1. Introduction
[1.1] User-generated game reviews on the commercial digital distribution platform Steam can be productively conceptualized as what I refer to as platformized community archive of player experience and reception. I also argue that these reviews constitute records of "transformative play" (Bowman et al. 2024; Tanenbaum 2022), a concept within video game research that explores the profound and lasting impacts that games can have on their players. While Steam reviews (hereafter SRs) are often analyzed quantitatively when studying sales trends, conducting sentiment analysis, or informing game design recommendations (Zuo 2018), they are also a relatively unique form of user-generated content nestled within a complex set of social systems. Beyond simple consumer feedback, these reviews, housed within a game's Steam Community hub, function as an informal yet influential form of amateur game criticism and fan creativity and contain rich metadata and text that paratextually chronicles how games evolve and are received by their audiences over time (Kohlburn et al. 2023). Additionally, the communal evaluation of these reviews through votes and awards highlights what a game's fan community values, forging a link to the concept of community archives—grassroots efforts, now increasingly leveraging digital tools, to collect and preserve materials often overlooked by traditional institutions. Framing these reviews in this manner underscores their potential historical significance, particularly in revealing the transformative impact games can have on players.
[1.2] To demonstrate this potential and underscore my argument, this article uses the 2D indie precision platformer Celeste (Maddy Makes Games, 2018) as a primary case study. Celeste is renowned for its challenging gameplay and its deeply emotional narrative centered on its trans protagonist's struggles with anxiety and depression. Themes of persistence, self-doubt, reconciliation, and eventually, self-acceptance resonate strongly with players, often resulting in online discussions of mental health and gender identity, and, as I argue, the game's SRs uniquely capture these personal, transformative experiences.
[1.3] This analysis of Celeste's SRs is undertaken as a foundational part of a larger, ongoing SSHRC (Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Postdoctoral Fellowship archival research-creation project. This project directly addresses the current gap in archiving born-digital, fan-generated paratexts by creating a pedagogically focused open-access archive and set of digital exhibitions of Celeste paratexts, including the SRs analyzed here. The goal is to provide resources for game studies educators to easily incorporate Canadian video game culture and development history into their classrooms and to contribute this material to existing Canadian GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), which often lack such content. By exploring Celeste's SRs through an archival lens, this article serves as a demonstration of how such platformized user-generated content constitutes a culturally significant and historically valuable resource that warrants dedicated collection, preservation, and exhibition efforts. The transformative effect of playing Celeste on fans' mental health, gender identity, and persistence is explicitly revealed through this archival framing of their reviews.
[1.4] Following this introduction, I provide necessary background on the Steam platform and the scholarly understanding of its community features. I then review existing literature on paratexts and archival studies relevant to video games, followed by an overview of Celeste's narrative themes and critical reception. Finally, I delve into a selection of Celeste's SRs, analyzing them as evidence of their function as a platformized community archive of transformative play and discussing the methodology used in their collection for the larger archive project.
2. Steam as platformized community archive
[2.1] In many ways, Steam has become synonymous with computer gaming fandom. What once began as a relatively simple game launcher and digital storefront in the early 2000s has slowly transformed into the de facto way that most players purchase and play computer games. Furthermore, through the platform's unique blend of social and e-commerce affordances, many players discover new games, curatorially organize their game libraries, connect with other players, and critically express their opinions about the games they have played (Joelsson et al. 2018; Thorhauge 2024; Windleharth et al. 2016). Similar to what Werning (2021) has referred to as tool fandom and the hardware fandoms often associated with the console wars (Taylor 2007; Vero 2018) of the '90s and 2000s, many PC gamers passionately prefer Steam as opposed to other potential launchers or digital storefronts such as the Epic Games Store (Bernevega 2019; Statt 2019) or the Ubisoft Connect launcher (Shakir 2023). Perhaps most notably, the metrics surrounding the number of sales, concurrent players, and the ratio of positive to negative reviews are often cited (Orland 2014) as general indicators of any given game's popularity and/or commercial success. The recognized correlation between a game's perceived quality and the number and quality of SRs has also prompted a recurring phenomenon of disgruntled gamers attempting to review bomb (Cantone et al. 2023; Fenlon 2017) specific games they take issues with, whether it be because of poor localization updates, a poorly implemented and glitchy update, or, as is increasingly the case with right-leaning reviewers, the inclusion of diverse content (Snavely 2024). Considering the significant influence of SRs on the perceived desirability of a video game, and how Steam functions as a major social hub for user-generated content in addition to a digital storefront, SRs are thus relatively unique when compared to other kinds of user-generated media reviews, such as those found on Letterboxd (Goc 2024), Goodreads (Kousha et al. 2017), or mobile app stores (Lin et al. 2018; Robson et al. 2013). For example, one important factor that differentiates SRs from the user-generated content of these similar review platforms, and especially from