Triggered by nostalgia over EverQuest's 5th birthday, I sought briefly, the other day, forum discussion from EQ's first year, curious to see what was being discussed then versus now. I only made it to a couple of fan sites. However, that was enough to notice a worrying pattern. Forum discussions beyond a couple of years or so seemed no longer available on these websites. Perhaps not all this material is lost permanently (some of it may be archived somewhere), but I it seems fair to believe that a great deal of this material, across all fan sites, is vanishing for good.
This problem is hardly unique to Virtual Worlds and their communities. Initiatives such as The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program are at work on the larger World Wide Web and digital information problem.
Peter Lyman (Archiving the World Wide Web) writes of the more general problem this way:
"In the past, important parts of our cultural heritage were lost because
they were not archived, in part because past generations did not - or could
not - recognize their historic value. This is a cultural problem. They did
not address the technical problem of preserving storage media - nitrate
film, videotape, vinyl - or the equipment to access new media. They did not
solve the economic problem of finding a business model to support new media
archives, for in times of innovation the focus is on building new markets
and better technologies. And they did not solve the legal problem of
creating laws and agreements that protected copyright material and at the
same time allowed for its archival preservation. Each of these problems
faces us again today in the case of the Web."
VW community data feels particularily at risk - given its sheer volume, the ephemeral nature of its content, an its low "signal to noise" ratio (hard to determine what is most important).
Great point Nathan. I know that people like Andreas Lange (www.digitalgamearchive.org) and Henry Lowood(How They Got Game: The history of videogames and interactive simulation hpslab.stanford.edu:16080/projects/HTGG/main.html) are doing a lot of work on preserving games i.e. physical games, machines, packaging & marketing materials. And they are facing some interesting challenges (logistical, legal, you name it) looking at the long term where circuit boards will have degraded etc.
But I’m not sure that they are archiving meta-materials such as discussion boards. As so much game culture now exists around the game it sounds like they should.
Posted by: Ren | Mar 21, 2004 at 01:37
More likely vets will publish summaries and chronicles. I think a definitive EQ compendium with fan fiction, art, war staries, etc. would be a good seller. This is a commercial POV vs. an academic one.
Frank
Posted by: Magicback | Mar 21, 2004 at 23:27
Culture is that which is passed on from generation to generation. Depending on the degree of cultural exchange: different virtual worlds have different cultures; different incarnations of the same virtual world will have different cultures; the same incarnation of a virtual world will have a different culture over time.
We can preserve the code for a virtual world, but not the culture. The code and administrators may shape the culture, but not with enough fidelity that it is reproducable and uniform.
There are many virtual worlds that have disappeared over the years. For some of those, the code is still around, but not the culture. Their emigrees may have had cultural impact elsewhere, or may have assimilated into the cultures of whatever new virtual world they visited. It's hard to recapture what a dead virtual world was like, though, unless someone did an ethnography.
Also intriguing is the history of virtual worlds that aren't dead. EQ is 5 years old, and people are already wanting to preserve forum messages for posterity. Would those text messages reflect the internal history of EQ or its external history? In other words, would they describe what went on from the point of view of characters or players of characters? What about the characters who didn't post to a forum but still did interesting things?
Some textual worlds are still alive and kicking after 15 years. If you look at an old log from an old game, though, it's dead on the page. You have very little feeling of what it was like to play in that virtual world at that time. The same applies for forum postings - you can read the words but you can't read the passion behind them.
You get a far better sense of what a virtual world was like when you read what someone who was there at the time wrote about what it was like. Those are like messages to the then future (ie. to the here and now) rather than the forum postings that are messages to the then present (ie. to the there and then).
Forum messages can be preserved, sure, but they're just information; of far more use is knowledge. If you want people in 45 years' time to know what it was like to play in the first 5 years of EQ's existence, you'd do them more of a service to write an ethnography of it.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Mar 22, 2004 at 03:37
On preservation of new media -- here's an essay from Nick Monfort on the issue.
Re VWs particularly, Torrill Mortensen's thesis is on "Dragon Realms," a MUD which is now defunct, and early in the thesis she brings up the issue that Richard mentions -- it is impossible to capture the "place" with transcriptions.
But I think I agree with Richard. While many 300-person MUDs and MOOs have come and gone without a trace, there will probably be a bunch of hard-to-understand data out there on the huge contemporary MMORPGs. But what would be nice would be more quality personal accounts and general histories, along the lines of what Julian did for LambdaMOO.
E.g., seeing something like this brief post on EQ turned into a 50-page paper would be great...
Posted by: greglas | Mar 22, 2004 at 09:29
Greglas>seeing something like this brief post on EQ turned into a 50-page paper would be great...
Yes, but what academic journal would publish it?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Mar 22, 2004 at 11:17
Go with the commerical route. Definitive annotated EQ knowledgebase or a 12-volume compendium/encyclopedia.
Frank
Posted by: Magicback | Mar 22, 2004 at 11:28
Boy, I empathize with this thread strongly. I often think, "Man, I wish we could transmit to the world all the cool sh*t that goes on in our games. The drama, the storytelling, etc." But the thing is, without a sense of context given by at least medium-term participation in the world, things like transripts or bland historical accounts hold little value to most people because they don't give you a sense of what it's like to really care about the virtual world you're in.
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Mar 23, 2004 at 04:37
indeed the preservation of discussion boards is an unsolved problem so far. we are collecting quite a few game magazines but no digital discussion lists.
but here I have two workarounds that might help a little bit:
an old version of at least the EQ homepage can be found at the internetarchive, e.g. at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021023130028/http://everquest.station.sony.com:80/
unfortunately the community link on it dosen't work.
but one can access some relevant discussion lists via goggle. Go to the advanced group search and search for all entries of e.g. the group "alt.games.everquest" between lets say 1999 and 2001.
beyond this it might a more as a thought worth of building coalitions together with the industry and reliable archival institutions to preserve such important material like discussion boards.
Andreas
Posted by: Andreas Lange | Mar 23, 2004 at 08:19
Richard> Yes, but what academic journal would publish it?
Maybe Game Studies? Maybe the Research Journal for Game Development? http://www.jogd.com/
But the site of publication isn't the real issue -- what you're getting at is that most academics would struggle to get the work recognized as significant by traditional departments.
Posted by: greglas | Mar 23, 2004 at 11:11