Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
No Man's Sky Survey First Month Report - Episode 3
167 Plays8 years ago
Today we talk about the No Man's Sky Archaeological Survey (#NMSAS) and look over the challenges the survey has faced in its first month. We talk about the game a bit, and how archaeology works in games like NMS. We also talk about preparing future archaeologists for the digital worlds they're going to encounter, and how to get current archaeologists up to speed.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Main Theme
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to the 8-Bit Test Pit main campaign podcast, episode 3. Today we talk about the No Man's Sky Archaeological Survey one month review. We also talk about the future of archaeology and how we should be presenting archaeology in a more 3D format.
00:00:25
Speaker
Just a disclaimer, some of the things said in this podcast are a bit dated, updates to the No Man's Sky game have gone through, and have changed gameplay slightly. Get ready to roll initiative!
Panel Introduction and Initial Thoughts
00:00:36
Speaker
Hey everyone, and welcome to 8-Bit Test Pit, the main campaign. I am your GM today, Sarah, and I am joined with Megan Dennis, Tara Copplestone, and Andrew Reinhardt today. Hey guys, what's going on? Hello. Hi. So today we, you know, we've talked about ethics and we've kind of done an overview and we've mentioned Andrew's project, the No Man's Sky survey a few times. And Andrew, you're coming up on your one month report, aren't you?
00:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of my things to write up today actually to distribute to the team and then I'll post it on the various Twitters or whatnot just so people can kind of read as far as where we are and where we are
Gameplay Experiences and Critiques
00:01:20
Speaker
not. But it's a month out of playing every day or almost every day and I've found it both a frustrating and rewarding experience.
00:01:27
Speaker
I think most of us have been playing it in this what it's only been out for a month now. And I know it's gotten some harsh. It's gotten some harsh criticism. But I have seen some positive stuff out there. I'll admit I'm a little underwhelmed by the game. And I know I'm not the only person out there. But I'm also playing on a PC. And so is Tara. You and Megan, however, are playing on the PS4, which seems to be what the game was designed to play on. True.
00:01:57
Speaker
I definitely think we are having a better experience via the PS4 than anybody else having via PC right now, which is unfortunate. It's very unfortunate. Yeah, it is unfortunate. We've actually had to have a couple of team members drop out just because they don't have PlayStation. They've been trying to play on Steam and it's just been in Paris shape for them. So they're going to watch vicariously until either Hello Games steps up and approves the playing experience for PC users or they get a PlayStation and can rejoin us at some time.
00:02:27
Speaker
So Tara, I know what my experience on the PC is. What has been your experience on the PC with the No Man's Sky so far?
Cultural Heritage Portrayal in No Man's Sky
00:02:34
Speaker
Well, I came into it kind of with an open mind. And there was some issues to begin with, some kind of server side issues and some sort of connection issues, which I struggled with a bit. But on the whole, I found the game was an interesting play. There isn't enough sort of substance
00:02:53
Speaker
in the cultural heritage of the sites in terms of like daily live life or things which are happening that kind of engage me other than just like the traditional way of representing it which is just like here's some monumental architecture and some cool stuff that you can do. Like it seems like a museum piece rather than a lived-in world and I struggle with that a bit.
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, you totally hit that on the head. It is exactly like I've done a couple Sims that were created by the museums to kind of like showcase things. And it is it's like walking around one of those 3D display things on the computer. Like everything's cool. It's beautiful game. I love it. It's beautiful. I mean, I love the the the the view and the feel of it. My biggest problem is is it's so freaking slow.
00:03:43
Speaker
It takes forever to get someplace. It takes forever to do anything. And like the cut scenes, I wish there was a way to shut those things off because I know they're not supposed to. No, seriously, I've timed them. They take three to five minutes to play one of the cut scenes depending on what it is I've done.
00:04:03
Speaker
Interacting with an alien takes like, I think almost three minutes from the point that I click on him and it starts doing the camera pan bull crap and then the dialogue has to appear and it literally appears like one freaking word at a time. Oh
Technical Challenges and Platform Differences
00:04:19
Speaker
my gosh. It is insanely slow. That's really, that's very upsetting.
00:04:25
Speaker
Well, yeah, I've watched the videos of other people who are playing from the PS4 and it's like a game supposed to go. It's like you click, things happen, you interact, things go away. If I do, you know, when you go up and you hit one of the beakers and it takes you out in the space, that's like the fucking worst. I get up and I go to the bathroom. I make a cup of tea. I make a sandwich. I come back. I might be back on the planet. I might be able to start playing the game. It is infuriatingly slow.
