Paragon

Living Games and Digital Decay: Curating as Temporal Practice

This paper examines the challenge museums face as they increasingly collect video games whose identities shift through updates, expansions, and community activity.

• Living games such as Minecraft, Fortnite, and World of Warcraft resist fixed identity because they function as ongoing networked processes shaped by updates, expansions, and community activity, so museum preservation must shift from the artifact to its temporality.
• The paper's central argument is that preserving living games requires attending to their entropic dimension: systemic decay, obsolescence, and infrastructural fragility built into platform-based existence.
• Games depend on server continuity, patch cycles, licensing arrangements, and corporate ecosystems, so earlier versions, features, and worlds are routinely superseded or made inaccessible.