Archiving the Ephemeral in Digital Public Space: Using Speculative Design to Consider Collaborative Fan Play in the Metaverse

Looking at fan activity through the lens of play, this paper considers the archiving opportunities and challenges posed by new technology for playful ephemeral fan co-creation in multiplatform digital contexts. These include technical concerns such as platform fragility and how to capture inherent liveness and temporality, but also ethical concerns such as sustainability, consent and content moderation. To examine this, the paper takes fan-created alternate reality games (ARGs) as a particular example of such archiving challenges. It first describes a real example of such a game, ‘Blow the Man Down’ before introducing speculative design as a method to consider a potential future where emerging technologies such as the metaverse and artificial intelligence form part of online collaborative play and how it is archived. A speculative design scenario is presented where players can choose to recreate the experience of initial interactive play either as a dream-like replaying of the original player choices, or as a branching experience where a new story and experience is created each time; an ever evolving and updating archontic text. In such a context we can then consider, is archiving possible, or even desirable?