the significantly more anonymized user game reviews from review aggregation websites like Metacritic, is the fact that a Steam review is connected to the user's Steam account and by proxy the collection of games they have purchased throughout the duration of that account's lifetime. This leads many Steam reviewers to take their critical writing quite seriously and adopt the identity of an amateur video game curator or critic. Additionally, another factor that productively differentiates Steam from these other review platforms is how it is nestled within a relatively complex set of social systems where community members can up- or downvote reviews they appreciate or find unhelpful (Eberhard et al. 2018). Similar to the monetized social affordances found on Reddit (Burtch et al. 2021), any Steam user can also bestow a review with a number of purchasable emoji-like awards that each signify a specific, socially recognized opinion about that review (for example, the Jester award is often used to imply that a reviewer is being foolish in some way and to signal to other users that their critique is not worth reading). Taking all this into account, SRs can thus be framed as a relatively informal, yet highly influential form of amateur game criticism and platformized fan creativity that collectively have had a very significant impact on video game history.
[2.2] Within video game research, SRs are certainly not an understudied cultural artifact; however, they are most often used as quantifiable anonymized datasets to study sales trends, conduct sentiment analysis (Guzsvinecz and Szűcs 2023), and make psychologically informed recommendations on how to improve player experience (Busurkina et al. 2021). For example, in a 2021 article on how to rapidly identify commercial video games with therapeutic potential for the purposes of planning player-focused research, Phillips et al. argue that SRs represent an efficient yet underutilized dataset, positing that "the current [video games as therapy] research paradigm is not able to keep pace with changes in game technologies, game communities, and games themselves. In the time that it may take to acquire funding and ethical approval, carry out a study, and report research on video games with therapeutic potential, several factors may make the findings obsolete" (2). They also argue that the vast amount of information contained within a game's SRs gives researchers the ability to quickly and accurately assess the impact that the game is having on players without having to go through the process of conducting a lab study with active participants. Although their need to expedite the process of identifying potentially therapeutic commercial games makes sense in the context of psychologically oriented, player-focused games research, Phillips et al.'s concern over the passing of time and cycles of obsolescence also indirectly works to imbue SRs with a sense of historical significance. It's a research justification that, I argue, unintentionally transforms SRs into something beyond the instrumentalized datasets that many quantitative games researchers mold them into for the purposes of their work.
[2.3] Over the last decade, digital platforms have been increasingly framed as new forms of informal and living archives (Aasman 2019) across fields such as critical archival studies, digital humanities, and media studies. From this perspective, any game's collection of SRs can be framed and studied as a platformized archive (Ringel and Ribak 2024) of experience, play, and memory. An individual review contains several categories of metadata such as date of publication; the reviewer's username and Steam profile; the number of hours they have played the game; the number of people who have found the review helpful, unhelpful, or funny (Eberhard et al. 2018); the number and type of badges that other users have awarded the review; and the review text itself. As many game historians and preservationists (Newman 2012; Swalwell et al. 2017) have already pointed out, many games change substantially over time through updates, patches, and DLC (downloadable content; Lu et al. 2020), and SRs thus become a useful way of chronicling how these processes have been received by their audiences. Furthermore, by examining how certain reviews are upvoted, awarded, or ignored by other Steam users, game historians and fan studies scholars can glean what is valued by any individual game's respective community across time. This process of communal evaluation also allows for productive connections to be made between SRs and the concept of a community archive (Caswell 2021)—a link that is made all the more explicit through the fact that, in addition to being accessible from the main store page, a game's SRs are housed within its Steam Community hub. Community archives are most commonly defined as physical repositories of historical material that are curated and maintained by members of a grassroots community rather than a traditional memory institution (Cvetkovich 2023; Flinn 2010). Often, community archives are focused on a particular identity (queer, immigrant, etc.), event (for example, film festivals), place, or form of media (short film, zines, etc.). Although this definition may initially seem to have little to no relationship with an online commercial digital distribution platform like Steam, Acker and Flamm (2021) argue that "as people have adopted new digital technologies—from digital cameras to email listservs and Facebook groups—community archives have increasingly leveraged digital tools on the Internet" (2546). In their paper, Acker and Flamm reference how community archives can increasingly be found on digital platforms such as Instagram and Facebook and use this as a precedent for their study of GitHub as a tool for Chinese community archiving practices during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, in the context of the therapeutic games that Phillips et al. (2021) identify and how these games' reviews commonly contain personal reflections on topics such as mental health and personal wellness, framing SRs as a platformized community archive allows for their associated game's transformative potential to be underscored through a historical lens.
