When the group stays and the place empties

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

The chat has four hundred people and is still alive every day. The server where they all met has two players online on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody fell out and nobody left: it's just that nobody logs in any more.

It's usually read as a victory, and in part it is one: the friendship outlived the game that produced it. But something has been lost in the handover, and it's hard to name.

The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued in 1925 that a group's memory doesn't float: it rests on frameworks, and the most resilient of them all is space. A group that keeps its members but loses its place keeps the memory and loses the support that held it up.

Hence the practical difference: a chat is for talking about what happened. Only a place produces what will happen. When the group lets go of the place, the conversation stops generating new stories and starts repeating the old ones.