What is This Project about?

This web site was designed and developed as a project for HIST697: Making History in New Media (Spring 2008), “an applied course in digital history that explores the adaptation of history to a digital environment.”

This project aims to investigate and to theorize political and economic characteristics, impacts, and developments of the virtual game world and its technology. To this end, with the assumption that in the new digital media environment the boundaries between work and play, between the real economy and the virtual economy, have been blurred, I will concentrate on the new mode of production and consumption generated by online games. I expect that the analysis of massively multiplayer environment will provide us a clear perspective to see how online game space is colonized as a new continent, where the enjoyment of play can be easily converted to hard cash, where the prototypical aspects of free market capitalism are crystallized through the development of virtual entertainment technology. Furthermore, since the online game industry is not limited to the one-national social situation, we could extend our understanding of this new phenomenon by considering online game an essential part of globalization and the spread of neo-liberal ideologies.

Timeline of Virtual Worlds

HOW TO USE : You can move left or right both of time bands in timeline by dragging them with mouse. If you want to move faster, drag lower (decade) band than upper (year) band, or double click anywhere you want to go. By dragging it, you may go back to hundres of thousands years ago and go beyond million years future, but I do not recommend to do that, unless you cannot resist doing so. Each event is clickable and contains a short historical description. Sometimes it will show images and related links in the small window. You can also click those images and links. It is almost a small virtual world. Explore it!

Timeline structure above is provided by one of MIT's Simile projects (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments). In that web site, there are a dozen useful gadgets we can transform and apply for our own projects, no matter what the fields we pursuit. But it requires some sweat and time. Yet I am not sure how this timeline would be constructed and concluded. I hope it would be a little hint for the further researches on the technological, cultural, and politico-economic natures of virtual worlds. And of course our virtual worlds grow and develop, and accordingly the timeline should be updated.

If you have any idea or advice about this project, please contact me.