Digital Preservation of Experiences in Virtual Worlds: Extending Digital Rights to Include Right to Replay

ABSTRACT

Experiences within Virtual Worlds spaces are increasingly becoming normalised as the standard form of human interaction, not only for play but also for work and education. The COVID pandemic did not cause this, but because of this existential crisis and Climate change, the development of virtual worlds is speeding up. Their role in society is changing, and they are becoming just as important as real-world spaces. Still, due to their digital nature, they are inherently ephemeral, they only exist for a short time in software and hardware. Then, they are simply lost to the ether. These worlds and the experiences of the users within them needs to be preserved. For digital preservation of these virtual worlds to succeed, a new approach is necessary, based not on preserving the world’s data but on the players’ experiences within. A user-centric approach to the digital preservation of our experiences in Virtual Worlds virtual reality experiences is required. This can be achieved by extending our digital rights to include our right to replay. When codifying the right to allow for replaying experiences within virtual worlds, it can be argued that this action is burdening the companies who create those virtual worlds with undue responsibilities. This paper outlines how such a burden is trivial given modern-day game engines. To demonstrate this fact, an open-source library was developed to record generic objects within a Virtual World. This approach differs from others that approach treating the virtual world as a deterministic environment. The system in this paper records an object position and interactions within a world instead of just the raw inputs that most replay systems use. This article aims to discuss how future technology generating these worlds should target replays systems as a digital preservation method. Other more laborious processes will not be achieved even if they are enshrined into law. This approach hopes to offer to balance the burden between user and producer of virtual worlds. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.