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Good Death

PaperSarah Friend

Sarah Friend argues that protocols can generate living worlds through accumulated user attention and interaction, and that a protocol's 'death' depends on whether it successfully cultivated such a world ecosystem rather than merely existing as a technical system. Drawing on gaming communities' definitions of when an MMO becomes 'dead,' she explores how platforms, places, and social systems generate worlds that persist or perish independent of their underlying protocol's technical status.

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