00:04:53
Speaker
What we're seeing here is one of the things that interests me the most about, not just No Man's Sky, but about any game that is cross-platform. And the fact that you have the game, the entity of the game, No Man's Sky, it's a thing. It's its own discrete intellectual bit of property that people can interact with.
00:05:13
Speaker
and how they're interacting with it based on their hardware and other kinds of things like network connection and processor speed. And are they plugged in or is it wireless that they're using? How is that creating the context of the game or this added context to the game? And to me, that's just as important as what's going on inside the software as played when you're interacting as a player.
00:05:41
Speaker
So hearing these horror stories, it's basically giving additional archaeological narrative and context to the state of the game that's played.
00:05:54
Speaker
Um, and then, you know, the other cool thing, you know, about at least playing on PlayStation is the fact that they've been doing an update almost every day or every other day. Um, you know, over the past, well, actually they're up to what, version 1.08 at this point for, for at least for PS4. And they've been changing things and you can actually see that in the gameplay. So we've been able to document.
00:06:15
Speaker
You know, some, some earlier issues, for example, there was a classic bug that came out with vanilla and as released. Where if you scanned an animal with your scanner, the weight would be given in meters or units and. You know, the.
00:06:36
Speaker
It was, I'm sorry, I'm not articulating this very well, but the units of measure, like weight and distance or weight and size, the dimensions of the thing. They'd get flipped. Not appropriately correlated. Right. I'm six feet tall, but I would have been said, I'm 90 kilograms tall, which is basically silly, but they fixed that in one of the things. You can no longer see that again unless you're looking at old screen grabs. They've wiped that out as that particular artifact.
00:07:04
Speaker
of the game. So we have that going on too. So playing the game and seeing the cultural heritage, quote unquote, in the game, it's wrote, it's repetitious. I think there's a kind of delight in that repetition and that subtle change for the procedural generation of these things, which makes it interesting as far as, as well as like seeing where they're placed in the landscape. That's okay, but stepping one level back and seeing how the game is changing kind of on a macro level is as valid for archaeological study as anything.
00:07:33
Speaker
It is very repetitive, and I think that wouldn't bug me. Which is totally different from real-world archaeology. No, no, no. See, and that's why that aspect of it does not bother me at all. I actually enjoy that. I like walking back and forth. I know I'm weird, but I play Sims, so I'm used to this crap.
00:07:54
Speaker
So yeah, that part doesn't bug me. But the fact that like, you know, you get your little really the only thing that bugs the crap out of me is how long it takes to do anything. You do your little markers and it's like in game time and in my notes when I'm writing these up to because I have a notebook that I keep notes in because I'm a dork. And we're like, no, you're a scientist. Well,
00:08:13
Speaker
And this comes into play later when we start talking about the actual way that we're trying to do the archaeology in the game, because there's no north-south, there's no coordinates, so there's no way to triangulate anything. And so what we've- The waypoints get lost after two weeks. Yeah, and your waypoints get lost. So what the solution I think that we, well, I've settled on, is using
00:08:36
Speaker
waypoints as a triangulation. So I try to have two to three waypoints or as many as I can get from a location. And I'm like, well, in your own mind, it would take forever, but you could recreate a map using that anyway. But when it says it's like two minutes and 45 seconds in game time from where you're standing to whatever point it is that you're trying to get to.
00:09:00
Speaker
You know, for you guys, it might be for the people playing on the PS4, it probably really only takes you two and a half minutes to get there. For me, it takes, you can pretty much just double whatever that time is. And then if anything happens, you just add like a whole other minute to it. Tara, have you had that problem?
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'm running a really high spec computer. And as you say, there are some significant issues with when you click something or when you start going towards something and trying to measure something or just trying to do anything really, that there's like this hang time that happens and you're like, okay,
00:09:36
Speaker
can I interact with things? And the more you try to do things, the slower and more backlogged things get. And it's an interesting phenomenon because it's clearly an optimization, or I think it's an optimization issue with PC because my rig is good. And the game seems to run exceptionally well on PlayStations, which are lower spec, significantly lower spec than my computer. So therefore, to go back to what Andrew was saying, where does this kind of
00:10:05
Speaker
archaeological artifact occur and it's somewhere in either the physical coding architecture of the game and the way that that's deployed across the service which are hosting this gigantic world and how that interacts with our machines as well between being PlayStations and computers. And that's fascinating. That's really interesting. Well, Tara, you're our programmer. Why did they do this? Why did they abandon the master race? Why is PS4? Why do they get to be better than me? I'm a computer.
