of the equivalent of photo albums for me… so we still print physical photos,

even though everything's digital now… I can get a photo album out and show you, like,

here's pictures of my family or pictures of me when I was a kid. I can go in there and I

can show you… here's physically this server that I played on for—literally months of my

life are plugged into that thing.

Most players want to see their blade and to be able to show it off to visitors, telling stories and

reminiscing together. Grey told me that some of his guildmates made a sort of pilgrimage from

out of state to come see the blade in person, and they sat reminiscing together as a result, like

The Church members from the beginning of this chapter.

In Keith Murphy’s (2015) ethnographic work on Swedish design, he points to the ways in

which collections of banal, mundane objects, like those in IKEA model rooms, can become a

whole image, “a simple microcosm of the social democratic order, a top-down provision of basic

raw materials that support and encourage the ongoing self-assembly of a better social world”

(202). Though different in scale, the display of collected WoW memorabilia seated with a server

blade can also stand for a whole world of collective experiences, “not only one’s own lived

world, but the lived worlds one shares with others” (Murphy 2015, 202). Many players display

their blade prominently in their home: secured atop a shelf, as a centerpiece on a wall in their

kitchen, inside a glass-top coffee table, or framed in a shadow box in the living room, much like

collections of framed family photographs or pieces of art. Dakota placed his underneath his

television, “Cuz that's where I sat and looked at things. You know, sit and look at the TV and I

could look at that too. So it was kind of just prominently displayed for me to see.” One

individual posted a video to YouTube showcasing their server blade, which they had modded

with strips of colorful, blinking LED lights around the outside edge, a flashier presentation than

most.

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Preventive Conservation

Some players told me they refuse to display their servers, worrying that hanging them up might

damage them. Blake, for instance, pulled out the blade to show it to me, but did not remove the

plastic sleeve that the etched plexiglass came in—in fact, he had never removed it:

I have like 20 guitars at home.. and you have to like anchor those things into studs in

order to hang that. And if one of those fell I would be just crushed. But if that [points to

the server blade] fell I would be equally as crushed if it was damaged at all. You know,

that's why I have it on the bookcase because I know it won't fall, it's stable. It just played

such an important role in my life.

An ethic of care has evolved around these objects as a result of them being perceived as both

historical artifacts and valuable personal mementos. I have already discussed several examples of

this ethic of care, from the insistence embedded within the inscription that they must be kept safe

to the foam-padded modified gun case used to house The Church guild’s Darkspear blade.

Additionally, fans online who see people posting images of their blades will weigh in, pleading

that the blade must be cared for on their behalf; for instance, one forum commenter insisted:

“You take good care of that girl. A good years’ worth of my first foray into online gaming, and

some of my fondest video game memories, are stored on that baby.”

During a Discord interview call with Fiona, who purchased a Farstriders server blade for

herself and her husband, she offered to show me the framed and mounted display she was

working on as a piece of wall art dedicated to her guild, her husband, and their memories. To get

it within eyeshot of the webcam, she had her son help her lift up the display, which contained the

Farstriders blade, several photos of the guild, and a blank space where she intended to put a piece

of aluminum with the guild insignia laser cut into it. After she explained each piece of the

display, she exclaimed, “This is our little relic of WoW history!” And then I watched as she

cautiously instructed her son on how he should place the heavy frame back on the ground:

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Figure 4.6: With help from her son, Fiona carefully shows off her framed server blade display on

a video call. Source: Author.

Got it ok? Be very careful. Making my teenager carry it back. You can leave it right up

there, [Jonas]. Actually that's probably a good spot. Yeah, right up against that wall. Face

the glass toward the wall. Yeah, there you go bud. Perfect. Like there's a spot on the wall

right there. We can put it back and just push it– push it a little closer to the wall. Closer

than that. No, toward the wall, honey. This way. There you go.

In putting the server blade into a display case behind glass and in instructing her son how to

handle this display containing a “relic,” Fiona is taking part in what museum conservators refer

to as “preventive conservation” in that much of her care for these objects involves preventing

damage rather than restoring an object (Rowlands and Tilley 2006). Server blade owners want

these objects in pristine condition, as they attribute personal and historical value to them. This

and the examples above showcase the ways in which players care for the blades as significant

and delicate objects to be securely stored and handled with care.

