What Happens When a Cyberworld Ends: The Case of There.com

The closure of There.com, a 3D social cyberworld that shut down on March 9, 2010, after its CEO cited insufficient revenue amid the economic crisis, serves as the focus of this analysis of how virtual communities respond to the loss of their digital homes. The study frames the event not as the removal of a mere product but as the loss of a real community, with players describing shock, anger, and grief. Situating the case within a longer history of cyberworld closures, including Habitat, Meridian 59, and Uru, the work notes that empirical research on player responses to such shutdowns has been scarce, and it positions the There.com case as a valuable contribution to that gap.

Central findings concern the psychology and sociology of displacement. Users widely adopted the language of death and mourning, grieving their avatars and seeking a new home across social networks and rival platforms. The community migrated to Facebook groups, Thumdar, and YouTube, while competing cyberworlds, including Second Life and Kaneva, offered free accounts and currency exchanges to attract the displaced population. The author concludes that this movement resembles a diaspora and a liminal state, in which former residents remain caught between the world they lost and an unsatisfactory substitute.

The study finds that most displaced users ultimately settled in Second Life, the largest available platform and the one closest in experience to There.com, because it offered user-generated content, a real-money exchange, and the ability to recreate familiar visual and social elements. Other rival worlds, including Frenzoo, IMVU, Twinity, and Onverse, drew criticism for lacking free-roaming movement, user-created content, or transportation. The analysis concludes that the closure produced a "cyberdiaspora," a pattern of collective displacement and nostalgia similar to that documented after the closures of Uru, Earth and Beyond, and Faunasphere, and it calls for further study of closing cyberworlds.