Bear with me as I waltz down memory lane for a bit…

In 1993, during my first year as an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college in Maine, I discovered the Internet. The campus was deserted for Thanksgiving holiday, so I sought out the computer labs to set myself up with an email account and see what I could find. The labs were set up with Gopher, which was linked to a number of small online social networking portals.

Upon discovering these, I, being a shy nerdy teenager, developed an ideal of myself and used this persona (delilah, lowercase “d”) to interact with the denizens of these portals (called Talkers). Of course delilah was me – she wasn’t a fake persona. She was a Hyper-me. It wasn’t long before delilah started playing in MUDS and creating environments for play. Of course, creating these regions required research about the coding and how to set the stage if they were grounded in a historical context, rather than pure fantasy.

Over the years, I discovered more and more online places for gaming and social interaction. The most compelling of these was an online world called Everquest, truly one of the first 3-D fantasy environments on a global scale. It had an immersive world, defined goals, some trades and skills players could learn and some customization for physical appearance. It wasn’t long before I met up with several intelligent, dedicated roleplayers who were less interested in getting to level 50 and the ph4t l00t, and more interested in creating a storyline that would promote the setting of the world and welcome others to interact with us.

We created The Soerbaird, a guild of bards who sang songs, told stories, and traveled as mediators and respected world historians. delilah had become Isara by this point, and she was the Seneschal of The Soerbaird, the one who collected the tales written by the guild’s members and organized the membership across several mirror worlds. To this day, I have two 3-inch binders filled with these poems, records of the songs we would “sing” (ie. type frantically in front of an audience of other avatars and hope you don’t make a typo) and the stories we would recite (for one of my own poor examples, I offer a comic tale of The Marriage of Dudley McGee).

The Soerbaird were based heavily upon the old Celtic bard system, and to develop the guild, we spent many hours conducting research into the structure and history of barding within Ireland. Within this historical framework, we pulled the fantasy elements of the Everquest world (Norrath) into our play. But even though we were singing about ogres, we always had the historical structure of a real system to work against. Our efforts to promote the roleplaying ideals of the world captured the attention of the creators of Everquest, and we were often invited to interact with and create special events for the corporation.

Unfortunately, over time, the Everquest world proved too inflexible and level-oriented for the types of storylines we were trying to promote, and the guild disbanded. Many of the players moved on to other games, such as World of Warcraft, creating other types of storylines.

I was curious to see where these players went, so I tracked them down at Vagabond’s Rest. Interestingly, there’s no mention of Second Life (SL) within their forums, despite Second Life’s amazing flexibility and player-driven content creation. When I asked them about this, the feedback is that SL seems to be a toolkit and not a roleplay environment, or SL is almost too flexible, without defined goals to work with, nor a built-in community interested in the same storyline your group is. I disagree with this to some degree, but I do see that SL requires more work to generate a specific environment and for goal-oriented gamers, SL is not a good solution as there is no “winning,” per se.

Alright, alright. What does this have to do with museums or people trying to create digital cultural places?

The thing that was special about The Soerbaird, though certainly not unique, was that you had a band of players interested in fostering an environment within a certain framework. They researched history and poetic styles and created something very rich and immersive to make up for the shortcomings of a commercially-run fantasy world. They created vast content which was shared freely with other players, and they specifically invited non-Soerbaird to join in the play. As I see it, the creation of rich, immersive content shared with the public at large is remarkably similar to the goals many museums and cultural heritage groups are trying to achieve. Nor do I find it much of a stretch to suggest that cultural heritage groups might learn a thing or three from dedicated roleplayers.

We all know that gaming within museums is a fun and interesting way to learn. We’re extending that to Second Life. We realize that a flexible online environment such as SL provides some cost effective opportunities to present material in a way we might not otherwise be able to do (due to limitations like cost, space, or gravity). Real-world exhibitions may be free-form or path-driven, have interactives, extended didactics, and so on, but they almost always have a strong element of curation. Virtual and online exhibits follow those same models (though it’s more difficult to have a forced-march exhibition within a virtual world), whether or not they’re created by “museum people” or by the public-at-large.

What I see as potentially very interesting about the roleplaying community is that they are eager for knowledge on certain topics to support their roleplaying, they are creating vast amounts of content utilizing this information, and they’re using it for years. What if museums began to incorporate virtual exhibits into immersive storylines, rather than the other way around? The recent presentation at Museums and the Web from Dick van Dijk about Operation Sigismund does this in real space, having students pretend that they are archival researchers to solve a puzzle. During their session, they’re learning history and archival techniques. Now imagine providing a framework where virtual visitors are willing to create content for you, using your materials, for years!

I know, that does touch on issues of Radical Trust and curation and branding and all of that, but the overworked (or lazy) side of me is really interested to know how we can solicit and corral the dedicated energies of roleplayers, who are just as interested in (or even more so!) creating immersive environments. Chances are, they can do it better than many of us can.

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