What Happens when a Cyberworld Ends? The case of There.com

Abstract

This paper is the first in a series presenting findings from a wider ethnography study of players from There.com and what they did when this virtual world closed on March 9th, 2010. Studies of online games and virtual worlds (or cyberworlds, as I prefer to call them) tend to focus in player activities during the time these spaces are open, assuming them as timeless places. But what happens when a cyberworld ends? How do players react to its closure and what they do next? Only a few scholars have investigated such critical events (Pearce 2009; Papargyris and Poulymenakou 2009; Consalvo and Begy 2012) and their findings suggest a determination by players to keep playing together after the closure. Players do not simply disperse and stop playing when a cyberworld ends but they actively work to form groups and relocate their activities elsewhere. I followed the movement of There.com players —or “thereians”, as they refer to themselves— across various cyberworlds, social networks, and forums after There.com closed. They actively worked to keep together gathering in forums, creating Facebook groups, uploading videos on YouTube, and travelling to other cyberworlds such as Second Life, Onverse, Kaneva, Twinity, etc., trying to translate their play identities and activities in these new spaces. In this paper I will focus on the player responses to the There.com closure and what they did after the end of the world.