Archaeogaming

This is a guest post by Guy David Hepp, PhD.

Guy David Hepp is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. His teaching and research interests include early complex societies of Mesoamerica, non-Western religion and ritual, iconography, the anthropology of the senses, and archaeological theory. You can contact him via email at guy.hepp@csusb.edu or the below web links for more information about Dr. Hepp and his work.

https://www.csusb.edu/profile/guy.hepp
https://csusb.academia.edu/GuyDavidHepp
https://sketchfab.com/guyhepp

It’s been a long ten months of field and lab work in southern Mexico. Collaborators have come and gone, you weathered a hurricane and an earthquake, and you’ve attended enough local events to almost feel like part of the community. You were robbed not once but thrice. You were so sick at one point you dictated an informal last will. You’ve made great friends, one of whom will be killed just a couple of years later by cartel violence in Guerrero. 

Your dad, always up for an epic road trip, volunteers to join you for your return home. He flies to coastal Oaxaca to help pack tools and documents into your field truck. Driving to the highlands, you encounter a baby donkey sleeping behind a blind curve in the middle of a mountain road. Just outside the capital city, you deliver artifacts to the government bodega and enjoy two days of rest before tackling the lion’s share of the 3,600-mile drive to Colorado. On the way, you stop at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Teotihuacán. You have visited before, once during high school and once a decade later, when you were first considering a Ph.D. program in archaeology. Over the years your knowledge of this place has grown, even as the site has mostly remained the same, its colossal pyramids deceiving the eye with expert architectural lines and hiding hollows and tombs within. That silence also belies a dynamic past two millennia before, when the buildings were considered alive by those who built them as stages for a beautiful, bloody pageant of urbanization.

Your dad has questions. How did they build all this so straight? How much of this is original and what has been reconstructed? How did Walmart get away with bribing local officials to build at the edge of the site without a proper survey? Is that an active excavation on the Pyramid of the Sun? How did you find a piece of obsidian in the middle of the Avenue of the Dead, after millions of tourists have walked here? Pachuca green, you say. But how do you know that? What was it used for? Why?

There’s more to that day. You and your dad pose for a photograph, nearly matching straw hats giving you some protection from the sun as you stand atop the Pyramid of the Moon. It’s too little, too late, sun damage already having sunk its teeth into both of you, years earlier, for different reasons. You don’t realize that this trip will go by in a blur. Or that your dissertation will take over two more years to finish. Or that your life, as you knew it, won’t be there when you get home.

My mind keeps returning to Teotihuacán. That’s not where I’ve done my research, but it serves as a kind of waypoint, both archaeological and personal. I’ll pass that way again, and who will I be when I do? Maybe it’s all that silence, in the hulk of a dead city where the pyramids echo the surrounding mountains, only a short bus ride from Mexico’s capital. It’s a built landscape that somehow dwarfs humans. I think it was meant to.

Now I teach university courses about archaeology. Not all my classes are about Mesoamerica, but they also are all about Mesoamerica. And Teotihuacán casts a long shadow. The Aztecs of centuries later thought it had been built by the gods, after all. Even now, after much study, with more nuanced ideas of the ethnic enclaves, the layout and astronomical alignments, and the city’s demographic stupendousness, many questions remain. Who built it? Why did so many people move there? Was the city founded on conquest and sacrifice, or cosmopolitanism and cooperation? Was it a little of both? And, always lurking behind those questions, how did it all fall apart? Was an internal revolt responsible not only for toppling an empire but for becoming the first falling domino to end the Mesoamerican Classic Period? That must have felt catastrophic, perhaps like the fall of the Roman Empire or what we fear our grandchildren will face, on a global scale, at the hands of climate change.

I teach that archaeology is a modern affair, couched in the politics and cultural milieu of our era. We cannot travel in time. This work is interpretive, always seeking to translate the past and form analogies. This work is also scientific. I paraphrase a professor from my graduate school days who wrote that we are scientists so long as our ideas have a basis in data rather than just speculation, no matter how tentative they may be.

As an educator, I’m faced with a perennial question: how do I make my courses informative, scientifically sound, politically engaged, and fun? Recent pedagogical research shows that many of us in higher education are still doing too much lecture. I have been guilty of that. Good lecture content is necessary, of course, but rote memorization is a poor way to build knowledge retention. My brief foray into bartending emphasizes this for me. I once knew many, many cocktail recipes I thought would help me afford life as an out-of-state Ph.D. student temporarily ineligible for a teaching assistantship. Today (admittedly many years later), my bartending knowledge boils down to this: carbonated liquids always go on top, unless there’s a “float.” The bartenders who read this blog will get it. In other words, what I remember from bartending school is conceptual rather than factual. 

I was hired at Cal State with the idea that I would teach courses incorporating phenomenology. Without going too far down a rabbit hole, this involves the challenging, even nonsensical task of exploring how the past was experienced by the people who lived it. Borrowing heavily from Indigenous ways of knowing the world, often without acknowledgment of the debt archaeology owes those ontologies, phenomenology emerged in archaeology decades after European philosophers discussed it, sneaking in on the coattails of postprocessualism in the 1980s and seeing its greatest popularity (along with hefty criticism) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, I would argue that it’s been incorporated into the broader “anthropology of the senses.”

