Archaeogaming

The first ever Archaeogaming unconference is happening June 1, 2015. It’s free and open to the public. Spearheaded by Electric Archaeology (Shawn Graham) with support from GamingArchaeo (Tara Copplestone) and Archaeogaming, this is everyone’s chance to talk about the archaeology in (and of) video games. An unconference is very much like a pick-up group (aka PUG) in an MMO: nobody quite knows each other or what’s going to happen, but we’re going to team up for an epic boss-fight with hopefully minimal wipes.

Read the general announcement from Shawn here.

There will be three, 45-minute sessions with three concurrent break-out rooms, so that’s a potential of nine topics to explore. We’re doing this via the MIT Media Lab’s unhangout infrastructure, which in and of itself is pretty cool. Click here to learn how that will work. If things break down, we can always switch to Skype and/or Google Hangouts because that what unconferencers do: roll with it.

So what are we talking about? What are YOU talking about? Click here to see a working list of proposed topics. Nothing’s settled yet. We’ll all know on June 1st! Click here to vote (or add your own topic). A proposed schedule of sessions and topics can be found here. There are no papers, prepared presentations, or PowerPoints. BYOB.

Shawn, Tara, and I look forward to chatting with everyone tomorrow, and we look forward to the next virtual unconference as well as the first one to be held in meatspace later in 2015.

-Andrew Reinhard, Archaeogaming