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Physical Servers in a Virtualized World

The server blades have been prized as physical, tactile (not to mention big and heavy!) objects

from the world of WoW that that player can touch and hold, caring for them and attributing

personal and historical meaning to them. As Blake explained to me, “when you live in the digital

world, everything is ephemeral. You don’t keep anything physical and everything goes away and

nothing is kept forever… It was cool to hold that and say okay, there are memories that I have,

that this piece of machine gave me.” The server blades represent a rare moment when the virtual

world literally materializes for the player in the form of an object, a memento or souvenir from

the game world. Piggybacking on the success of the old server blade auctions, in 2019 Blizzard

tried to recreate this magic by putting newer server blades up for sale on their website—at a flat

cost of $300 USD rather than an auction—to commemorate the game’s 15 year anniversary.

While many players celebrated this second opportunity to own WoW servers, other players

bemoaned the ways in which these servers were notably very different, and indeed less valuable,

than the ones auctioned off in 2011; player attitudes toward them tell an interesting story of

virtual world change and consumer-company relations, which I refer to as a process of

disenchantment.

In Chapter 1, I wrote about how servers have historically structured the network of WoW and

how that has changed dramatically in recent years. It used to be that, when you connected to the

game, your computer communicated with a particular server “realm” that others were also

connecting to, and that server was formed by four servers all communicating with one another.

The networks of WoW were more closed and discrete, offering some opportunities for cross-

realm interactions but most of the time with players staying within their discrete realms separated

from other realms. With the rapid growth in WoW’s popularity and the introduction of new in-

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game features that made it easier to find people to play with, developers at Blizzard made

infrastructural decisions that led to servers becoming more interconnected as many lower-

population realms were subsequently merged with larger ones. The idea of discrete realms

quickly faded away, and servers themselves became more and more virtualized, with many

realms simultaneously working from one server blade. The servers being networked together in

this new way has had all sorts of impacts on gameplay and social relations, which many players

have lamented as having damaged many social aspects of the game.

The virtualization of servers in essence virtualized people’s sense of place in the virtual

world as well. It changed the ways players related to the server as a community, as Wilson

explains: “That made me less, I guess less loyal to the server I was on because at that point it

didn’t really matter.” When the server blades from 2011 were released, some players saw them

as objects of nostalgia for a time when servers actually mattered as discrete places in the

multiverse of WoW. Wren expressed that he understood the uniqueness of this moment, that the

server blade auctions were capturing something in the blades’ final material moments before

obsolescence: “so when I found out when they were dismantling all the servers, I didn't know

they were moving to a cloud-based server system, but I was like, I definitely want a part of that,

that's something I could spend my money on that I'm never gonna be able to spend on for the rest

of my life.” Players understood that this was a rare moment, when their virtual world was

materially manifesting in its final moments of obsolescence.

However, Wren insisted he would not be bidding on newer server blades in the future,

because his relationship to his server has changed over time due to increased virtualization: “I

don’t know if I would do it again. Cause I just don’t care about my server.” In other words, any

new server blade would not be enchanting in the same way as the original blades, because the

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materiality and the world have been decoupled. This is the beginning of the process of

disenchantment. It should come as no surprise then that upon announcing this new slate of

decommissioned WoW server blades to be sold, the FAQ on the Blizzard website highlighted a

critical difference from the original ones that reflected these changes in server architecture: “Due

to advancements in the technology behind WoW and the ability to host many realms on one

blade, there’s no way to guarantee purchasers will receive a server blade that previously hosted a

specific realm they were interested in.” These newer blades were very different from the 2011

blades, and that difference has everything to do with the ways in which Blizzard has altered

WoW’s server infrastructure.