[2.4] Both to help emphasize my argument that SRs can function individually as authored records of transformative play and to provide some broader context for the relatively common references to anxiety, depression, identity, and community that are found across Celeste's SRs, I will preface my analysis of them with a short overview of the game's emotional narrative, difficult mechanics, accessibility options, development history, and critical reception. This marrying of textual content with paratextual artifacts resonates with recent calls by video game historians (Guay-Bélanger 2022; Newman 2012; Nylund 2020; Swalwell et al. 2017; Wright 2023) to consider the study and collection of objects and narratives that lie beyond the game itself. Thus, before focusing on Celeste and its associated SRs, in the next section, I will work to briefly review and define how born-digital paratexts have already been argued to be important and yet also distressingly ephemeral, historical material that is not often effectively collected by institutional media archives.
3. Archiving paratexts
[3.1] To effectively perform this archival recontextualization of SRs—in addition to the interdisciplinary scholarship cited above—I build on the wealth of existing game studies research on video game history and paratextual media. What is especially relevant for my effort to define a game's SRs as a platformized community archive of transformative play is research that argues for the historical value of paratextual material. Mia Consalvo (2007) was one of the first scholars to seriously examine the research potential of video game paratexts. Building on Genette's (1997) initial literary definition of paratexts as being everything that exists around and outside of the text itself, Consalvo revealed how video game paratexts could include objects such as strategy guides, walkthroughs, forum posts, and promotional material. Consalvo's formative arguments on the topic of video game paratexts established that they are crucial material to consider when seeking to gain a holistic understanding of video game culture. More recently, scholars like Ruggill and McAllister (2019) and Seiwald and Vollans (2023) have argued for the archival and historical value of video game paratexts and worked to define them as networked assemblages that can often reveal more about a game than a preserved copy of the game itself ever could.
[3.2] Outside game studies scholarship, the value of paratextual material has been similarly argued for by Jonathan Gray (2016) in his examination of the archival qualities of fan-moderated Star Wars wikis and how they provide valuable tools for other fans in forming their own understandings of interpretations of texts within the franchise. Of similar relevance is Abigail De Kosnik's (2016) concept of a rogue archive, which she argues provides a useful framework for examining the participatory fan archiving practices that work in opposition to the formal institutional methodologies typically found in traditional government archives. As the media property that a fan community is focused on expands through canonical sequels, new seasons or issues, and/or official side content, De Kosnik argues that these fan-organized rogue archives will similarly grow and adapt as the fans produce new criticism, art, and fiction in response—content that is often ignored and left unarchived by large-scale GLAM institutions.
[3.3] Although De Kosnik clearly states that corporately owned digital platforms such as Steam do not fall within her definition of rogue archives, Fryberger (2019) builds on her work to argue how the Steam Community portion of the platform (i.e., the space where forums, reviews, mods, and other user-generated content are located) functions as what he calls a tactical safe space. In defining this term, Fryberger examines how Chinese gamers use the Steam Community forums to discuss politics outside the gaze of government censors and argues that the Steam Community thus functions as a discursive "archive built directly into the infrastructure of the Steam platform itself" (7). With a similar focus on the political impact of paratextual media, Gray (2016) works to underscore how important it is that a piece of media's paratexts be archived, especially when there is a significant ideological component that is being communicated by them that might get lost or even deliberately hidden over time.