After years of getting sidetracked, I finally got the chance recently to teach a course in the archaeology of the senses. How best to do so had been on my mind, on and off, for those intervening years. The basic challenges remained. How could I craft an upper-division undergraduate seminar that was different from our other departmental offerings, based on real data about the past, memorable, and fun, both to take and to teach?

I decided that exploring the senses in archaeology as more than a gimmick required incorporating a phenomenological experience. I am a long-term devotee of role-playing games (RPGs), especially video games. I also love to write and found this a great opportunity to flex my atrophied creative writing muscles. I’m no programmer, and I wanted to be deliberately low-tech rather than produce a digital game that might age poorly. I read two books by RPG guru James D’Amato. I earnestly sought the feedback of my nerdiest friends.

So, for ANTH 3201 The Archaeology of the Senses, I wrote a table-top RPG. The course begins as a traditional seminar, albeit more akin to a graduate course than an undergraduate one. We jump right into the deep end, reading Heidegger, Hodder, and Hamilakis in the first two weeks. Things soon balance out, with academic papers complimented by popular science articles, videos, sound recordings, and 3D digital models as fodder for discussion. We explore concepts like the “taxonomy of the senses,” sound- and smell-scapes, and hi-tech methods for recreating ancient recipes, identifying eroded pigments, and recording musical instruments.

In Week 2, we begin the RPG. “The Uprising” is a 10-part adventure. Each week, I read a short story about events in an unnamed ancient city in Central Mexico (essentially Teotihuacán). After hearing these scenarios, the students have opportunities for choice and chance. I wouldn’t want them to lose motivation if disaster befell a given character, so they work together to represent factions over generations, even centuries. A third of the class comprises the Commoners, another third the Nobles, and the final group the Immigrants. A “rule sheet” details the game’s setup, goals, turn-based play, the attributes of each faction, and how to create individual avatars such as warriors or diplomats, who are controlled by the group and whose fates are far from certain. 

My intention with the RPG is to incorporate chance (using dice rolls, a fun source of chaos in the classroom), encourage collaborative responses to uncontrollable circumstances (like climate crises or external demographic trends), and facilitate negotiations and friendly competition among the factions. For example, the Commoners may feel oppressed by the Nobles and see the Immigrants as a potential ally, at least for the expediency of a historical moment, rather than as a threat.

The factions truly differ. Commoners enjoy strength in numbers and access to basic resources but lack experience in diplomacy and the trained warriors of the Nobles. The Immigrants can be chimeric, numbering few but deft at political negotiation. Often most fun is the opportunity at the end of class for the factions to negotiate and barter with one another and with me as the Game Facilitator, rebalancing power or trading Action Points (AP, earned through student attendance) for roll effects that enhance basic faction abilities. This all becomes wonderfully complicated. We track basic faction stats on a whiteboard. I tally AP and roll outcomes on a notepad for later recording in Excel. The students encourage each other to attend and participate, as it benefits the faction. 

Near the semester’s end, things come to a head. Beyond the students’ control, an insurrection (based on what may have happened at Teotihuacán) simmers for weeks and eventually spills over. By choice or by chance, the factions may have strengthened or weakened their ability to respond. Our final task as the dust settles is to take stock of the outcomes for each faction. In the semester we played this game, the mechanics became a bit broken. Seeing the wisdom of the strategy, the students focused on strengthening their roll effects, resulting in too many successful rolls. With no obvious winners and losers, I turned to the spreadsheet to see which faction had been most successful in dice rolls, as well as most able to bolster their team attributes. The Immigrants won out. To paraphrase the unofficial ringleader of that faction, himself the son of immigrants, they played the game with the eyes of first-generation students seeking to maintain their identity while successfully negotiating their new home. At first flustered by the breakdown of the game rules, when I heard this, I was thrilled.

We wrap up the class by reading a short, peer-reviewed article about Teotihuacán that touches on many of the elements of the game. The students give group presentations about their experience and the connections they saw between the RPG and the archaeological data. The class involves other assignments, including a final paper or report based on either a traditional literature review or an experimental archaeology project.

There is room for improvement. In future iterations, including this fall semester, I may explore ways to inhibit the snowball effect of overpowered factions at the game’s end, better reflecting the dissipation the actual citizens of Teotihuacán may have felt as their urban landscape crumbled. Individual readings about the archaeology of the senses will come and go as I update the course. I also like the idea of “gamifying” the syllabus itself, allowing students more choices as they build their grades, something already hinted at with the final paper/project option. I’m excited about the other presentations in our 2024 Society for American Archaeology conference symposium, entitled “Leveling Up: Gaming and Game Design in Archaeological Education and Outreach,”to see what others are doing.

Has this class allowed the students to travel back in time to witness the fall of Teotihuacán? Of course not, nor was that the goal. However, presenting the students with some of the decisions and challenges of the city’s factions was one goal of the course. I wanted to weave these elements together to form a cohesive whole. As one student stated in an anonymous course review, “Each week the articles and supplemental information we read informed our decision making in this game. Our engagement in class increased because we had a different set of stakes, aside from our grade.” Another student reflected that “the beginning of the class was a little slow or weird,” but it ended up being “the highlight of [their] week.” I consider this an encouraging, if modest, success. It was certainly fun. 

— Guy David Hepp, PhD
29 March 2024