WildStar's rogue archives: exploring an anarchaeologicalapproach to defunct games

In this paper, we explore the potential to reconstruct otherwise ‘lost’ and unplayable videogames through their paratextual remnants. The rogue and unkempt archives comprised of these remnants afford particular access, we will show, to the feelings and sensations that emerge from playing videogames. The ruins of increasing numbers of failed, forgotten and abandoned videogames collect all around us, rendered inoperable as services, servers, and circuitry are retired, discontinued, and fall into obsolescence. Conventional approaches to videogame preservation consider this a technical problem, proposing software emulation as the solution (Guttenbrunner et al. 2010; Pinchbeck et al. 2009). However, focusing solely on reproducing playable artefacts overlooks important context of use (Winget 2011), further eroding a sense of the player’s involvement in coconstituting videogame experiences (Giddings and Kennedy 2008; Morris 2003; Newman 2012). Our proposed methodological intervention allows situated encounters of play to be reconstructed from the past by connecting in more vernacular ways to alternative modes of remembrance driven by videogame players. We modify the approach of ‘platform anarchaeology’ (Apperley and Parikka 2015)—a method for constructing speculative media histories of failed, experimental, and long-vanished platforms derived from earlier media anarchaeological approaches (Zielinski 2006)—and adapt it for videogames. The platform anarchaeological approach crystallises a means by which to “speculate on alternative yet complementary trajectories for platforms” that have failed, and uses digital ephemera to piece together “speculative, alternative, minor, and even imaginary perspectives” of platform and media experiences (Apperley and Parikka 2018, 360).