[3.4] Although physical paratexts such as print advertisements are a relatively common form of acquisition for many major video game archives around the world, this paratextual remit has not as often been extended to born-digital items such as the forum discussions, wiki pages, and fan art referred to above. This is a gap that some game studies scholars have already identified and argued needs to be addressed. For example, across the wealth of research that Esther Wright (2018, 2022, 2023) has published on how Rockstar Games uses the notion of historical authenticity as a marketing tool, she points out that much of the studio's born-digital promotional paratexts (blog posts, interviews, trailers, etc.) have already been taken down or lost to link rot. Although Wright has been able to go back and access the paratexts that Rockstar doesn't think are worth saving (or perhaps more significantly, actively does not wish to be accessed anymore) through the Wayback Machine and what she has referred to as "creative Googling" (2023, 42), as many other scholars (Aasman 2019; Milligan 2019; Walden 2023) have pointed out already, web archiving is not a foolproof solution.
[3.5] With a similar focus on historical ephemerality and authenticity to that of Wright, Guay-Bélanger (2022) reflects on the many difficulties inherent to preserving video games in their original playable form and instead argues for the archiving of recorded gameplay experiences as an alternative solution for future historians seeking to study today's games. Wright and Guay-Bélanger's arguments can neatly be synthesized through Ruggill and McAllister's (2019) archival method, which "sees games not as discrete objects but as complex cultural artifacts that are always already entangled in the world that gives them meaning" (326). When defining this method, Ruggill and McAllister point to the many paratexts that surround Tempest (Atari, 1981) and argue that they contribute just as much as the game itself to how it exists and is understood within video game culture and technocultural history. This relates to how I have argued elsewhere (Bailey 2024) that many historically themed games, especially those whose developers aim for authentic playable representations of the past, have a decentralized and complex relationship with both fan historians (Stevens and Webber 2022) and traditional memory institutions. As games move through culture they accrue and influence history through the ongoing meaning-making efforts of their developers and fans.
[3.6] Through the lens of the scholarship reviewed above, I argue that fan-written SRs are an important form of informal and self-expressive fan criticism that is well worth documenting as part of their corresponding game's ongoing history. In the case of Celeste, its SRs are a clear index of how the game's textual content and developer-created paratexts have positively resonated with its players and fostered an inclusive and supportive community of fans. In the next section, I will provide a concise summary of Celeste's ludonarrative focus on persisting through difficulty and explain how this has been warmly received by many different avenues of video game culture.
4. Indexing Celeste's transformative play
[4.1] Celeste is a pixel-based 2D, side-scrolling platformer that has often been grouped in the masocore genre (Johnson 2019)—a category of games known for its extreme difficulty and repeated failure. Celeste is divided into a series of isolated, short levels where the player must make a series of tricky jumps while also managing their avatar's stamina levels and avoiding environmental hazards. Narratively, Celeste tells the story of a young woman named Madeline who is suffering from anxiety and depression and wants to climb a fantastical version of the real-world Celeste mountain in British Columbia, Canada, as a way to confront her mental health issues. Throughout her increasingly difficult journey, Madeline meets a personification of her self-doubt and anxiety named Badeline, whom she must contend with as a disruptive antagonist force throughout various sections of the mountain. Eventually, Madeline and Badeline reconcile their differences and work together to ascend the final stages of the game.
[4.2] Unsurprisingly, given the game's overt mental health themes, critical success, and ongoing popularity within the speedrunning and modding scenes, Celeste is already a well-trodden topic within game studies scholarship. Hefkaluk et al. (2024) used the game in a study on how challenging games help players understand and deal with failure across many aspects of their lives and ultimately develop a more persistent approach to problems they encounter. Tavares et al. (2021) argue that the mountain within Celeste largely functions as a reflection of Madeline's mental health struggles and that her ascension and interactions with Badeline strongly correlate to the individuation process: "In her journey, she comprehends the importance of listening to her shadow part, making it possible to accomplish anything if they both work together in harmony. Similarly, individuation is also about learning to accept one's shadow instead of rejecting it, resulting in better ways to work through obstacles and goals in life" (204). Chiasson (2023) uses phenomenological and Gothic literary theory to explore how the ruined architecture that composes the majority of Celeste's mountain thematically connects to Madeline's psychological state: "Celeste mobilizes the tradition of ruin-gazing to provide a metaphor for self-exploration and then crucially transforms the psychoanalytic 'cure' into a gamified experience. Analyzing navigation and ruins as mutually constitutive elements of video games substantiates that video games bring together physical, mental, and emotional processes" (365).
