In a decrepit computer cafe, the last day of a MMORPG plays out before its server shuts down forever. Across three windows & scales of space, you're left to ask: where does the game end? where does the self begin?

As a server death comes, players navigate a game, chat, and a shop across browser windows—different dimensions of embodiment, scale, and time in dialogue with each other. Time runs out in your computer shop session, ads disrupt, calls leak, the spam of the real-world against the chaos of the room. The discontinuities of the game and real worlds bring us to search for boundaries that might not exist, where both the avatar and the self are constantly fragmented, where we do not know where our technology ends and where we begin.

Situated within a weak machine on the computer cafe in the Philippines, a nesting narrative presents three browser windows & contexts showcasing the last day of a speculative closing MMORPG as the player experiences endless in-game deaths, as the server & its players permanently log off, and as the user is compromised from their physical space. In simultaneously negotiating scales of experience & scopes of community, the self is constantly fragmented — but perhaps no splitting is any less true.

Thank You

GAME CHAT SHOP was commissioned by Runway Journal's Issue 47: MMORPG, guest edited by Riana Head-Toussaint. Thank you to Akil Ahamat (Editorial) and Julie Ha (Digital).