00:10:35
Speaker
This was actually quite contentious in Hello Games' history that they quite not super early on, but about maybe a year and a half into them publicly revealing that they were making this thing. They needed funding and PlayStation said, if you make it a PS exclusive release, so basically on its release date, it's a PlayStation title and one of the like flagships for PlayStation.
00:10:57
Speaker
And is that why they held back the PC release? That's why the PC release. Same with Tomb Raider. It's why it gets held back and it's why it's not necessarily optimized, although that could also be for a number of different reasons. But basically, if your funding comes from PlayStation, you're going to make sure that your game is optimized. Exactly, yeah. But why can it not also be optimized for the PC? I mean, to me, as a user who doesn't understand the nuts and bolts of this,
00:11:26
Speaker
To me it seems like it wouldn't be difficult to make it work well on both platforms so why is it that?
00:11:34
Speaker
we're having, why can't our game be as good as the PS4's game? And maybe this is getting off the archeological topic, but... That's just not where the resources were devoted to. Okay. No, very, very
Procedural Generation and Game Design
00:11:45
Speaker
quickly. It's a large issue to do with the drivers, which are being used on different platforms. So you run an operating system on your computer, which requires drivers for audio and visual and everything. And to optimize, to make those work well, you need a code library which supports those.
00:12:03
Speaker
or which can function well with those. So you even see it like if you have a different type of graphics card, say for instance in Nvidia, then that requires different drivers to make it work versus something else. And so making sure that it works and plays nicely with everything is a really big deal. And Hello Games is very small. It was a little group of I think originally three people sitting in a
00:12:28
Speaker
In an office. In a cupboard. In a cupboard. Yeah, basically. And really sadly, their office got flooded out quite early on in their development. So they had to relocate and everything. So they've had some trials and tribulations, but it's not as easy as just deployed and it works across every platform. Okay, fine. I'll go easy on them. PS4 is PS4 is PS4. So getting that done and done well is much easier as Terrace. At least for a little while longer. I guess PS4 is PS4 is PS4 is about to not be this case again.
00:12:57
Speaker
Well, when the pro comes out or whatever. Yeah. See, and that's why I stuck with the computer because it was like, if I'm going to spend this much freaking money on what is effectively a game system, it's going to run. I'm not I'm not doing this update crap every two years. Anyway, I completely derailed the conversation. So how how has this overall how has the survey been going?
00:13:20
Speaker
We rode that hype train pretty hard. As in we bought into the hype train? No, as in we were driving the bus, you know, for archaeology. And I am guilty as charged for that because that's one of the...
00:13:35
Speaker
The big things I'm good at is making buzz, right? But at the same time, when the game actually came out, you know, I was ready to go. I had my MacBook open, I had my phone open for the Slack channel, I had the Fames archaeological software running, and I was in the game and I'm like, okay, let's get to the map. Shit.
00:13:56
Speaker
I'm at this way point. Let's get the coordinates for the... God damn it. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, we're going to take a step back. And I've actually had emails back and forth with our Australian colleagues who do the famed software. They're like, we noticed that you've only tagged a few planets. What's going on there, guy? And I said, well, here's the deal. Here's the frustration with the game. And so we had the software built.
00:14:20
Speaker
Expecting to have a kind of a similar archaeological experience, you know, as we would if we were doing a regular survey, you know, increase or something and walking around and doing a transect and stuff. That is not the case. And that was actually a real danger in kind of making those assumptions without having played the game. And that's on me. Well, I don't think – here's the thing. I don't think you want to – I don't think you should be taking –
00:14:41
Speaker
blame for us thinking that there were going to be some basic features. There are definitely issues with how the internet has received the game and I think we could probably talk for quite a long time about perception and reality and how games get made and what we actually get and that's all fine. But there were some basic feature set things that you generally get in
00:15:11
Speaker
exploration games and in basic RPGs that we just did not have.
Glitches and Player Narratives
00:15:16
Speaker
It is not normal to have a game that gives you no functional map or no functional compass. That's just a feature set that... Or just some way to find your way around.
