The Gathering of Uru: A look into player communities

In Celia Pearce's article she examines the small "refugee" community of Myst Uru players after their online game community was shut down. Most of the members of this community, that refers to themselves as the gathering of uru or TGU, were members of the beta test for the online multiplayer component of the Myst game. Even though the game was only around for almost a year for those with the beta access they were able to form a tight nit community and were deeply saddened by the sudden shut down of the servers for the game.   

A live gathering of Uru players on the final day of the game.

The members of TGU started a forum for everyone to stay connected on called koalanet. They shared stories, thoughts and even poetry about their experiences and thoughts about their game. From here the community also tried to have people scout out a new virtual game world for their community to join and find a new "homeland". The two main contenders were There.com and Second Life. The majority ended up going to There.com and trying to rebuild Uru in that world. They would recreate some of the locations from their past game into this new world and met opposition from the "indigenous" people already in the There.com community. This was one part of the article that I found really odd. It seems like these people were just trying too hard to hold on to this game they really loved and were just trying to remake this other environment into something it wasn't. At some point these people should have just moved on and tried to enjoy the new game for what it was and just use it as a space for them to enjoy each other's company and to keep there small community alive. To me it seems like it should have been more about the community of players than trying to remake the game itself. They even had a guy learning a whole new programing language just to remake the world of Uru. I mean everyone likes to get nostalgic from time to time but it is new experiences together that create strong bonds within a community. Maybe its because i have never been apart of an online community but it just seemed like they missed the whole point of a community and just fixated a bit too much on it for a game that really wasn't around for that long or that popular. 

My question for you is do you think that these types of communities can last over multiple online games(uru to there.com to second life ect..) or will the players just assimilate into the new games' communities? At what point does the "community" become more about the people playing than the game itself? or is the only thing keeping the community alive the game so players must recreate it in other locations after it is gone?