Comments on: Temporal Virtual Worlds

By: Nick Noakes

Nick Noakes — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 05:39:02 +0000

the lack of ‘flow’ is a complete PITA!

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 14:39:40 +0000

Good points, Ruben… I was not meaning to advocate a need to change anything about the ephemeral-ness or Sl nor a need to auto archive it all. It was just an observation about the differences in web land and virtual world land.

Documentation is key as you say, and is what I’ve been doing for the last year. What it calls for is a richer set of tools for information to flow from SL to blogs, photo archives etc- yes there are some like BlogHud, and the ability to send photos to SLPIcs, but they are not fully leveraging the web APIs; and it is not trivial to bring web content into SL. I want more flow!

By: Ruben Puentedura

Ruben Puentedura — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 12:08:34 +0000

Hmmm - speaking as a fan of ephemeral environments, I’m not sure that (by and large) I want to see MySecondLifeDrive or WoWArchive.org as default options. A large portion of what makes SL work is its ephemerality - how many people, do you think, would be willing to experiment with alternate personas if they knew that everything they did in the world had been archived for all eternity?

On the academic publishing side, I see working with SL constructs as being no different from working with ephemeral items in the physical world. If you wanted to document something ephemeral in the physical world, you would take photos, record events on video, register interviews, etc. - SL is no different. Granted, objects tend to be more ephemeral in SL than in the physical world, but that does not alter the basic mechanics of the process.

This topic reminds me a bit of the discussion in museum curatorial circles about the preservation of some forms of installation art - nothing more fun for a museum than to be charged with the preservation of works that were designed to decompose or otherwise self-destruct…

By: Bryan Alexander

Bryan Alexander — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:04:30 +0000

This is a *huge* issue.

It’s part of/related to gaming. Cliff Lynch and others have been talking about problems in gaming preservation. Think about saving records of World of Warcraft raids. How much Eve do we need for future generations to see?

I suspect that the Lindens’ response would include the suggestion that this is a business opportunity. MySecondLifeDrive as a HUD, for $100L?

By: Daniel Livingstone

Daniel Livingstone — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:01:24 +0000

oops… and the citation would have to end with:
(last accessed, Feb 28th 2007)

By: Daniel Livingstone

Daniel Livingstone — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:00:16 +0000

The ephemeral nature of Second Life is something I’ve thought about before.
On the academic side, if you right a paper and refer to a location in Second Life, how can you know it’ll still be there by the time your article goes to print?

How do you even cite a build!
Will we find papers ten years from now littered with references like this:
Webber, A., et. al., (2005) Midnight City. secondlife://midnight&20city/128/128/30/