[4.3] Within the space of popular video game criticism Celeste has also been thoroughly examined through the lens of its mental health themes. In an article for CBR, Sean Bell (2022) argues that "Madeline and her quest to climb Celeste [Mountain] are important for people struggling with these afflictions because within her journey are many poignant takeaways, coping mechanisms, and realizations." In an interview with Nathan Grayson for Kotaku (2018), Lena Raine, Celeste's composer, recounts how a player suffering from depression reached out to her to explain how the game helped them through a time when they were contemplating suicide. In a self-reflective essay for the middle-state game studies blog First Person Scholar, Alyse Stanley (2018) writes about how the game's narrative mirrors many of her own recent mental health experiences: "As I played, I recognized in Madeline's attempts to overcome her emotions certain teachings from my nearly decade in therapy to address my own anxiety and depression. Unbeknownst to the developers, Madeline's techniques for battling anxiety borrow heavily from cognitive behavioral therapy, a study I'm intimately familiar with, as it's been essential in combating my own debilitating mental illness." This critical focus on mental health is not something that is restricted to game studies research and/or articles on popular video game websites; as I will demonstrate in the next section of this article, like Stanley above, in the game's SRs, many fans of the game quite openly and sincerely emphasize how much Madeline's journey significantly impacted their own sense of self and ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression.
[4.4] In addition to the many texts that have been published on Celeste's positive impact on the mental health of its players (Quirke 2018), another relatively common topic for articles focused on the game mirrored across its SRs is Madeline's trans identity. Although it was discreetly hinted at within a postgame expansion that was freely distributed a year after the game's original release (Jones 2019; Marrujo 2019), Maddy Thorson, Celeste's Canadian director, writer, and co-programmer, later revealed via a blog post on her personal Medium account (2020) that Madeline was canonically trans. The timing of this post also loosely corresponded with Thorson's decision to transition and begin using feminine pronouns after having come out as nonbinary via a Twitter post the previous year on International Nonbinary Day (Nonbinary Wiki, https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Maddy_Thorson#cite_note-2). Similar to the way that the texts surveyed in the previous paragraph pointed to the transformative impact that Celeste has had on players, the added context of Thorson's transition and Madeline's canonical confirmation as a transgender protagonist has resulted in the game being repeatedly analyzed as an explicitly queer text. For example, Kyle McPhail (2023) discusses how Madeline was interpreted by many Celeste fans as trans well before Thorson's blog and how this provides a model for reconsidering what can be read as a trans object and/or how transness can be found within a text that doesn't explicitly identity itself as such. Engaging with a similar thread of analysis, Henley (2021) reflects on her own initial experiences reading Celeste as a trans text throughout her own transition and how different trans players might project themselves onto Madeline or Badeline more strongly depending on their own life experiences and current mental health state.
[4.5] Collectively, the research and criticism I have cited above point to how Celeste's value in video game history can be assessed not only through its in-game mechanical and narrative content but also via the many paratexts that surround the game and contribute to how it is interpreted by new and returning fans. This synthesis of textual and paratextual content provides a strong basis for collectively examining Celeste's SRs as a kind of platformized community archive of emotionally poignant fan criticism. Although these reviews are ultimately moderated by Valve and bound by the policies of its Steam platform, the extremely high saturation of players who choose to reveal the transformative effect that playing Celeste had on their mental health, their outlook on real-world experiences of difficulty and failure, and their sense of self provide productive opportunities to connect them to the marginalized material that has often, historically, been collected by many brick-and-mortar community archives.
5. Collecting Celeste's SRs
[5.1] As I have posited above, when considering the abundance of scholarly and popular texts focused on the meaning and value of Celeste's ludonarrative approach toward mental health and gender identity, it is unsurprising that these topics are also easily observable within the game's SRs. When writing their reviews, most Celeste fans do not simply discuss the mechanical merits of the game or assess it using the typical structure of a scored consumer review (fun factor, replayability, graphics, sound, etc.), like the SRs for many other popular games, but instead use the platform to talk about the deeply transformative impact that playing Celeste had on them. Examined collectively, these reviews provide a comprehensive picture of how Celeste's fans have experienced and reflected on the game in the years following its release and also point to the broader community of fans that exist beyond the confines of the Steam platform. As I argued above, although promotional paratexts such as magazines and printed ephemera are increasingly being collected by existing video game archives, platformized user-generated content is not typically collected outside informal and rogue archives such as the Wayback Machine. However, I also argue that there is a lot that a curated archive of select SRs could communicate to future video game historians and fan scholars that is not captured by current institutional video game archiving practices.
