VirtualHistory
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Keeping track of virtual world history
MMOG players are well aware of the virtual lands they play in because there is typically a rich history established, but after that there is no record of how the players influence the world once the "game" started. Gamers are naturally, due to programming, always at the mercy of plot lines created by developers; however, even when a major plot line is fulfilled, there is no history that it ever happened. Narratively it's like the government being in control of the press and you only hear what they want you to hear. A TerraNova writer poses the possibility of a student asking to write a history of events in Ultima Online, he says, "The textual sources are going to be extremely difficult to recover in a thorough way because there are both too many and too few; a lot of the rest will only be knowable through oral historical work, or through questioning people through email."Players in World of Warcraft over the last year dealt with opening the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj and a new Scourge Invasion, but players have no place in-game to find out what happened during these times. There is no newspaper, no town crier , nobody who publicly tracked in-game what guilds and players helped the war effort. For new players or those wanting to look back there is no history in the World of Warcraft after players entered and the game started. It would be nice to see embedded journalists in the game like there is in Second Life, tracking the history of various servers with access to Blizzard's statistical information. These journalists would be able to report and help create a history to online worlds. Of course, it wouldn't be a free press because the company would manage what data could be released, but at least there would be narrative of what players have accomplished.
