Extracting worlds: the ethics and aesthetics of treating game assets as raw material
Filtered Point Cloud Extraction from Elden Ring | By Hyperdense
Eighty-seven percent of video games released before 2010 are now commercially unavailable — critically endangered cultural artifacts locked behind proprietary walls, decaying on obsolete media, vanishing faster than American silent films. This startling figure from the Video Game History Foundation crystallizes the central tension in contemporary debates about game extraction and transformation: Are commercial game worlds proprietary products to be consumed and discarded, or cultural commons to be preserved, studied, and reimagined?
The question matters urgently because artists, modders, preservationists, and scholars are already treating games as raw material — ripping textures, extracting 3D models, reverse-engineering engines, building new meaning from corporate creations. They do so in a legal gray zone where “tolerated infringement” is the operative reality, where the same act that earns Cory Arcangel a Whitney Biennial invitation could earn a fan developer a $12 million lawsuit from Nintendo. What follows is a map of this contested territory.
The enclosure of the digital commons
The most useful philosophical framework for understanding game asset extraction comes from James Boyle’s concept of the “second enclosure movement.” Just as the English commons were privatized through enclosure acts in the 18th century, Boyle argues we are witnessing an enclosure of “the intangible commons of the mind” — the raw material of cultural creation being fenced off by ever-expanding intellectual property regimes.
Video games exemplify this enclosure perfectly. They are built from shared cultural resources — mythologies, visual languages, musical traditions, narrative conventions — yet corporate ownership transforms them into private property accessible only on licensed terms. Lawrence Lessig’s distinction between “Read-Only” and “Read/Write” culture captures the stakes: RO culture produces passive consumers; RW culture enables creators who “blur boundaries” and make new meaning from existing materials. Current copyright law, Lessig argues, is “antiquated for digital media” since every use of a creative work in digital contexts involves copying.
McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory offers complementary framing. She describes “gamespace” — the game-like logic that increasingly structures contemporary life — arguing that games are not escapist entertainment but “the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through.” If games reveal the algorithmic logic governing existence, then extracting and transforming their elements is not theft but critical inquiry. Wark herself practiced this openness by releasing Gamer Theory under Creative Commons.
The enclosure framing gains urgency from preservation realities. The Video Game History Foundation’s 2023 study found that less than 3% of games released before 1985 remain commercially available. Game Boy libraries show only 5.87% availability; even the relatively recent PlayStation 2 catalog is 88% out of print. As Frank Cifaldi of VGHF puts it: “Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape and maintain your own vintage equipment.” This is the reality for most video game history.
Artists who treat games as found objects
A robust tradition of artists has already answered the extraction question through practice. Cory Arcangel stands as perhaps the most celebrated figure — his Super Mario Clouds (2002) hacked an NES cartridge to display only scrolling sky and clouds, stripping the game to pure abstraction. Exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2004, the work treats commercial software as readymade raw material. Crucially, Arcangel shares his source code freely, framing the work as participatory: “Here’s what I made, and here’s the source code.”
The net art collective JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) pioneered extreme game modification as deconstructivism. Their SOD (1999) replaced all Wolfenstein 3D graphics with abstract black-and-white geometries; their Untitled Game series created closed cubes with swirling patterns from intentional Quake engine glitches. The 1999 Webby Award winners now have work in MoMA and ZKM collections.
More recent practitioners have used extraction explicitly for critique. Joseph DeLappe’s dead-in-iraq (2006–2011) typed names of killed U.S. soldiers into America’s Army chat, transforming the military recruitment game into memorial. Georgie Roxby Smith’s 99 Problems [WASTED] repeatedly killed a female GTA V avatar to expose gendered game violence. Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet layered Tomb Raider footage with texts from Fernando Pessoa and Sun Ra to explore “women, virtual bodies, role-playing, identity issues.”
These artists inherit the appropriation art tradition of Sherrie Levine, who re-photographed Walker Evans’ Depression-era images as her own, and Richard Prince, whose Instagram re-photographings sold for $100,000. The legal outcomes have been mixed — Prince won fair use protection for 25 of 30 works in Cariou v. Prince (2013), though the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith significantly narrowed transformative use doctrine, requiring artists demonstrate “fundamentally different purpose” rather than merely adding new meaning.
The legal architecture of tolerated infringement
The legal reality governing game extraction is less a coherent framework than a patchwork of accommodations, gray zones, and selective enforcement. Understanding this architecture reveals both the risks and the spaces where transformative work occurs.
Foundational protections exist for reverse engineering and personal modification. In Sega v. Accolade (1992), the Ninth Circuit held that disassembly for interoperability is fair use “as a matter of law” when it’s “the only way to gain access to the ideas and functional elements” of software. Sony v. Connectix (2000) extended this to PlayStation emulation. Most significantly for everyday modding, Lewis Galoob v. Nintendo (1992) established that temporary alterations for personal enjoyment do not create infringing derivative works — “Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play.”
However, commercial distribution changes everything. In Micro Star v. FormGen (1998), user-created Duke Nukem 3D levels were found to infringe the game’s “story” — not the code, but the narrative arc. The court reasoned that game characters’ adventures constitute a copyrightable story, and user levels creating new adventures constitute unauthorized sequels. This case haunts anyone distributing mods commercially.
The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions create additional hazards. Nintendo’s 2024 lawsuit against the Yuzu Switch emulator settled for $2.4 million not primarily on copyright grounds but on DMCA § 1201 claims — the emulator enabled decryption of copy protection. This theory potentially bypasses fair use entirely, since circumvention itself is the violation regardless of ultimate use.
The 2024 Copyright Office ruling rejecting remote access exemptions for game preservation illustrates the current legal ceiling. Even for scholarly research at accredited institutions, the Copyright Office determined that “preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes” — revealing that cultural access itself threatens corporate interests. The ESA lawyer stated there is “no combination of limitations” industry would support for remote access.