[5.2] Given the space restrictions of this article, I obviously cannot include all the SRs I have been collecting as a part of this project, but to demonstrate the qualities that I ascribe above, I feel it is prudent to provide a small selection of relatively short, recent examples. To collect the total pool of reviews that I am working with to produce the final archive, I opted to use Joshua Marcus Hill's Steam Review Explorer (https://project.joshhills.dev/steam-review-explorer/) data analysis tool. At the time of this article's writing, the number of total English-language Celeste SRs that this scraper retrieved was 44,767, which I then manually combed through using search terms related to mental health, personal well-being, community, and transformative play (for example, anxiety, depression, failure, achievement, growth, doubt, negative). Below is a selection of relatively short reviews from various months in 2023 that each work to emphasize the game's positive influence on their writers and thus support my arguments on the community's warm reception to Celeste's approach to mental health and gender identity.
[5.3] What I love most about this game is the themes and the community it's built. It's not just about anxiety and depression, which so many of us deal with, but also about the LGBTQ+ community and the challenges we face. Somehow, those two things together have created this amazing, supportive community around the game. It's hard to describe, but hanging out in the chats of streamers who are into this game has been so great—everyone's just super kind and uplifting, and it really makes me happy.
[5.4] The thing that makes this game different from other platformers is how much heart it has. The story dives into stuff like mental health, anxiety, and self-doubt in a way that feels real and hits home. And when you finally push through the tough parts, it's not just about beating a level—you really feel proud of yourself, like you've done something meaningful.
[5.5] This game isn't just technically awesome—it tells such a personal, powerful story about mental health and figuring out who you are. The way it handles the main character's struggles with anxiety and depression feels so honest, and it's cool to see a game take mental health this seriously. It's definitely a big deal for how games can handle these kinds of topics.
[5.6] This little game is all about teaching you to take it slow and learn from messing up. You're going to die a ton while trying to climb the mountain, but each time you figure something out, it feels so good. And it's not just the gameplay—it's got these awesome messages about understanding yourself, accepting who you are, and being kind to yourself.
[5.7] In addition to the very sincere and reflective reviews that are easily found when searching for terms related to mental health, there is another category of reviews that grew in popularity following Maddy Thorson's blog post confirming Madeline as a trans woman. Many of these are brief, one- or two-sentence reviews meant to function as Tweet-like jokes. For example, one such reviewer writes "How come I didn't gain the ability to double jump after transitioning?!?" and another writes "My testosterone disappeared after playing this game." At first glance, these reviews may resemble the meme-like and jokey one-liners that are often found on Letterboxd or Goodreads. However, what differentiates and makes them especially worth studying is the way they're embedded in the platform's unique social infrastructure. Because SRs are tied to users' profiles, play time, and gaming histories, even these brief, humorous entries carry a kind of authenticity and relational weight. They're not anonymous quips but signals of identity and belonging within a shared gaming space. And crucially, the platform metrics reflect their impact. Each of these two trans-focused reviews have hundreds of upvotes and user-awarded badges that clearly indicate that these lighter reviews resonate powerfully with the community. In that sense, they still function as microarchives of gender expression and queer joy and contribute to Celeste's broader legacy as a site of transformation and solidarity.
[5.8] Although both these categories of reviews have been written with the intention of speaking openly to as wide an audience of interested readers as possible and are all easily found on Celeste's public Steam page, for privacy reasons (Mason and Singh 2022) I have opted to anonymize them for the purposes of this article. Though I believe that directly quoting these reviews poses no potential damage to their authors, beyond leaving out their usernames, I have also taken into account Carter's (2015) ethical concerns that quoted text from forums and blogs can easily be found by "creative Googling" (Wright 2023, 42) and opted to minorly rephrase each review to further obfuscate its origin. I acknowledge that all this works against my earlier stated intentions to position SRs as individually authored artifacts rather than the anonymized data they are often converted to for quantitative research; however, for the final digital archive and exhibitions I am constructing, I will be reaching out to gain formal permission and informed consent from all the users whose reviews I wish to include in the project.