00:15:31
Speaker
So wayfinding is crucial for doing field archaeology. It means how we define the boundaries of a site, how we find context and stratigraphy, especially because we can dig underground and all of this stuff. What's really been good, though, is by stepping back a little bit and by taking the world on its own terms,
00:15:52
Speaker
You kind of come to this realization that you can still do meaningful archaeological work, although it's not as precise as we're used to. So we can still look at questions about, well, why is it that everything seems to be on a grid, any planet where you go? Why is there no diversity? How does the landscape affect where ruins show up? And why are there no ruins
00:16:15
Speaker
Under the sea when clearly they're marked as being under the sea, you know, so there's stuff like that that's going on I'm hoping you know that you know if NMS 2.0 You know comes out that it will add this basic functionality We can actually get to work and we also none of the team have gotten to the center of the galaxy yet Although I've read a spoiler about what happens, you know when one does I don't want to know yet. I'm not telling I'm not telling
00:16:39
Speaker
Now, Andrew, I thought you did do the center. I thought you did make it to the center. Did you choose not to do the thing? I thought I was going to be there much sooner than I was, and then I realized that I was only going 1,500 light years or 1,600 light years at a click, and I've maxed out my drive and everything, and it's going to take me freaking forever to get there just like the rest of this, although some people... I'm still on my second planet.
00:17:06
Speaker
Oh my god, I've been to, I think, maybe 70 planets now, and I've done 50 jumps. It gets more interesting the farther in you go. There's more diversity, there's more stuff starting to show up, which is really cool. And then there are the issues of portals, which have yet to be activated. But I can tell you that for playing for almost a month straight,
00:17:25
Speaker
and interacting with the game and consciously going and seeing every ruin I can, you know, before I leave a world. Yesterday was the first time I found a glitch in a ruin that was doing some weird stuff. I put that up on Slack and also put it on the Twitter. NMS archaeology. Yeah, that was cool. The spinning ball that was embedded in the... That was so weird. I never really liked it. The other picture that you shared had missing pieces. It looked like it was missing bits.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, the landscape of the world was rugged enough that the architecture type that the computer selected, the algorithm selected to pop there, didn't quite fit. And so you could walk halfway under the stairs, for example, or under the ramp and look up. You could see a knowledge stone that was suspended in mid-air. And then I've seen a bunch of flag poles that are suspended in mid-air too that are clearly artifacts and glitch behavior as opposed to artifacts that you would find just as studying cultural heritage.
00:18:23
Speaker
It's an interesting idea though, because is it really a glitch? Like to me, when we talk about glitches, a glitch is something that's...
00:18:34
Speaker
that's a flaw. And in this, if the algorithm is creating this, if this exists because that's how the algorithm made it, then is that really a glitch or is it just, is it a feature we don't understand? Is this the sort of thing that we should expect to see in procedurally generated content of this level? Don't all games have glitches though? Yeah, but that's why I'm arguing that this is not actually even a glitch.
00:19:03
Speaker
that this is something that we should have expected. I feel like glitches in games are like Easter eggs. It's, you know, I mean, as opposed to being consciently, yeah, and as opposed to being intentionally placed in there. Everybody looks for the glitches because it makes the game, it breaks the reality of the game, but it also makes the game funny.
00:19:22
Speaker
I think some of it, maybe it's coming down to a different idea of how we're regarding the levels of interaction with the game. From an external standpoint, when we're looking at game as system, maybe it's a glitch, but from an internal standpoint, looking at the internal narrative of us as explorer, archeologist inside the game, those wouldn't really be glitches, those would just be things we had discovered.
00:19:48
Speaker
Right I mean as if you look at the game if you look at yourself inside the game like if you are no longer Sarah playing the game if you are your character in that world then that glitch is the world even though I as the player can recognize it. What level are we talking about ourselves on when we start talking about glitch behavior in games of this scale.
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting, one of the things I've noticed with the survey, the few times we've talked about it on air, we, the group here, and you guys especially, are very fluid with your placement of yourself within the reality of the game. Like you go from talking about yourselves as if you, not directly as if you were the explorer, but you move from being inside the game to being outside the game very fluidly. And I think that's kind of interesting watching that happen.
00:20:40
Speaker
Yeah, since I've been working on all these ethical guidelines and all the things that I've been writing lately, that's one of the things that I've been doing a lot of thinking on is where are we situating ourselves within each game that we choose to research in as a space?
