Living Games and Digital Decay: Curating as Temporal Practice

This paper examines the preservation crisis facing "living games"—digitally networked games that evolve continuously through platform infrastructures. While traditional museum preservation models, designed for fixed artifacts, assume completed objects that can be frozen in time, living games like Minecraft (Mojang Studios 2011), Fortnite (Epic Games 2017), and World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) resist this ontological premise. These games exist as ongoing processes dependent on server infrastructure, licensing agreements, and corporate maintenance decisions. Drawing on media theory—particularly Wendy Chun's (2008) concept of "the enduring ephemeral" and James Newman's (2012) theory of "supersession"—this work reframes game preservation through cura (care) as an anti-entropic practice. Rather than attempting to preserve games as discrete objects, we propose a modular curatorial platform that integrates six interdependent preservation modalities: versioned archives, gameplay documentation, developer documentation, community servers, community memory, and curatorial notes. This framework acknowledges that living games exist across technical, institutional, social, and affective dimensions simultaneously. Through case studies of fan-led preservation efforts (Nostalrius/WoW Classic, City of Heroes Homecoming), we demonstrate how communities and corporations are evolving toward cooperative preservation models. We conclude that digital game preservation requires participatory, distributed stewardship across museums, communities, and platforms—not as an institutional mandate, but as collective care practice.