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

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 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