00:20:55
Speaker
How do we consider ourselves in terms of that game? Where do we think of our self, our personal self, as related to the avatar or character that we're using within the
Ethical Considerations in Game Research
00:21:09
Speaker
game? And where does the research lie? Does the research lie with us as an external, with us as an external operating via an internal, with the internal entirely? And when we create
00:21:23
Speaker
Methodological structures when we create ethical structures, how do we have to balance all of that?
00:21:29
Speaker
seeing when I'm playing the game, even with my notebook, I take notes and I make decisions as much as you can in that game as if I were in that world. Like, I don't I don't break away from that to come out and take notes. And that's the famous thing I find actually causes me to break to to break that reality. So I think this brings up a really interesting point about
00:21:56
Speaker
When we do archaeology in a game, are we still trying to apply our real world archaeological processes? Basically, I found the same thing with the Fame Sheet, where it's like, I'm in a game and I'm doing something in that world. And then when I have to break out and sit and do my Context Sheet, it's difficult. But that's the same thing when I'm digging a trench. Right. And so this is kind of the thing where it's like,
00:22:22
Speaker
One of the interesting things about games is it's like, could we use the system in the game system? Is there some way that we could capture that and transport that both between the game world and our real world as a way to actually do archaeology? Like, when we formalize it onto a context sheet, we're changing something in the kind of like mediation of the archaeology in those worlds. Exactly. And so it's, yeah, anyway, sorry. No, keep going.
00:22:49
Speaker
With this game, it's going to be really interesting to see how the ethics change, if they do at all.
Long-term Archaeological Interest vs. Player Interest
00:22:56
Speaker
And I'm predicting that maybe in two or three years, we will be working with an abandoned site.
00:23:01
Speaker
Oh, wow. You know, because I think people will be on to other things and will become one of those weird kill screen stories or Kotaku stories about some explorers walking around an abandoned universe. And we're still here doing stuff and nobody else is. And and how is that going to affect what we're doing? Because, you know, I still plan on playing this game years from now just to check in and see what's going on if things have changed and whatnot.
00:23:25
Speaker
Well, in two weeks, all of your information is going to be gone. So, you know, definitely in two years, it'll be like a whole new world again. Let's go to break real quick. And when we come back, we will start the coding argument because I think we're, I think we're ready for that now.
00:24:08
Speaker
Now let's get back to the show.
00:24:15
Speaker
And we are back. And Andrew, you had a question for Tara. Yeah, well, this is this is really going to kind of serve as a segue between the last section of No Man's Sky archaeological survey and this section, which we're going to be talking about, you know, coding and game development and all of that stuff. One of the greatest things about No Man's Sky is not necessarily the game, but the hype machine behind it.
00:24:35
Speaker
and especially the hype surrounding procedural generation in games or agent-based modeling and whatnot. I guess my question was, we're all led to believe this is the next new wave of procedural generation where everything in the game is ruled by the algorithm. Is there truth in that? Was this the most ambitious and largest attempt in the history of mankind or in the history of peoplehood for
00:25:00
Speaker
you know, for procedural generation, at least in a thing that is supposed to be a digital entertainment. I know. Well, OK, so I'm going to I'm going to separate this into two categories. I think one of one of the things which is one of the reasons why it is so brilliant and so ambitious and so wonderful is that it's one of the first times that we've had it on this kind of like 3D universal scale, I guess. But we've had procedural generation games for a hell of a long time. Like, yeah, we have like early 80s.
00:25:29
Speaker
Even before that, a lot of the early text adventures ran on procedurally generated mazes and procedurally generated worlds. One of the games which I'm really hyped about in open beta at the moment is Ultima Ratio Regem.
00:25:44
Speaker
And one of the things I find fascinating about this game versus No Man's Sky, where the procedural generation is almost entirely aesthetic, it's like, here is some ruins and they change slightly and there's some language and that changes slightly and you can get words and build your language.
00:26:00
Speaker
But it's quite, it's very, very superficial, the way which it's been applied, I think it's impressive, really impressive. And I think the procedural generation music is incredible. But when we move to something like Ultima Ratio Regem, the procedural generation is being used to craft like
00:26:16
Speaker
whole people and their whole histories and their whole languages and every single item that they carry around them within this world ties back into this narrative which is generated on the fly, which is something which is completely missing, I think, from No Man's Sky, where you get these kind of isolated enclaves of stuff that you have.