What emerges is a legal landscape where much derivative game content exists as “tolerated infringement” — technically illegal but practically permitted due to enforcement economics, community relations, and marketing benefits. This tolerance can be withdrawn at any time, and publishers like Nintendo demonstrate that legal exposure is real.
The developer spectrum: from collaboration to control
Game studios span from open collaboration to aggressive control, revealing that different philosophies about ownership of creative work are not only possible but commercially viable.
Bethesda represents maximum openness: releasing the Creation Kit (the same tools developers use) for free, with Todd Howard declaring “the sky’s the limit” for mods. Bethesda sees extended game lifespan — Skyrim’s decade-plus relevance — as proving the business case for supporting transformation.
CD Projekt Red evolved toward openness as a “final goodbye” to The Witcher 3, releasing REDkit in 2024 and hiring talented modders into professional roles. Community response: “This is not a modding tool, this is an engine, you guys are crazy.”
Sega explicitly tolerates fan works: “We usually have no issue with y’all using our blue boy to hone your art and dev skills” as long as works aren’t monetized. Sega famously hired Sonic fan developers to create the acclaimed Sonic Mania.
Nintendo occupies the opposite pole: AM2R (Metroid fan remake) taken down after 15 years’ development; 379 fan games removed from Game Jolt in December 2020; the Garry’s Mod community forced to remove all Nintendo-related content in April 2024. Nintendo’s patent attorney Koji Nishiura frames emulation itself as potentially illegal “depending on how it’s used.”
Developer Tim Schafer articulated preservation-friendly reasoning in 2002: “Most of the creative teams behind all those games have long since left the companies that published them, so there’s no way the people who deserve to are still making royalties off them. So, go ahead — steal this game!” Against this, the ESA argues preservation exemptions would “obliterate the market for reboots, remakes, and relaunches.”
Player labor and the co-creation of game worlds
Critical theory offers frameworks for understanding players not as passive consumers but as co-creators whose labor generates value appropriated by corporations.
Tiziana Terranova’s foundational essay “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” (2000) describes internet creative labor as “simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited.” This captures precisely the modder’s condition: investing creative energy that extends game lifespan and corporate profits without compensation.
Julian Kücklich’s concept of “playbor” names the convergence of play and labor in gaming communities, particularly modding. The line between entertainment and exploitation is deliberately blurred; player creativity generates value captured by companies.
Alexander Galloway reframes games fundamentally: “If photographs are images and films are moving images, then videogames are best defined as actions.” Games exist only through player action — players co-constitute the work. This ontological shift implies players have legitimate claims over experiences they help create.
Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric framework positions games as persuasive arguments made through processes rather than words or images. If games encode ideological arguments in their mechanics — Animal Crossing teaching capitalist debt cycles through gameplay — then modifying those mechanics is counter-argument, not theft.
Academic research confirms modders understand themselves as creators. Hector Postigo found modders “develop a specific rationale and set of norms rooted in Jenkins’ concept of a ‘moral economy’ to justify their appropriations.” Tom Welch argues queer mods constitute “affectively necessary labour” responding to inadequate representation — politically necessary creative work building what commercial products fail to provide.
Death of the author in the age of corporate immortality
Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” has been applied to games with revealing complications. The core argument — that reader interpretation should take primacy over authorial intention, that once created “the author dies” — seems especially applicable to games designed for active player participation.
Games scholars note that games are “designed such that players will have as much opportunity to create their own stories and validate their own interpretations of the fiction as possible.” Game designers create frameworks for meaning-making rather than fixed meanings — theoretically opening space for derivative work.
But unlike traditional texts, game companies retain power “from the afterlife.” When Sony/EverQuest banned a player for creating fan fiction, it demonstrated that while authorial intent may be theoretically dead, corporate power enforces interpretive control through technological and legal means. The author may be dead, but the rights-holder is immortal.
This creates a fundamental asymmetry. Commercial games draw freely from shared cultural resources — mythology, genre conventions, visual languages developed over centuries of collective creation — then fence off their outputs as private property. The extraction question is really about reciprocity: if corporations can take from the commons, why can’t artists take back?
The doujinshi alternative: what tolerance looks like
Japan’s doujinshi culture offers a vision of alternative relations between rights-holders and derivative creators. Fan-made comics using copyrighted characters thrive in a legal environment with no fair use doctrine — technically infringing but practically flourishing through cultural norms and industry tolerance.
Publishers view doujinshi as talent pipeline and free promotion. The “shinkokuzai” system means most copyright offenses require victim complaint for prosecution — and companies rarely complain. Prime Minister Abe stated doujinshi should be treated as parodies, not piracy.
This tolerance is real but conditional: keep sales small-scale, don’t compete commercially, respect “IP dignity.” When creators violate these norms — as in the 1999 Pokemon erotic doujinshi arrest — enforcement occurs. The system runs on enforcement discretion rather than legal rights, meaning creators depend on corporate goodwill that can be withdrawn.
The doujinshi model reveals that vibrant derivative culture is economically and culturally compatible with commercial interests — but also that framing this as tolerance rather than rights leaves creators perpetually precarious.
What remains uncertain
The legal landscape continues shifting. The 2023 Warhol decision narrowed transformative use; future cases may narrow it further. The ESA’s absolute opposition to preservation access suggests no voluntary resolution. AI training on game assets raises entirely novel questions about extraction and transformation.
Meanwhile, artists continue working in gray zones — tolerated until they aren’t, legal until challenged. The fundamental question remains unresolved: Are commercial game worlds private property to be protected or cultural material to be transformed? The answer will shape what becomes possible for digital creativity — and what disappears into the enclosure.