Versioning Worlds: Digital Histories, Temporalities, and Change Noel Brett, McMaster University, Ph.D. Candidate Andrew Groen, Independent Scholar Krista-Lee Malone, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Faculty Associate Cody Mejeur, University at Buffalo, Visiting Assistant Professor Josh Rivers, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Ph.D. Candidate PANEL ABSTRACT As virtual worlds in video games arose and quickly established themselves, questions surrounding digital platforms captured anthropological attention. Researchers such as Boellstorff (2008), Malaby (2009), Nardi (2010), Pearce (2009), and Taylor (2006) gave us ethnographic glimpses into the daily workings of life amongst the pixels, asking what it means to be virtual, to create, to be a team, to share, and to watch your world die. This panel continues to expand upon this work by focusing specifically on the dynamism of virtual worlds as ever-changing sociotechnical spaces with multiple temporalities. Notably, virtual worlds are subject to versioning—digital objects are recreated and reconstructed with each new release. Although these versions are often fashioned as technological updates, the changes invested in digital platforms often reshape user experience, gameplay, and the visual landscape of the digital space. This panel proposes we understand a virtual world as we do the actual: as complex, processual, and indeterminant. In looking at multiple facets of virtual worlds, be it the versioning implicit in the labeling of Final Fantasy XIV expansions as 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0, the shifting affordances of bodies over time in VRChat, or the death of a virtual world’s creator, this panel explores the multiplicitous ways in which virtual worlds change over time. In doing so, the panelists encounter similar questions: why should the understandings of virtual worlds remain fixed in particular moments in time? How have the surrounding communities influenced the requirement for alterations of digital platforms? And, how do they change our interactions and sociality? With this, this panel seeks to extend the study of virtual worlds in games in ways that give nuanced understandings of their histories, evolutions, and present temporalities. The panel will begin with Malone’s presentation, titled, “Nothing Lasts Forever Online: A Look at Endings and Failures Beyond Player Perspectives,” wherein she explores the notion that the social spaces that live within digital spaces and the companies that create them do not last forever, noting that they are ephemeral and precious. Malone remarks, by means of her ethnographic industry work, how quickly everything changes and how suddenly it can all disappear when the company she worked for went under and Talking Island (紐約說話島) was shuttered. The presentation ultimately focuses on endings and failures to continue a line of inquiry (Pearce 2008, Márquez 2013, Consalvo and Begy 2012) that can sometimes be uncomfortable but is crucial to a holistic understanding of the intersection between design and sociality within and around virtual spaces. After Malone, Josh Rivers will present, “The Versioning of Final Fantasy XIV: An -Emic Perspective.” Drawing on a year of ethnographic data from the virtual world of Final Fantasy XIV, Rivers uses M’Charek’s (2014) concept of the folded object as a lens for examining the explicit versioning language of FFXIV in its labeling as 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0. This analysis, in turn, makes evident the multiple temporalities and histories that are often folded in on one another to create singular temporal objects in the form of virtual worlds. Ultimately, the presentation aims to shed light on the processes of change present across digital platforms as they are erased within said folded objects. Following Rivers, Andrew Groen will present the methodology underlying Empires of EVE. The virtual world EVE Online has been host to an entirely player-driven history unlike any other in the Proceedings of DiGRA 2020 © 2020 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author.