00:26:37
Speaker
But none of it really builds into anything bigger or more interesting or cultural, I guess. It's just stuff. I don't know how you feel about that. Yeah, no, I agree. And maybe it turns out that what we're doing in No Man's Sky, you know, with the archaeology or what they've done, you know, is just a prelude to going into, you know, Ultimo Radio Radium. I'm going to slur that because I'm not as familiar with that title as you are. You know, so that
00:27:05
Speaker
What we've done is we're starting to figure it out as archaeologists. And now we've got like a game that has real depth and complexity to it. And so maybe this is the next big project. I don't know. Maybe we've been kind of figuring out the kinks and what we're doing and methods and procedures and whatnot in kind of a really big universe, but kind of a big baby universe. And now we're ready for something grown up. But I think the other thing is like we kind of jumped on
00:27:32
Speaker
on Hello Games as kind of being these like messiahs of making open universes. And again, there's a guy called David Braben, who back when he was doing his PhD in physics, made Elite a video game, which if anyone, yeah, and it's that again, it's completely everything in that world is completely procedurally generated with scripted events. But you actually play with other people and there's trade and there's all this other stuff which goes on in it. So when we kind of
00:27:59
Speaker
What you're saying is, is the game that we think we're playing has already been created by a physicist? No, no, no. It's this idea that when we, I don't know, the hype train kind of came in and it hit this mark with the way that they did the marketing and it was ingenious. They really did a good job.
00:28:19
Speaker
But the kind of rhetoric that we were jumping on board with was that this is different and new and really far out. And I think the scale of it is, the scale is incredibly impressive, but there's nothing new in procedural generation and there's nothing new in generated universes apart from the scale that they're doing it at.
00:28:39
Speaker
I took the hype, and maybe this is because I didn't follow every single word of the hype, but I took the hype as it wasn't that the procedural was new, but that the world was so big. This is the largest procedural-generated game on the market ever. Am I correct there?
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, I believe so. Or at least it's supposed to be. And then on top of it, the thing that I got sucked into was how interactive the game was supposed to be. And I am not finding it to be quite as interactive as I was told. No. And I think that's part of where the problem has come in is
00:29:15
Speaker
It ties into how the game was marketed and how it was marketed over a long period of time. We got small bits of stuff over a long period of time and we saw things that people, some of those things obviously didn't come to pass in the final product and I think we all know that that happens. Some of those things may still come to pass. We don't know.
00:29:37
Speaker
But the whole hype built up around it, and people extrapolated out so much about what was going to be there based on the small bits of information that we were given. And unreasonable expectations were formed because of that. But the problem is, having worked in community stuff, if the players have unreasonable expectations, even if they are unreasonable, those are still the players' expectations. And you still have to deal with the fact that those are the players' expectations.
00:30:05
Speaker
That in some way you have contributed to either by creating the hype or not stifling the hype at points and saying no you know what we're not going to have features a b and c we really wanted to but they're not going to launch instead this is what we're going to do. I think the segue is quite nicely over into the coding argument which is that.
00:30:26
Speaker
We throw around these terms like procedural generation and people who do coding kind of get the extent of what this means and how it's been applied in the past and what's happening in No Man's Sky. Whereas when you talk to your general population who are not necessarily involved with this,
00:30:42
Speaker
It's like you can throw around these words and they don't really comprehend that it's an algorithmic system. It's still bounded by what is physically capable within the hardware and the algorithm. It's not generating new stuff. It's generating what you say it should or the parameters within which it should generate. Sorry. So what does the coding look like? I mean, if you're building an algorithm for procedurally generated X,
00:31:09
Speaker
I mean, what does that look like? I mean, you're looking at different lines of things. Are you chunking? How does what you do with the keyboard translate into something that creates a visual element or an experiential element when you're in game? Well, are you asking what the literal code looks like? Or are you asking what the process looks like? Well, kind of both. I mean, you have to take it
00:31:33
Speaker
you know, strip it down to the studs so that you can understand, you know, how did we get there from here? Please explain code to a bunch of humanities people. I tried to describe this the other day, actually, at this presentation that I did, and the kind of best parallel that I can draw between how you code a game world
00:31:51
Speaker
like in inverted commas normally versus how you would do it with procedural generation is it's like in a cookbook right so it's like if i'm trying to cookbook which is like this is how you bake a cake that's kind of how you code normally it's like when like first of all you take a cup of sugar you take a cup of x and a cup of y and you put them in here and when those three things are in the mixing bowl
00:32:12
Speaker
And you heat it for this amount of time, this is what's going to happen. Like this is the process, this is the outcome. And you know what's going to happen when any one of these given things gets put in, mixed and outputted. With procedural generation, what you're doing is rather than saying, take a bowl, take a cup of sugar, take
00:32:30
Speaker
a definitive thing and make this definitive output when that happens. You're saying, okay, well, these are the parameters for what a bowl can be. Anything in here can be a bowl. Here is anything within what, you know, a cake can be. And therefore, anytime these things execute,
00:32:50
Speaker
they get put together in different ways. So you can get different outputs. So basically, like the outcome is not defined by the inputs themselves. You've just defined emergence behavior based on computational complexity. Exactly. But then again, this gets into really interesting debate, because when you talk about emergent behavior, it has to be greater than the rules which you program into it. Yes, it doesn't break those rules.
