Digital Ruins

In recent years, Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of the ruins, abandoned and neglected spaces of modernity (for examples, Edensor 2005 on industrial ruins and Pinder 2005 on urban exploration). This work has emphasised the sensuousness of the material contextualisation of space largely in terms of the phenomenological experience of decay, disorder and blight. In addition, such work has also attempted to capture the affective elements of these spaces through concepts such as ‘ghostliness’, ‘haunting’ as well as drawing on elements of romanticism and nostalgia, and, in general, the experience or memory of a past recent enough to still have a presence.

This paper is an investigation into ruins or abandoned spaces which do not have materiality or temporality: digital ruins. Existing without age in a kind of eternal present, such spaces do not decay, yet still demonstrate many of the affective and phenomenological experiences of what we understand to be ruin, abandonment or blight. Using ethnographic research of a variety of abandoned or nearly-abandoned virtual worlds, this paper will reconsider the notions of ‘ruin’ and ‘blight’ within the increasingly important context of digital spaces. At the same time, it will also situate the digital ruin within the wider critique of the relationship between capitalism and space.