Holding Hands as Servers Went Dark

When Uru: Ages Beyond Myst shut down, players gathered for what they called a “wake.” One player: “I couldn’t bring myself to press that OK button because for me it was NOT OK.”

Players held hands virtually as the servers went dark at midnight. European participants “parked their avatars” to be watched over by friends during shutdown. When World of Warcraft legacy servers closed in 2016, 150,000 users protested; some staged “suicide marches,” killing their own characters before forced deletion.

In Minecraft, explorers find suicide notes in abandoned builds.

Falcone’s four categories of digital ruin: ruins-by-design, socially-vacated persistent spaces, no-longer-worlds, no-longer-places. Each a different way for a digital thing to stop being alive.