Recently I came across Ruth Tringham’s paper Becoming Archaeological.

While searching in 2014 in Erik Champion’s Playing with the Past (2011) for web-based virtual cultural environments that could act as models for a game, Dead Women Do Tell Tales, that was being developed about .atalh.yük (Tringham n.d. 3; see also Tringham 2015), we found that at least half of his examples have disappeared by now, which seems to be a common trend with games and other web-based interfaces in general. It’s not surprising—according to the Library of Congress, the average lifespan of a webpage is only 100 days. Many of the disappeared, like Okapi Island, can be seen as tempting fragments
displayed through video documentation on YouTube or Vimeo (e.g. Leavy n.d.).

Ouch Ouch Ouch! Neither of my books were supposed to list all the major projects or gamic projects!

I have been pondering whether there should be a list of virtual heritage projects, and a summary of their interaction mechanics and how they are intended to help further understanding about archaeology and heritage and of course the originating or related culture or cultures.

Is it also necessary to list virtual heritage projects no longer with us and the current condition of the technologies and formats they used? That would be a big task. But perhaps just as or even more interesting, a kind of Virtual Heritage status report. It could not be conclusive but I have some ideas about parameters.

So which is more important? A list of Virtual Learning Environment Mechanics or a status report on Virtual Heritage projects?

I have also been told off for my blog post that I may try to resurrect my Palenque model. I have never been shame-encouraged via a journal article before!

There are many other such projects on personal hard drives around the world. Just recently, Erik Champion (n.d.) blogged about porting his 2005 model of the Mayan city of Palenque (which we believe sleeps/rests on his personal hard drive) to an updated version of Unreal Tournament engine (Unreal Development Kit). But will we ever see it without having to go to Perth, Australia?