These server blades even looked different. Of course, the hardware itself was distinct from

the earlier ones, a technological upgrade that replaced the previous iterations. However, these

new blades did not come with a commemorative plaque with the name of the realm it served or

the start and end dates of operation. There was no inscription, no signatures, no personalized

attributes, each one a clone of the last. Player reception of these new blades was mixed, and the

meanings people attached to them varied widely. Some players jumped at the opportunity to own

a commemorative piece of WoW history, while others lamented the new look and feel. Many

players expressed severe disappointment at the announcement of the new blades that were

products of the wave of virtualization in the world of MMORPGs. One forum commenter wrote,

“Would be really really cool to get the specific servers. Because thats just more bad ass and

collectible.”

For many players, these blades were more like shells, really heavy (and “empty”) decorative

slabs of metal. They were once seen as symbols of particular realms, but now the relationship

between blade and server can no longer be conflated, making it difficult for the player to relate to

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the server blade as a place they used to inhabit. Without the dates of operation and the name of

the server etched onto the surface, the new server blades are alienated from both place and time.

Lacking temporal and spatial specificity, they will not, as souvenirs from specific places do,

“capture its viewer into reverie” in the same way (Stewart 1984). The changes in infrastructure

that minimized the importance of material components have unequivocally altered players’

relationships to the infrastructure itself that no longer exists in a 1-to-1 relationship with the

worlds they help to create.

Nevertheless, the new blades sold out almost immediately, and individuals quickly began

reselling them at an inflated price for a profit on sites like eBay.

This rapid positive response in

sales can be attributed in part to the anticipated potential resale value, but also the new meanings

that players attached to these new blades. While the old blades signified a relationship with a

particular realm, some players online explained that these instead felt like a representation of

World of Warcraft as a whole. As one forum commenter wrote, “I think its still pretty cool to

have something that you can have that says world of warcraft happened here. Inside this box.”

Many players, especially those who were unable to obtain one of the original blades, chose to

imagine that these unmarked blades once hosted their realm. For example, one commenter

posted, “I would rather have one of these at $300 than nothing at all. I will just imagine that it

hosted my original server. Who's to say it didn’t?”

To reiterate, I do not want to suggest that these server blades were completely lacking in value;

on the contrary, players found new ways to ascribe meaning to them and justify their purchase.

However, the player backlash was rather severe regarding the lack of specificity in knowing

As of January 26, 2021, the average resale value of a 2019 WoW server blade was around

$1000, while the average resale value of a 2011 WoW server blade was around $3500.

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Figure 4.7: The plastic cover of one of the newer server blades lies broken next to the unadorned

server hardware. Source: Icy-veins.com

which realm was linked to a particular blade. The materiality and aesthetics of the blade matter

to many players, and without certain elements that made the blades appear unique, many players

saw them as something akin to disenchanted items, impersonal and without sentimental value.

This growing disenchantment among players in how they valued these new blades was made

even more complex when a major bungle in the shipping of the blades received attention on

forums and in the press. After a long wait for the servers’ arrival, a large number of players took

to online forums to report that their blades had arrived damaged, with the metal case dented or

the acrylic stand completely shattered, just as the act of disenchanting an item in the game

actively destroys it in the process. Players took to forums to express frustration with the lack of

communication and support to address the issue, posting images of broken pieces and

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screenshots of e-mail requests for replacements. Numerous players on multiple platforms

proposed that the carelessness of the packaging and fragility of the product were symbolic of a

crumbling relationship between players and the company. Importantly, many fans remain loyal

to the company, finding that Blizzard listens to players and supports their desires as long-time

customers; as Will explained, “being a fan of Blizzard has more to do with just the fact they

actively cater to their consumer base.” Several interviews echoed this, even speaking to their

shared values with the company overall. For example, Joel asserted, “It’s a company that I align

myself with heavily.”

However, several people I interviewed hinted at a gradual shift in their attitudes toward

Blizzard, especially after 2008 when the game development company was acquired by game

publisher giant, Activision

. Joel echoed these concerns, saying that, “it’s kind of gone by the

wayside now that Activision had acquired them but back in the day, I mean they used to put

gamers first… Traditionally they would listen to the audience, they would put games first.”

