Bernhard Drax is best-known for his impressive work as a documentary machinima-maker and investigative reporter in Second Life (where he is known primarily as Draxtor Despres).  In fact, he has multiple lives in the entertainment industry, making music and working in a variety of media.
 
Now he has achieved a first, with the featured presentations in both the Machinima Archive and the Archiving Virtual Worlds Collection.   His machinima piece is "I'm Too Busy to Date Your Avatar!," made in collaboration with Second Life "talkshow Goddess" Pooky Amsterdam and the German house/electronica producer Samuel's Dream.  It is a machinima response to the trailer for the third season of The Guild," "Do you wanna date my avatar." 
 
In the Archiving Virtual Worlds Collection, "Gone Gitmo" chronicles the development of Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantanamo Bay in Second Life.  This project is a collaboration of Peggy Weil and Nonny de la Pena.  Gone Gitmo was a European "Every Human Has Rights" finalist for the Media Award given in 2008.  Bernhard's efforts as an investigative journalist in Second Life are yielding unique video documentation of the uses and issues in this virtual world and thus we are very pleased to have his work in the Archives.

“6 Days” is a new piece stemming from a collaboration of master machinima maker Joshua Diltz and artist-provocateur Joseph DeLappe, two people whose work I have long admired. It has just been added to the Machinima Archive. Here is the introduction provided by Joshua:
 

Our machinima spot on the conference, by J. Joshua Diltz.

Stanford Magazine, the publication of the Stanford Alumni Association, provides a nice piece in its November/December 2008 issue on the Preserving Virtual Worlds project.  Under the title "Saving Worlds: Preserving the Digital and Virtual," neatly summarizes the project and its work, with quotations from Henry Lowood (me) and Beth Dulabahn of the Library of Congress, as well as a couple of nice photos.  By the way, the workshop described in the article was "Preserving Knowledge in Virtual Worlds," put on as part of Media-X' Summ

Back in 2003, Doug Wilson prepared two video loops for the "Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences" show I curated with Casey Alt for the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford.  This was the first of the exhibitions the project has prepared over the years.  More recently, the project has been active in Second Life, particularly through the Life-Squared project with Lynn Hershmann and the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project.

One of the resources we have created in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project is the Archiving Virtual Worlds video collection, hosted by our partner, The Internet Archive.  This collection is a collaborative effort of the How They Got Game Project project team in the Stanford University Libraries and the Internet Archive, as part of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the U

In the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, we are exploring many methods for preserving the software and data of virtual worlds.  Another central concern is making sure that an archival record remains of the activities and events that have occurred in these worlds.

The How They Got Game project is pleased to announce that we will be starting up a new journal, with the title Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media.  The new journal will be edited by Matteo Bittanti and Henry Lowood (me).  We have been working with a group of authors for the first issue, which we hope will be published Winter 2009.  The theme for this first issue will be "Digital Games: Historical and Preservation Studies."  We hope soon to be able to announce the members of the editorial board.

 “Preserving Knowledge in Virtual Worlds”

August 7-8, 2008

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