Preserving virtual worlds

Ars Technica has an interview with a University of Illinois professor who’s trying to preserve a dozen video games from the last several decades. It’s not just the software and the consoles, in cases like Second Life, they’re trying to archive and store the collaborative world created by everyone who played the game. They say games are culturally important in terms of the size of the industry and the number of people playing them. For older games like Doom or early pre-Atari games, you have to build enough software to keep the game alive but make it not dependent on old software that can’t be supported anywhere else.