[5.9] In the future, in addition to adding these reviews to the pedagogical digital archive I am producing as part of the postdoctoral research-creation project this article is connected to, I aim to explore the possibilities of incorporating these kinds of fan-authored paratexts into institutional video game museum collections and exhibitions. Here, the goal would be to help expand the ongoing conversations around how GLAM institutions are approaching the difficult task of video game preservation and historicization. This could potentially include curated selections of SRs alongside other paratextual ephemera such as fan art and forum posts. This would also work to address a gap illustrated by the recently published 2024 International Video Game Preservation Survey Report that was conducted by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. As this comprehensive gray paper indicates, the large majority of video game heritage organizations around the world do not significantly collect or exhibit born-digital paratexts such as user-generated content (YouTube videos, Twitch streams, social media posts, etc.) or web archives of developer or journalistic websites.
[5.10] As I have worked to demonstrate above, born-digital artifacts such as SRs can uniquely and persuasively communicate a game's post-release reception and help to provide a more holistic picture of that game's life cycle to scholars and audiences of the future. Although not specifically through the inclusion of SRs, this kind of paratextual focus on platformized artifacts and user-generated content has already proven to be successful through recent examples such as Jini Maxwell's curation of the Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition at the ACMI (Australian Center for the Moving Image; 2024–25)—where a series of screen recordings of the development team's GitHub commit messages and Blender animation files were exhibited—and Niklas Nylund's ongoing approach to archiving and curating fan-generated content with the Finnish Museum of Games. Adding to this disparate but slowly growing trend, I argue that through the collection and exhibition of a curated selection of SRs, video game heritage institutions could paint a broader and more dynamic picture of any given game's historical significance, moving beyond the game itself and allowing for new and nuanced understandings of a game's reception, its impact on its players, and how it is remembered by its community.
6. Conclusion and future work
[6.1] I have argued how game reviews on the commercial platform Steam can be productively framed as a community archive of transformative play, moving beyond their more common use within video game research as datasets for sales trends and sentiment analysis. By specifically examining the indie platformer Celeste, I have demonstrated how SRs can instead function as culturally significant paratextual artifacts that reflect much more than many other forms of user-generated consumer reviews. This is supported by the fact that many Celeste players use the Steam review platform to discuss the game's positive impact on their lives rather than just focus on a more typical scored breakdown of their satisfaction with a product. This approach aligns with the growing recognition of digital platforms as informal and living archives, showcasing the importance of user-generated content in understanding a given media text's cultural legacy.
[6.2] Through this examination of Celeste and its SRs, I have emphasized the need to expand traditional archival practices to include fan-generated digital paratexts, which are often overlooked by major institutional media archives. While physical promotional paratexts are increasingly being collected and digitized by video game archives, user-generated content is typically not, leaving a significant gap in future understandings of contemporary video game culture. The value of this kind of fan-generated material is that it can be used to discern how a video game's audience has received it over time and how that reception evolves with updates, patches, DLC expansions, or, as is the case with Celeste, blog and social media posts written by the game's developer. By using Celeste as a case study, I have shown how SRs function as a clear index of the game's reception and community.
[6.3] To conclude, Celeste's SRs offer more than just feedback or consumer advice—they are intimate reflections on survival, transformation, and identity. They speak candidly of anxiety, depression, perseverance, and, in more recent years, the powerful affirmation many players have felt in Madeline's confirmation as a trans woman. Taken together, these reviews form a decentralized, user-driven record shaped not by institutions, but by players themselves—what I have referred to throughout this article as a platformized community archive. Like brick-and-mortar community archives, Celeste's SRs preserve experiences that are too often excluded from official histories. They are messy, emotional, and vernacular, and all the more powerful for it. These reviews are living documents, constantly growing and shifting, echoing the game's own themes of change, identity, and resilience. They don't just respond to Celeste; they continue it. In centering experiences so often marginalized by mainstream video game archival practices—especially queer and trans narratives—these reviews enact a kind of counterarchival logic. They reject the neutrality of traditional institutions in favor of something more personal, more affective, and more honest. If we want to understand Celeste not just as a game, but as a site of care, identity, and resistance, we need to listen to these voices. We need to take seriously the archive they are building, in plain sight, one review at a time.
7. Acknowledgment
[7.1] This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.