Web Archiving as Entertainment

TL;DR

This paper explores making web archiving entertaining by gamifying the process and live streaming it on gaming platforms, aiming to engage viewers through competitions and interactive content.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of integrating web archiving with live streaming and gaming concepts like speedruns to enhance viewer engagement.

Findings

Created web archiving live streams for two crawlers.

Developed gaming streams influenced by web archiving performance.

Implemented crawler speedrun competitions.

Abstract

We want to make web archiving entertaining so that it can be enjoyed like a spectator sport. To this end, we have been working on a proof of concept that involves gamification of the web archiving process and integrating video games and web archiving. Our vision for this proof of concept involves a web archiving live stream and a gaming live stream. We are creating web archiving live streams that make the web archiving process more transparent to viewers by live streaming the web archiving and replay sessions to video game live streaming platforms like Twitch, Facebook Gaming, and YouTube. We also want to live stream gameplay from games where the gameplay is influenced by web archiving and replay performance. So far we have created web archiving live streams that show the web archiving and replay sessions for two web archive crawlers and gaming live streams that show gameplay influenced by the web archiving performance from the web archiving live stream. We have also applied the gaming concept of speedruns, where a player attempts to complete a game as quickly as possible. This could make a web archiving live stream more entertaining, because we can have a competition between two crawlers to see which crawler is faster at archiving a set of URIs.