flosch, I really have nothing to add to this post. Just stopping in to say I enjoyed it and agree.

That’s the main difference I see with MMOs. An offline computer game is sufficiently archived by having the shipped version and if necessary, an emulator (source code and secondary sources like reviews are nice to have, but not vital). A theater play is sufficiently archived by keeping a copy of the text, and a specific performance is sufficiently archived by recording it as video. But for an MMO, simply keeping the source is not enough, neither is recording cut scenes that are provided by the designers. Since their main goal (hopefully) is to provide a virtual world, you will want to archive how people “lived” and behaved in such a world. What was the everyday life like, what special events happened that shaped the community, etc?

Of course, you are right, we are already doing our best to preserve our experiences in one way or another, in a form similar to classic diaries. The difference is the scope of data that is produced, and that we’re not sure yet how to extract meaningful information out of all that data. The visualization you linked is very nice to get a rough feeling of just how much data is being piled up day after day.

I agree with your last point. Given the nature of code repositories, I would be appalled if somewhat-decently versioned and annotated source code wasn’t preserved for practically all eternity. I’m more worried about the ancillary information, though. One day nobody will remember how exactly you had configure server X to get a running setup of game Y; that’s the kind of information that gets lost much easier in my (granted, limited) experience.

http://c179631.r31.cf0.rackcdn.com/info_byte-final.png

I don’t think it matters that there’s no real way of preserving the actual experience of playing WoW in 2005 or Everquest in 1999. There’s no way of preserving the experience of seeing the first night of Waiting For Godot or the premiere of Rite of Spring either. Performance is always temporal and transient. It’s important to preserve the records of performance, though, and we can all do that with our blogs and youtube videos. Best of luck to those who have to find some way of sorting through them to glean the examples they need though!

I do hope that at least some people in the games industry are sufficiently historically aware to save the source code and the ancillary materials. I suspect, given the nature of geekdom, that probably happens more often than not.