Preserving Virtual Worlds - a few comments
Written on February 19, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
The Virtual Worlds preservation workshop at Stanford, funded by the Library of Congress’ NDIIPP, is over now. Partner institutions besides Stanford are University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland and Rochester Institute of Technology. I attended via Skype conference call with text chat on the side, augmented with a dynamically-updated Google Doc page where participants collaborated live on taking notes of the proceedings. It was very interesting to work with the group, and I’m looking forward to being involved with this project for the next couple of years. It is a 2-year project, so the work has just begun.
In addition to the International Spaceflight Museum, where I’m a director and CEO, at least one other “homegrown” SecondLife island is to be included in this archiving pilot program, Democracy Isle. I think the project may also be including a sim that the Stanford Humanities Lab people have been building as well, the LifeSquared. (There is an intro video to the LifeSquared project online.)
Non-SecondLife subjects include the original text-based computer game, Colossal Cave Adventure, and possibly some aspects of World of Warcraft (WoW), which of course is a wildly popular multiuser online game world.
One aspect I found interesting was that this project seeks to document and perhaps enable recreation of the user experience, not just the sourcecode for the worlds it is archiving. Probably the most important object of the project is to define a methodology for doing this, beyond preserving the specific content from the test subjects. However, as the representative of one of those subjects, I can say we (the guinea pigs) are very grateful to be part of this study, since it will preserve at least a snapshot of our museum that otherwise could well vanish one day if SecondLife or Linden Lab happened to go away. Since a number of us have invested considerable time and even a little money into our virtual museum, to have that happen would be a personal tragedy.
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