PLAYFUL PASTS

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Videogames and archaeology?

TARA COPPLESTONE------------------------------------------

is (PhD Researcher);at (York & Aarhus);does (videogames); and (archaeology);tweet (@gamingarchaeo);

ARCHAEOGAMING

QUESTION-------------------------------How many of you play, or are interested in, videogames?

OPINION-------------------------------How

do you think archaeology and

videogames intersect?

EXTERNAL------------------------

Examining how archaeology is portrayed to the world.

&

Questioning if we use games to educate / entertain external

audiences.

See: Emily Johnson, Meghan Dennis.

APPLIED------------------------

Using archaeological methods to do things

to games.

e.g

Create typographies of physical game stuff, or digital, physically excavate.

See: Raiford Guins, Andrew Reinhard.

REFLEXIVE------------------------

Using games to think about archaeology and develop critical / new paradigms.

e.g

Creating games to explore multilinear narrative natively.

See: me, Amadeo Viccari, Juan Hiriat

WHY GAMES?

OPINION-----------------------------------------

Do you think accuracy of archaeology is

important in games?

PLAYER------------------------Many had complex

deconstructive ideas about playing with

the past.

DESIGNER-----------------------

Many discussed the past as multilinear, reflexive, multivocal etc.

ARCHAEO------------------------

Quick to identify w. broad ideas, then

say they don’t apply to video-games.

ACCURACY WORKS DIFFERENTLY IN

GAMES?

“We consulted an archaeologist as part of our development process … We would... Get an answer that simply would not work in a game. I guess the problem was that we didn’t speak ‘history’ and she didn’t speak ‘game’ so we kind of just talked past each other and missed out on what the other was wanting and saying.”

Anonymous Developer – AAA Studio– Interview, 2014.

…the developers explained that due to the book media forms they worked in they perceived heritage and archaeology practitioners as tending to write single, authoritative instances or outcomes of what happened which the reader directly consumes, whilst they were creating how the world works so that their player could explore why that was the case more indirectly. They said it meant thinking about the past differently.

Diary 156 - Copplestone

GAMES ARE DIFFERENT.

(and maybe that is really cool 4 archaeology)

WHY?HOW?

No narrative exists purely, rather it is shaped through the structures allowed in the space and the hand of the creator

Murray - 1997

Linear Narrative: Book System Narrative: Game

“The medium is the message” that defines or controls “the scale and form of human association and action”

Marshall McLuhan - 1964

“Process intensity is the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data.”

Chris Crawford - 1987

“generate[s] some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself. Procedural systems generate behaviours based on rule based models; they are machines capable of producing many outcomes”

Ian Bogost - 2011

MEDIA IN ARCHAEOLOGY

Tends towards linear with low process intensity.

Post-processualism (and the ongoing theoretical paradigms aligned) is largely theoretical. Also, computing is largely deterministic and non expressive meaning it is a better fit with processualist ideals.

THE PROCESSUALIST CRITIQUE

MAYBE GAMES CAN DO ARCHAEOLOGY

DIFFERENT

“to know the world one must construct it [by making lots of games about archaeology]”

Cesare Paverse, slightly modified – from totally ages ago

RESULTS

Across 7 enginesWith 5 programing languages

4 TB of recorded material912 Moments of Understanding

4.2 hours of air guitaring289 cups of coffee drank

38 games made87 games designed5 additional tools made

Montage of the games

Some of the games were good. Many of them were really, really bad. But it was the process of making them – NOT the games themselves – that was interesting for archaeology.

MOMENTS OF INSPIRATION TOOL

Sits on top of recordingWhen you have a moment of inspiration / understanding you hit the button.

Records tag, time, memo and diary.

These are then fed into a relational database.

MAKING GAMES MEANT I THOUGHT ABOUT THE PAST

DIFFERENTLY.

“To make an emergent systems narrative you have to think through emergent systems narratives. Once you learn to think through them, you start to see them, to design them, and it becomes perfectly clear that the world isn’t linear.”

SKILLS, MEDIA, METHOD AND PRACTICE ARE

REFLEXIVE.

“To truly understand something, we have to do” – Perry 2014

MAKING WITH OTHERS PUSHES

AGAINST THE NORMATIVE.

MAKING IN THE FIELD vs MAKING AFTER THE FACT

SO?

ARCHAEOLOGY IS AN ART!

ARCHAEOLOGY IS A CRAFT!

ARCHAEOLOGY IS A SCIENCE!

ARCHAEOLOGY IS DESIGN?!

Games represent a distinctly different way of making and doing in archaeology. Allows for multivocality,

multiplicity, reflexivity, agency etc to be embedded in how we think and do, not just what we say.

Technical skills, knowledge of media and ability to think about archaeology are interwoven with each other – developing the skills and media understanding is necessary for challenging how we think.

Co-creating with people from different perspectives on the media is an effective way of pushing up against our disciplines boundaries and rethinking them.

ALL ARCHAEOLOGISTS

SHOULD MAKE GAMES

WE SHOULD BE CRITICAL OF MEDIA USE AND SEEK TO

LEVERAGE GAMES AS PART OF THIS

END // QUESTIONS