Archiving the History of Virtual Worlds

eldavojohn writes "Some members of the University of Texas are trying to create a repository to store the histories of online virtual worlds. They hope that game makers will take advantage of this repository as they define standards of how to save interactions not only between players and the virtual worlds but also other players. How many times have I destroyed you in a duel? Let's check the records!"

Comments

Are we running out of stuff to do?

[philspear]

There aren't enough real events to chronicle, so we're moving on to virtual worlds? We've perfected news reporting with CNN and FOX so now we're going to start working on current events in WOW?

What is wrong with us?

Re:Are we running out of stuff to do?

[Lewisham]

I know this is Slashdot, and actually RTFA is rare, but had you actually done so, you'd have read this:

'"When you are trying to preserve anything you are trying to preserve the most important things about that artefact," she said. "With video games we do not yet know what is important."'

CNN and Fox are being archived very well already. But we have large gaps, and it's important to keep as much as we can, just in case.

We've been very good thus far at preserving our culture for studies by future generations, but that was because everything we made was stored in a physical entity. It didn't matter whether the creators thought it important or not, we at least could come back to it in later generations if we needed to.

The Digital Age has meant we're losing huge swathes of information because we can't keep up. Archive.org is going to be amazingly important, but it'll take later generations to figure out why.

I'm very pleased that someone has realized that the beginnings of virtual worlds will also be important. We can't possibly contemplate where they're going to go in just 50 years. We're going to want to know how they started when we get there.