Devon, who once had a podcast that received a lot of attention from Blizzard and fans, felt that

his previously close relationship to the company has decayed over time due to a growing

communicative distance between the developers and the players:

I’ve seen them be the most open, transparent company you could ever imagine… where

they just they constantly talk to their community and they shared everything they had to

where they are now, where everything is super big. And when they do come out with a

thing… it’s clear that they didn’t consider the community or they didn’t ask for

community’s input… which is a very corporate way of handling things.

Among players on several forums and comment threads online, the broken server blade casings

Activision-Blizzard recently came under fire for another controversy, in which current and

former employees came forward to reveal incidents of discrimination and harassment in the

workplace, leading eventually to Blizzard president J. Allen Brack stepping down.

Blizzard did eventually respond to affected players by offering refunds for broken casings and

sending out new ones.

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quickly became further evidence of this growing divide between community desire and corporate

response. The materiality of the server then became a new kind of symbol—rather than a symbol

of place, memory, or community experience, these new blades for a segment of the fanbase were

indicative of developers’ distance from and lack of care for their players, at least in part due to

what players understood as increasing “corporatization.”

Conclusion: Server Cosmologies

This chapter explores the multivariate and intersecting meanings that flow across and through

decommissioned server hardware, making them valuable and enchanting to nostalgic players.

Some players valued their blade as an object of historical value, one they felt they had to

safeguard and protect. For some, their blade is a trophy, a material possession that marks them as

a dedicated, veteran player. More players still regarded the server blade as a memorial to their

personal experiences or the collective experiences of their community, a souvenir from a time

and place, a container of memory. Over time, despite this wide span of enchantments, a theme

has emerged: The constellations of meanings players attach to their server blade reveal it as a

kind of cosmological object that both stands for the world and is the world, past and present.

John Tresch (2007) has written on the relationship between modern technology and the

cosmos, examining “cosmograms” as objects that represent totalities of worlds at moments in

time. He describes them as “concrete, visible artifacts” with which people “represent the

universe as a whole to themselves and to others” (92). I offer as a concluding thought here that

server blades are like cosmograms of World of Warcraft; they are the stuff from which the world

is made while also acting as representations of the world. Like server blades, cosmograms as

representational objects are not confined to the particularities of time, place, or person; they

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make possible an “open holism,” offering a unification of meaning “without requiring

uniformity” (Tresch 2007, 93). Many players regarded them almost as religious objects,

reporting that friends of theirs even made pilgrimages of a sort to see the server blade on which

they spent so many years of their life. Much like the Temple of Humanity in Rio de Janeiro,

described by Tresch as a cosmogram, the server blade, “is not just a symbol or a representation,

not a reflection or a projection; it is an instrument, a machine for founding, maintaining, and

extending a specific natural and social order and the emotions that will support it” (96).

Similarly, the server blades act as a foundation upon which meaning is built and affects the ways

in which players see and interpret the virtual world and relate it to the actual.

As an object depicting a cosmology of WoW for any given player, the server blade also

stands for more than just virtual–actual relations. As I have illustrated in this chapter, through

explorations of their physical properties, writing across their surfaces, and players’ tactile

interactions with them, the blades also highlight the process of infrastructural transition from one

state of matter to another. They represent moments when the process of virtualization, first

outlined in Chapter 1, becomes more clear and materially manifest. The blades are debris,

remnants and ruins left in the wake of an increased reliance on cloud computing. We are in an

age of increased infrastructural decentralization and aggregation, one in which game companies

are now providing worlds-as-services through the cloud, and multiple virtual servers can be

hosted on one physical piece of hardware. In this new cosmology and world order, represented

by these new server blades, players’ interactions with decommissioned hardware not only

continue to powerfully showcase personal attachments to player experiences and to WoW as a

game, but also points to detachments from Blizzard as a corporate entity.

162

Conclusion

This dissertation has told stories of relations between players of massively multiplayer online

role-playing games, developers of these games, and the infrastructures that support them, as well

as the memorial practices of gamers as they commemorate, preserve, and restore online game

worlds. In each of its chapters, I have approached these historic, contemporary, and evolving

relationships from different angles, from assessing the impacts of server virtualization on

gamers’ social worlds, to gamers restoring and preserving changing and disappearing virtual

worlds, to the very material ways in which players might come to interact with the remnants left

behind in the move to the cloud, the server blades that once powered their game world and

enabled their social interactions. This dissertation has explored how gamers and servers

meaningfully influence each other’s lives, altering what it means to be a gamer and what it

means to be a server.

