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Preserving Virtual Worlds II: Methods for Evaluating and Preserving Significant Properties of Educational Games

Libraries and museums already have extensive holdings of computer games, video games, and interactive fiction, but they generally do not have long-term preservation plans for such content. Stanford University Libraries is collaborating with the University of Maryland and Rochester Institute of Technology under the leadership of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to study effective strategies for preserving educational computer games and other complex interactive materials. The research project will determine the significant properties of these digital materials that must remain intact over time and analyze the likelihood that various preservation strategies such as virtualization and data migration can preserve these properties. The potential loss of computer games, interactive fiction and other forms of virtual worlds are a significant problem in their own right, but they are also indicative of a larger problem. What is true of computer games is largely true of any form of software. The preservation of any given piece of software is influenced by a number of interrelated factors, including its copyright status, availability of source code, its intended operating environment, its dependency on particular I/O devices, and numerous other factors. Libraries, museums and archives have little strategic guidance available for examining these different factors and mapping out a course for preservation. By creating an evaluative framework for identification of the significant features of games, and tying that to a decision matrix that will guide the selection of a strategy for preservation of a particular piece of software, our project will attempt to provide cultural heritage institutions with guidance on the preservation of software that is currently lacking. The project is funded through the National Leadership Grant provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The research will include content analysis work, interviews with game players and producers, and double-blind studies to help evaluate the “significant properties” of games and other interactive media. Kari Kraus, Assistant Professor of Information Studies and English at the University of Maryland states,”Preserving Virtual Worlds II proposes a novel methodology for studying the significant properties of video games and other complex interactive environments. By focusing on the temporal transitions between developer versions and player mods, we hope to identify patterns of stability and change in game attributes–such as graphics, text, sound, items, and sprites–that can help us infer how different communities of practice interpret their relative significance.” Our final project report will include recommended best practices for libraries, archives, and museums to preserve these kinds of material. The Stanford project team consists of Henry Lowood (lead), Susan Rojo (project manager) and Eric Kaltman. For more information on this project, please see:

The original Preserving Virtual Worlds project, funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP), investigated what preservation issues arose with computer games and interactive fiction, and how existing metadata and packaging standards might be employed for the long-term preservation of these materials. For more information on the original Preserving Virtual Worlds project, please see:

For further information on either project, please contact Susan Rojo: srojo at stanford.edu

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