(I originally published this article on examiner.com on April 6, 2016)
When friends die, it’s natural for us to praise them and remember all that was good about them, but when the man behind Lumiere Noir died last August, I discovered that he was far more amazing than I suspected. I knew him in two virtual worlds, we exchanged emails, and he was one of the first people to purchase my novel when I published it, but after his death I realized I never really knew him. I wish I had. That’s one problem in virtual worlds. We tend to get to know only one aspect of a person’s life.
Swen Wu Kong (left) in There.com with Mignon on May 11, 2003. Swen Wu Kong was Lumier Noir in Second Life and Vincent Frost in RL.
Today would have been his 52nd birthday. I can’t let it pass without remembering him. In RL he was Vincent Frost, an ESL teacher in Plano, Texas. I knew him as Lumiere Noir in Second Life and as Swen Wu King in the virtual world There.com.
This month is the thirteenth anniversary of my meeting Swen Wu Kong in There. I was new to virtual worlds, but he was an old hand who was transitioning from The Sims through There to Second Life. Exploring There with him was an eye-opening experience to this noob. He also got me started building in There and then in Second Life.
Education was his passion. When I finally followed him into Second Life in 2004, I found he had already begun building his Ivory Tower of Primitives and once again, I learned from him what I needed to know to build in this new virtual world. It’s an amazing resource that’s still in existence. SL members can visit it at slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/247/134/29.
(I originally published this article on examiner.com on February 26, 2013)
Professor Henry Lowood (Liebenwalde Ware in Second Life) giving talk on SJSU’s SLIS island in Second Life
A hundred years from now, when historians want to understand the ways we use Second Life®, how will they know? Computers won’t be anything we even recognize as a computer and won’t run current software or even be able to read installation disks.
Questions like this, but about software created decades ago, were the subject of a talk last night by Stanford University’s Henry Lowood (avatar name Liebenwalde Ware) at San Jose State University’s SLIS (School of Library & Information Science) Island in Second Life. The talk was titled, “Look Back on the Preserving Virtual Worlds Projects – and (Nearly) 15 Years of game Preservation.”
There are several parts to the problem, and they are true whether we are talking about a virtual world created twenty years ago or if we are talking about Second Life as historians will see it a hundred years from now.
Media
The first part of the problem is media. Decades ago, media used for software installation and data storage are obsolete today, such as data cassettes (like the old audio cassettes) and floppy disks. These media are notoriously unreliable and don’t age well. Even if they do hold up over time, it becomes more difficult over time to find the hardware to read them.
Hardware
The second part of the problem is hardware, not just media readers, but the computer itself. Professor Lowood’s presentation included a slide that showed part of this problem: a computer, looking like it measured about three feet wide, three feet deep, and about six feet tall, that was the equivalent of a video card today. Hardware like this from decades ago is scarce to nonexistent, along with the computers that used it, making playing the games that used it impossible. It’s the same problem that historians will have a century from now with Second Life: even if they manage to find a NVIDIA or other video card that will run Second Life well today, they won’t have the computers it goes in.
Software
The third part of the problem is software. Even if you have the installation media, the computer, and all the peripherals needed to run the software, how do you run it? What metadata is required for it to run? Moreover, it’s not enough to have the software for the game or virtual world. You also need the operating system and any components needed for the game.
Cultural
A fourth part of the problem that may not be obvious at first. It’s cultural: just how did people use the software or game? This is best viewed from the Second Life perspective. A century from now, if historians have the software to run Second Life and they manage to put together a computer for it to run on, what will they see and what will they do?
Will the installation software contain all the user-created content that we see today? Will these future historians see a Second Life from 2004 or 2014? Will they see a 2004 Second Life that even to us looks crude – this writer was in Second Life in 2004 and remembers what it was like – or will it have features that we haven’t yet seen?
Even more of an issue will be the fact that future historians will be the only avatars in that world. They won’t know the very many, very different ways we use it, and the very important role it plays in many people’s social lives. For some people, it’s a creative tool, for others it’s a dance hall, for others it’s a workplace, and for others, a vital part of their spiritual lives. There’s no way future historians will be able to experience that for themselves. They will be in a virtual world that’s like a physical world that’s been stripped bare of human life by a neutron bomb, leaving only buildings and prim, sculptie, or mesh vegetation.
Citations
A fifth problem is one that will only affect researchers, writers, and students: if you’re writing a paper or book and need to include software in a foot note, how do you create a citation for software? For example, if you’re citing a book, you give the page number of the reference, but how do you do the equivalent with software so that others can go into the software and see exactly what you’re referring to?
The scope of the overall preserving virtual worlds problem can be seen in a collection housed at Stanford, the Cabrinety Collection, which the university acquired in 1998. It’s only one collection for long-ago games and worlds, but it consists of 15,000 pieces of software that take up over 800 linear feet of physical storage space. Far more software has been created than is in this collection and is of a far greater complexity. Archiving it all will be a gargantuan task.
Four U.S. universities are taking part in the preserving virtual worlds and software effort: Stanford University, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, and Rochester Institute of Technology.
For more information
If you’d like to learn more, you can read Professor Lowood’s blog, HowTheyGotGame.stanford.edu. You can also follow him on Twitter at @Liebenwalde (his avatar name is Liebenwalde Ware).
I’ve been publishing articles about Second Life on examiner.com for seven years, since March 2009. It was a huge archive of events, history, tips and tricks, and photographs of Second Life that I expected to be around for a while, but sadly, it has now vanished. Examiner.com is no more, replaced by axs.com with entirely new content.
In the past year or two I wasn’t very active on examiner.com anyway. I was busy for a while building an OpenSimulator grid for a client and more recently ghostwriting for other clients. There were some frustrating aspects to writing for exminaer.com, such as the length of articles, some arbitrary formatting issues, and the fact that I could write only about Second Life. I love Second Life, but I also love OpenSimulator, and I want to be able to explore other developments in virtual worlds.
With examiner gone, I’ll be able to do that here. I’m looking forward to it. Stay tuned!
