Today I was interviewed by Nora Young, the host of CBC Radio’s Spark, a show about bleeding edge technology and futuristic trends. The episode should air on Friday, September 25.
Young, being astute and smart, asked the question I (and others) have been pondering for years regarding archaeogaming: What does it mean to “dig” within a game? What’s the dirt archaeology equivalent? This post creates an outline of tools and methods, and raises issues that make archaeogaming different from more traditional fieldwork.
Meatspace field archaeologists use some (or all) of the following tools in their day-to-day on-site: shovel, trowel, screen, brush/dustpan, dental pick, pick-axe, tape measure, line level, plumb-bob, camera, computer, notebook, transit/total station, drone, as well as remote-sensing equipment and other specialized tools. Most of these tools are useless when in-world, unless a game uses these as part of its archaeology game mechanic where players can pretend to excavate and recover artifacts.
What about tools used for archaeogaming? For now it’s a computer or console (likely both), a pointing device, and software for capturing screens, audio, and video. Services such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming allow the archaeogamer to live-broadcast an expedition to the public, as well as hosting edited videos. Public engagement is a key to the survival of archaeology anywhere, so having a public channel for excavating in virtual spaces could be helpful.
The coolest (and obvious) tool? Archaeogamers have drones, too, namely flying mounts or ships that allow one to hover over something or fly by it.
As of 2015, our toolkit is nowhere as big or as useful as it needs to be. We need archaeogaming software, and we need it now. I propose that we need the following four apps/mods (to be shared as Open Source), and hope that we can work with the GitHub community to make it happen:
Overlay: This will place a grid over the screen to assist with documenting where things are. It can also be a “smart grid” that can expand in three dimensions to reflect the landscape/topography of a space on-screen.
Smart-Measure: In-world distances vary game-to-game. This app will allow you to assign a unit for a distance of measure, converting it to English/metric units for perspective. The tool can be configured to record “as-the-crow-flies” distances as well as real distances over in-world topography, much like what is available in Google Earth. Other parameters can include volume and area for a user-defined space, or guides can identify and snap to borders for a room or region.
Smart-Clock: Time works differently from game to game, and often does not reflect the passage of time in meatspace. The clock app will keep track of both real-world time and its passage in the virtual world, displaying both side-by-side. Screen- and video-captures can include this data for record-keeping purposes, much like one sees on DVD “screeners” of films. Come to think of it, recording frame-rate and number might also be helpful to the professional archaeogamer.
Code Loupe: The code loupe will be a reticle that the archaeogamer can position over an area on-screen, revealing the underlying code created to generate that feature or gamifact. This could then be exploded into a split-screen window for reviewing code while seeing the environment created by it.
Others will have ideas for other apps/mods to add to the archaeogamer’s toolkit. I am happy to add them here as part of the wish-list.
Any tool used by an archaeologist (including Wii controllers . . . ) must help answer issues that are universal to archaeology in both meat- and virtual-space: recover and document artifacts and their context, analyzing assemblages and stratigraphy to make connections between their deposition and history of manufacture/use.
We need to be able to discover, identify, and record stratigraphy, context, features, assemblages, deposits, intrusions, spits, and artifacts, clearly defining what those are within the archaeogaming vocabulary, making these intelligible to meatspace archaeologists and the public at large. There will be some natural overlapping with archaeological survey (fieldwalking) and landscape archaeology, and exploring the history of use, be it an entire game, or something found within the game.
When archaeologists dig, they can either do so carefully, being mindful of stratigraphy, or can dig “out of phase”, plunging straight down without regard to stratigraphic layers. I would argue that archaeogamers can “dig” in phase, especially when dealing with variations in game-builds and versions. Seeing something in version 1.0 might be gone in version 2.0. Revisit the findspot between versions. This is not unlike removing soil above an artifact, recovering the artifact, and then continuing down. In games, there really is no gravity or centuries of accumulated dirt. There are, however, layers of versions. This creates archaeological context within a game when viewing the game as an archaeological site.
I think what archaeogamers are doing now is very much in line with the New Archaeology of the 1950s – basically processual. Lord Colin Renfrew once noted that processual archaeology investigates “historical processes that are at the root of change.” For archaeogaming, we can explore change of the games, and of the cultures within those games, using artifacts as evidence for that change, understanding the shared histories of games, gameplay, environments, created cultures, enclaves, and economies.
This is really no different than what traditional archaeologists do each day in meatspace. Archaeogamers just happen to be asking these questions in a contained world. Think of it as astrophysics and quantum mechanics: the universe without, and the universe within.
By the time procedural games (No Man’s Sky being the first of this new wave) reach the point of truly creating evolving cultures that contain everything from day-to-day goods to sacred architecture to everything in between, it is my hope that we will have also evolved our tools and methods to best record and explain what is happening and perhaps why. My personal stake in all this is applying archaeological methods to understanding machine-created culture, and how computers and consoles interpret code to create things that the game itself will find of use and apply within the rules of a manufactured, open, virtual world.
UPDATE: I have also been thinking about rules and tests for archaeogaming. The first is Turing test for built environments. Can a virtual space truly me into thinking it is “real”? This is what some game devs are looking for in their design.
-Andrew Reinhard, Archaeogaming