Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 

Special Issue 3/2026

“Save State: Ethics, Politics, and Poetics of Game Preservation”

Guest Editors: Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Kozyra (SWPS University), Tomasz Z. Majkowski (Jagiellonian University)  

Video games and virtual worlds are among the most culturally significant, yet materially fragile, artifacts of the late 20th and 21st century. As the industry pivots aggressively toward “Games as a Service” (GaaS), cloud streaming, and digital-only distribution, the ontological stability of the “game object” is collapsing. We are witnessing a paradox: games are more ubiquitous than ever, yet their history is disappearing in real-time.

From the shuttering of MMO servers to the delisting of licensed titles, and from the “bit rot” of physical media to the ephemeral nature of day-one patches, the archive is in crisis. This special issue of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds seeks to move beyond the technical question of how to save games (emulation, migration)—although this issue will also be considered—to the critical question of what is being saved, by whom, and for whom. We invite scholars and archivists to investigate the tension between corporate intellectual property rights and the cultural imperative of preservation, the role of “piracy” as archiving, and the methodological challenges of documenting dynamic, ever-changing virtual worlds.

We welcome contributions from game studies, media archaeology, platform studies, critical code studies, and digital ethnography. We are particularly interested in research that challenges the “official” histories of games, looking instead at the messy reality of modded lobbies, private servers, and cracked executables.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• the materiality of the medium: approaches to preserving physical artifacts beyond the software code, including “feelies,” packaging, manuals, and the tactile history of decaying plastics (e.g., disc rot, cartridge battery failure); 

• hardware, haptics, and the CRT: the phenomenological gap in emulation—how to preserve the authentic experience of specific display technologies (scanlines, vector monitors) and proprietary input devices (light guns, dance pads, Wii remotes); 

• paratextual contexts: the necessity of archiving the “surround” of the game to understand its play—including strategy guides, fan magazines, box art, and advertising materials that framed the original experience; 

• regionality and localization: the challenges of preserving distinct regional variants; how do translation choices, censorship, and technical differences create divergent histories for the “same” game; global digital divide: game preservation in the core, semi-periphery and periphery; 

• politics of abandonware: legal gray zones, DMCA exemptions, and the conflict between copyright and cultural heritage;

• archiving “living” games: methodologies for preserving MMOs, “Games as a Service,” and ephemeral events (e.g., Fortnite concerts). How do you archive a social space?

• shadow archives: the role of pirate communities, torrent trackers, and “scene” groups as de facto archivists; 

• archaeology of updates: tracking the aesthetic and narrative drift caused by patches, updates, and version changes; 

• emulation as translation: technical and philosophical implications of playing games on non-native hardware; 

• virtual world necropolitics: what happens to communities when the servers go dark? Case studies of “sunset” phases in virtual worlds; 

• curating the glitch: preserving bugs, exploits, and “broken” states as essential parts of gaming history; 

• source code and sovereignty: leaked source code, SDKs, and developer tools as archival materials 

• the performance of play: moving beyond the software object to archive the act of playing; utilizing Let's Plays, Twitch VODs, esports replays, and speedrun records as archival evidence of gameplay practices, meta-strategies, and player culture; 

• platform death and web history: the specific urgency of preserving browser-based history, focusing on the crisis of Flash, Java applets, and Shockwave games following the deprecation of legacy web plugins; 

• oral histories and developer narratives: the role of interviews, studio post-mortems, and internal design documents in reconstructing the intent and production context behind the code, bridging the gap between the final product and its creation; 

• fan restoration and “un-breaking”: labor of not just storing games but actively repairing them: creating “community patches” to fix bugs, restore cut content, or remove restrictive DRM (Digital Rights Management) that prevents archival access; 

• institutional challenges and metadata: the logistical and epistemological struggles faced by organizations (NGO and otherwise), libraries, museums, and archives in cataloging interactive media; how to standardize metadata for a medium that changes versions constantly? 

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts: Please submit a 500-word abstract and a brief author biography (100 words).

• Full Papers: Selected authors will be invited to submit full articles of 5,000–6,000 words (including references).

• Notes for Contributors: notes for contributors, including the citation stylesheet, can be found here:  https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-gaming-virtual-worlds 

Important Dates  

• Abstract Submission Deadline: 1 March 2026 

• Notification of Acceptance: 10 March 2026 

• Full Article Submission: 15 June 2026

• Peer Review Returned: 1 August 2026 

• Revised Article Submission: 31 August 2026 

• Publication: late 2026 

Contact

Please direct all abstract submissions and inquiries to Paweł Frelik (p.frelik@uw.edu.pl).