My name is Luke, and I am a Master's student in Archival Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I am developing a method to archive online gaming communities and player interactions. This method would attempt to cover documentation for online interactions in the game, as well as blog posts and forums. Online communities include millions of people from around the world, and when interactions rival those of some cities, they should be documented. The friendships built online are just as important as those formed in person. When you can share something close to you with someone online, it establishes a relationship. I want to preserve online interactions between people because when a game goes offline, all that is left is the code, which is a poor representation of the game and the personal interactions the game was designed for.

The funds received would go towards instituting a method to record these communities by collaborating with existing video game archives and applying applicable principles to online community preservation. The interested parties are the University of Toronto in Canada and the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia, which have different approaches to archival preservation. Combining approaches to develop a new form of video game community archiving is essential to preserving these communities. By visiting these institutions in person I will be able to speak publicly to the subject and raise awareness of the importance of community preservation.