How will we preserve virtual worlds?

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete.  The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is exploring methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction.  Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life.

The Preserving Virtual Words project funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) funded by the U.S. Library of Congress. Groups at the University of Illinois, University of Maryland, and Rochester Institute of Technology are also partners in this important project.

Main project website is at: http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/

Project Goals

To help develop mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction by

1. developing basic standards for metadata and content representation; and
2. investigating preservation issues through a series of archiving case studies representing a) early games and literature and b) later interactive multi-player game environments.

Key deliverables include development of metadata schema and wrapper recommendations, the archiving of key representative content and the development of generalizable archiving approaches for preserving this content. Our approach is intended to address both the pressing need to preserve the bits and available representation information of early and significant works now, and the need to begin to address more difficult issues surrounding long-term preservation of more recent multi-player interactive virtual worlds.