The stories in this dissertation have also been about the unique ways in which forms of server

ownership and control shape and are shaped by gamers’ memorial practices and engagements

with the past. By now, one important point should be clear: whoever controls the servers controls

the virtual world. Server owners have the power to make structural and technical changes that

shape the social landscape of games. However, this dynamic can shift, powerfully changing the

way gamers relate to the worlds in which they spend much of their lives. Laws can be modified

to include new ways for servers to change hands and circulate, fulfilling the heritage-related

needs of preservation institutions. Servers can physically change hands and circulate. Server

software can be crafted, recreated, and remolded to fit certain wants and needs. As games

continue to virtualize and digitize, we should look to the players of these games for insights into

163

how these moves impact their lives and ask after the hidden connections they might be making to

the infrastructure underneath it all. The future of virtual worlds, and indeed their conservation

and preservation as pieces of our collective cultural heritage, will lie in the hands of those who

can maintain control of the servers that serve as the foundation upon which these worlds are

built.

In the final section of this brief conclusion, I return to a question I asked in the opening

prelude to this dissertation: What other server stories are there to tell? During the first week after

I moved to the Bay Area of California to conduct fieldwork at the MADE, I friend of mine

invited me to visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) with him. During our

delightful afternoon walk through one of the museum’s many labyrinthine halls, filled with

pieces from popular contemporary artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Dan Flavin, we came

across a curious display that included a server: an exhibit called Autonomy Cube (2014) by

American artist Trevor Paglen. This is not the first time SFMoMA has shown digital

technologies as art—in that same trip I came across an exhibit called Designed in California on

the ideals and values of California designers, showcasing objects like a Macintosh computer and

prototypes for a personal computer mouse. What set Autonomy Cube apart was that it featured a

working server. It was a very small sculptural exhibit, placed in the middle of a wide open room,

featuring a thick, but still transparent plexiglass cube, measuring probably two square feet, with

two functional motherboards within it, a “live” infrastructural art piece on rare display.

The Autonomy Cube exhibit at SFMoMA, which is one of several instances of this piece that

have circulated in museums around the country, is unique in comparison to WoW server blades

on display in museums, because this server is active and online, and transforms the museum

itself. According to the placard that was placed on the wall behind it, this server “uses the

164

Figure 5.1: Autonomy Cube. Artist: Trevor Paglen, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

Source: Author.

museum’s public internet connection to create an open WiFi hotspot through which visitors can

access the global Tor network with their mobile devices and laptops… Paglen proposes a means

of furthering the civic mission of museums to support intellectual freedom.” Granting museum-

goers access to the Tor network, a free volunteer-run service that hides users’ IP addresses while

browsing the internet, this server on display makes a timely critique of the encroachments upon a

free and open internet. With this series of exhibits, the artist uses sculpture, active servers, and

the relatively high-bandwidth Internet connections provided by museums to turn museums into

hosts for the Tor network and push museums themselves to consider their own stance toward

165

online privacy and surveillance. When I first came upon this object, I wrote a note to myself

about the potential of servers as art pieces, especially when they are online, to be used top

comment on our society and teach the public more about the hidden infrastructures that form the

backbone of our daily lives. Looking back in light of this dissertation, the Autonomy Cube is also

a beautiful encapsulation of some of the findings in this dissertation. It demonstrates ways in

which people are in our current moment directly interacting with servers more frequently, despite

their typical remoteness, servers can also serve as aesthetic pieces of art that act as carriers of

deeper meaning and memory. Moreover, Paglen argues that the piece highly interactive, as it is

meant to be both “seen” and “used.” As a statement on net neutrality and infrastructural

connectivity, this sculptural and “servitized” art project shows how making and remaking our

own servers might be key in establishing and recapturing authority over our increasingly online

and interconnected lives into the future.

166

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