Experimenting with Twine
In doing the research for my dissertation, I discovered Twine, the open source software for creating non-linear stories. Twine seems useful in making historical sources more accessible and fun for […]
Rapid Archaeology in Death Stranding
December 8, 2019, will mark the one-month anniversary of the release of Death Stranding (Kojima Productions), and to commemorate it I wanted to write about the game’s “rapid archaeology” (my […]
Human Archaeology in Persistent Digital Spaces
Presented at TAG Syracuse Session 006, May 4, 2019. Below is the text-as-presented. Click HERE for the MP3 audio, which I pre-recorded (should you want to listen). My sincere thanks go […]
Machine-Created Culture: Abdication
We did this to ourselves. Humanity’s core set of needs include: food, water, protection from the environment (i.e., clothing and/or shelter), survival of the species. A fifth core need must […]
Games as Hyperobjects, Manufactured Landscapes, and Archaeological Driftwood
Over the past few days (thanks to Peter Campbell) I have read about hyperobjects (Timothy Morton), manufactured/intentional landscapes (Edward Burtynsky), and archaeological drift (Þóra Pétursdóttir, Bjørnar Olsen), which have become […]
When is a Video Game?
I was asked by an archaeology undergraduate student recently if a video game is from the past, present, or future when it is being investigated archaeologically. Archaeology does like to […]
Mapping, Colonialism, and No Man’s Sky
Thanks to a thought-provoking email from my friend and colleague Florence Smith Nicholls, I wanted to explore the ideas of mapping and colonialism in No Man’s Sky, something I had […]
A Grand Challenge: Applied Archaeogaming
There are three major braids to archaeogaming: external, applied, and reflexive (hat-tip to Tara Copplestone for this elegant demarcation of the discipline). As she defines them: 1) external archaeogaming examines […]
Assemblage Theory and Video Games
A horse. A rider. A bow. Taken separately, they exist on their own, in their own world, and in their own time. They have properties and behaviors distinct from one […]
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 […]
Archaeogaming 