Grieving World of Warcraft’s Chinese Server Shutdown

Twenty years of game scholarship established that players form profound attachments to the virtual worlds and inhabitants of Massively Multiplayer Online [MMO-]games, that are near-indistinguishable from their attachment to offline relationships. However, the shutdown of World of Warcraft’s Chinese servers on January 24th, 2023, ended those attachments on a massive scale for millions of players, after 18 years. How did Chinese players experience and grieve their loss after the World of Warcraft [WoW] server shutdown? By examining this online catastrophic event, we research the shadow-side of attachment: grief over the loss of one’s online home, body, labor, community, and memories of formative life events. Through a multi-sited ethnography we take a social-constructionist approach to study the grief of Chinese players: on Taiwanese WoW servers, WeChat groups, online forums, and Bilibili, where they collectively mourn this large-scale case of massively multiplayer online loss. Juxtaposing our findings with existing research on MMO attachment, our analysis shows how players expressed grief over the loss of (1) their world, (2) their virtual body, (3) their hard work, (4) their friends and social network, and over (5) their nostalgia for an intimate part of their lives. We conclude that, counter to the implicit project of previous scholarship, online and offline attachment are different precisely because of the paradoxically material and ultimately ephemeral nature of virtual worlds, as revealed by the Chinese WoW server shutdown. MMO games indeed feel just as real, embodied, and social as offline everyday life: until the switch is flipped. As such, all online worlds include the looming but inevitable possibility of their complete erasure: of their world, its inhabitants, and all they hold dear.