A Place that No Longer Loads

On ritual, digital impermanence, and the loss of a virtual wor

by

Kris Cirkuit

Notes on VR, memory, and the disappearance of digital places

Once there was a place. A calm place, a beautiful place.

I went there almost every evening, even if only for a few minutes before bed, to check on the plants and the animals. Some nights I stayed longer. Sometimes hours disappeared there without my noticing.

I knew all the songs. I knew where everything was.

I arranged plants carefully, moving them around until the space felt right. I chose which creatures lived there. I fed the fish. I changed the music depending on my mood. Sometimes I simply sat quietly and watched the ecosystem move around me.

Over time, the place stopped feeling like software.

It became a ritual.

The animals needed to be checked on. The plants need to be maintained. The world continued to exist between visits, and each time I returned, small things had changed. Creatures had moved. Plants had grown. If they were not fed and watered, they died.

I took photographs there in the same way people photograph gardens, holidays, or places they love.

Intellectually, I understood it was virtual reality. A headset. Code. Assets. A product.

Emotionally, it became a place.

The place was real, in VR.

There is something uniquely strange about digital impermanence. Physical places decay slowly. Buildings are demolished. Gardens become overgrown. There is usually a process of disappearance. Digital places can vanish instantly. One failed update, one closed server, one withdrawn source of funding, and an entire world disappears without leaving ruins behind.

Digital spaces often feel permanent while being extraordinarily fragile. We build routines around them, form memories inside them, attach periods of our lives to them, yet many exist only as long as a company can afford to maintain the infrastructure underneath them.

Maybe that is why I took photographs there so often.

I could only display two ecosystems at a time. Vivarims or Aquaruims, it did not matter which or if  there was one of each.  There was a limit of two. Older ones had to be sold to make space for new ones. Before selling them, I often took photographs. At the time, I thought of this simply as documenting spaces I liked. Looking back, I think I understood instinctively that digital places are fragile. Even before the project itself disappeared, the worlds inside it were already temporary.

One day, it did not load.

At first, I assumed something had broken. I deleted the game and downloaded it again. Still nothing.

Then I checked the Discord server.

The developers had announced that the project was being abandoned due to financial constraints. Not because it was bad. Not because nobody cared about it. In fact, the Discord was full of people expressing sadness and loss. Players shared memories, screenshots, favourite creatures, and favourite spaces. The developers themselves described it as “the game that we poured our hearts into making.”

That felt strangely unsettling. Not simply because I enjoyed the experience, but because of what the disappearance revealed.

More and more of modern life now takes place in financially contingent digital environments. Entire spaces, communities, rituals, and worlds exist only for as long as they remain economically viable. A place can feel emotionally significant, socially meaningful, even beautiful, and still quietly disappear because the revenue no longer justifies the servers remaining online.

Capitalism now determines which realities are allowed to persist.  Maybe it always has.

What surprised me most was not that I felt sad, but that the sadness felt like losing a real place.

Because in an important sense, it was one.

I took photographs before selling each vivarium because I knew the spaces would disappear.

First, the individual vivariums disappeared, then the entire world did.