Calling All Second Life Historians
We must take steps to preserve virtual worlds, or their histories may be lost forever. With the increasing popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life, an incredible amount of user-generated content has been created within these worlds – avatars, houses, clothes, games, and animations among other things. The establishment of subcultural groups that meet virtually and collaborate to make content fascinates me, including the Wild West role-playing simulation of Sigil. What can these sims tell us about this time of pivotal changes in human interaction? What questions will we have in 10 years looking back at this point? Will we have preserved these environments so the study of them is even possible? All too often these sims exist for several months, then completely disappear with no historical record kept. All of the daily interactions, the groups and people involved, stories and the wide arrange of content created by individuals instantly becomes invisible. Why are we letting this happen? I urge others to take an interest in preserving the histories of the virtual world, before many of these sims become “ghost towns” as Sigil did.
I’m not sure if the title is fitting, however I may be the first Second Life historian. In the very least, The Sigil Archive seems to be the first of its kind – attempting to preserve the history of an entire Second Life sim. A search on Technorati for “Second Life historian” came up with nothing, and a Google search only returned one vague result. Historians, why aren’t you doing research on Second Life? In today’s Web 2.0 world, if is doing anything remotely interesting on Second Life it usually appears in a blog somewhere, but I hope that I’m wrong and others are out there. History informs our identity and culture, which makes the preservation and understanding of history a crucial part of life. The history of Second Life simulations is no different. The importance of this became evident when I was recently in the Wild West sim called Tombstone. Tombstone is one of several Wild West simulations that appeared following the demise of Sigil, and the basic narrative structure (time period, location, etc) is incredibly close to Sigil. I had a discussion with a citizen, where I asked if he had ever been to Sigil – he responded no. To my surprise and delight, he explained how he is starting a virtual newspaper in this Wild West simulation – without realizing that there had been the Sigil Tribune at one point. Without having history to root our experiences, everything we do seems new.
Many Second Life amateur historians exist, in fact it’s increasingly popular. Individuals will maintain a blog for their avatar, where they account their journeys into the vast corners of the metaverse – often cataloging what they witnessed along-side images to document the experience. Historians must focus contextualize the accounts of individuals, as well as preserve documentation of these environments and individuals involved. SLHistory is a wiki that offers a space for community knowledge building regarding the history of Second Life, but at this point lacks any comprehensive research and documentation of simulations. In my research of Sigil, I began by traveling through the simulation documenting images of buildings and people, and recording their names. After the sim went offline, I contacted several former citizens including the mayor, who have provided me with a great deal of information including primary documents regarding the sim’s creation. These documents instantly became invisible to the virtual world when the sim became inactive – but many copies were stored in the inventory of users. As digital historians we must take active steps to preserve these documents.
Let me close by saying that there are individuals studying the history of virtual worlds (broadly speaking). Bruce Damer is compiling a virtual worlds timeline, cataloging the origins and evolution of social virtual worlds. Timothy Burke has a great blog posting regarding virtual world methodology and the lack of textual sources that influenced me a great deal. If we agree that virtual worlds are becoming increasingly important within society including education, then the need to archive and record the history of these emerging new media environments becomes clear.
