Recap: Archaeogaming’s (Jump the) Shark Week
This past week I wanted to write about video game archaeology theory, to see how far I could push things with a focused period of thinking on what it means […]
The Noumenophenomenology of Video Games
Let’s start with some definitions of “phenomenon” and “noumenon” and follow that with how they apply to video games and archaeology: Phenomenon: An object of a person’s perception; what the […]
Material-Based Communication in Video Games
We’ve heard stories (true or not) about roommates who share a living space but never see each other because their schedules never overlap. They communicate by leaving notes on the […]
The Archaeology of Video Game Complexity
In her introductory book Complexity: A Guided Tour, Melanie Mitchell distills how the rules of computational complexity can be applied to any system by anyone interested in understanding the behavior […]
Quantum Entanglement and Video Games
I like to think of archaeology as the science of things and their relationships to the people who make/use them. These things, some of them old, are actually timeless. They […]
Video Games as Complexity-Created Artifacts
Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously stated that language is composed of hidden rules that we use but don’t articulate. This is structuralism. The statement also defines how video games are […]
Deism and Digital World-Building
Nearly every aspect of archaeogaming can be considered on two levels: in-game and extra-game. As Raiford Guins writes in Game After, “players are not privy to the ‘inner space’ of […]
The Lost City of D: Archaeology in the Legacy Hub of No Man’s Sky
Climate change forced an entire civilization to evacuate to the stars. It’s the inspiration for the action in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, but it also just happened here on […]
Human Geography, Synthetic Heritage
I recently met with Prof. Joshua Kirshner who teaches at the University of York and studies human geography. The purpose of my meeting was to see if there was anything […]
Desire Lines in Video Games
> There is a CASTLE to the NORTH. The ROAD to the castle curves to the EAST. > NORTH > You can’t go that way. > NORTH We’ve all done […]
EAA: Epic Archaeogaming Achievement
The 2017 European Association for Archaeologists was held in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and the final morning hosted a session (#275) of 15 papers on archaeogaming, organized by L. Meghan Dennis, […]
The No Man’s Sky Archaeological Survey: One Year In
Hello Games launched No Man’s Sky for North American Playstation 4 on August 9, 2016, gradually rolling out the game to the rest of the world and onto PC (via […]
Archaeogaming 