WildStar's Rogue Archives: Exploring an Anarchaeological Approach to Defunct Games

This paper proposes a "paratextual anarchaeology," a method for reconstructing defunct videogames from the player-produced remnants that surround them, rather than relying solely on technical preservation through emulation. The authors argue that conventional preservation efforts overlook the context of play and the embodied, affective experiences of players, which are often absent from institutional archives. Their approach adapts platform anarchaeology, and Siegfried Zielinski's media anarchaeology, to videogames, treating forum threads, discussion posts, and gameplay videos as "rogue archives" that capture emergent player experience.

The case study examines WildStar, a PC-based MMORPG that operated from 2014 to 2018 before being shut down. The researchers gathered paratexts from two player-created archives, the /r/WildStar subreddit and YouTube, and used them to construct multiple speculative reconstructions of what the game was and how it felt to play. The emphasis is on possibility and alterity rather than definitive historical accuracy, with the authors embracing unexpected and tangential interpretations as they arose during analysis.

The paper's central contribution is methodological. It claims that residual traces of play can support both partial reconstruction of inaccessible games and the recovery of feelings, sensations, and situated experiences that formal archival methods tend to miss. The work is presented as preliminary, with the authors sharing emergent accounts rather than a completed study. Its scope is a single MMO and two online communities, so its generalizability to other titles and archival contexts is implied rather than demonstrated.