00:33:19
Speaker
But doesn't break those rules exactly. So it can't, you can't say like, when these two things happen, you will feel happy. That has to be something which happens outside of the rulesets, which you generate for the code. So it's, it's an interesting debate within agent-based modeling and archeology as well, because a lot of the time what you're actually doing is not simulating
00:33:41
Speaker
active agent based behavior, you're simulating what the person who codes it thinks happened and getting either a positive or negative result. So it's kind of when we talk about these kind of like active agency and emergence, it always bears or you always have to bear in mind that these things always come back to someone who's coded an algorithm and what's actually happening under the hood with that and how that's operating.
00:34:03
Speaker
And I think this is really important because tying this into the code side of that gets to the heart of a lot of what we're looking at when we're doing archaeo gaming and not looking at the code but looking at the content and the world is that it is exactly the same thing as far as how culture and cultural systems exist within these games. Exactly. Just like you have to code specific things in.
00:34:31
Speaker
in order to get system outputs to create the game. Every cultural influence that you see in the game, every cultural aspect,
00:34:41
Speaker
aspect of artifacts, every aspect of how people relate to one another, every aspect of architecture and religion and all the things that we consider to be cultural based, that is still coming from an external source. That external source may be focused and may say, you know what, I want it all to look like this particular thing. I want it to all have this flavor, but you can ultimately draw it back
00:35:07
Speaker
and pull back far enough so that you see what the influences are that went into creating that culture within the game. And I, since I'm not a code monkey and I'm very bad at coding and I try so hard, but I'm so bad at it, all I can look at is the cultural side of things in this.
00:35:25
Speaker
Right, which should not discredit the archaeology that's being done. No, not at all. Absolutely not at all. I studied Greek pottery, but I've never thrown a pot on a wheel. Yeah, exactly. I've never gone and farmed clay to see what kind of fabric that's going to make when it's fired, but I can still contribute in a meaningful way to the archaeological discussion.
00:35:48
Speaker
But I think there's a difference here that you still know what clay is and you still know what a pot is. And I think we've had this argument before and a lot of people who are on the code monkey side of the argument kind of put this argument forward. I say that with love in my heart. Of course, of course. There is a subset of people who genuinely believe that everyone should learn how to code. And there is an argument for that. We live in an age where literally everything is digital and
00:36:15
Speaker
functionally, a lot of people have no idea what's happening with it. I think with archaeology, the difference is that we've been very quick to discount or very quick to say we don't need to learn how to code or we don't need to know about the code. And I think there's something it's like you can't expect to be a Roman ceramics expert without understanding what ceramics are. And this doesn't mean that you need to go and throw pots yourself and that you need to like
00:36:39
Speaker
go and get touchy feely with clay all the time. But just knowing what the fundamental, the basics which underpin what a pot is, I think is really important. I would say if you want to study the system, knowing the difference between or knowing what code does at a rudimentary level is important. I think Tara is making a really good point, not slamming anybody who doesn't know how to code, but as she's saying, it's the same process. We as archaeologists understand
00:37:08
Speaker
the process that goes into making the majority of the artifacts and sites that we study. If we're going to translate what we do in the real world into this digital world, then it probably wouldn't hurt us to learn at least a little bit of how code itself is made, works, and is put together. Exactly. It's like taking something basic where they learn about DNA and what DNA does and how that operates in order to create organisms and stuff like that.
00:37:36
Speaker
So we've got that going on. So I guess the follow-up question is, in order for us to become better prepared as archaeologists to at least understand the fundamentals, where do we go to get that information? And if it's at university, I would think that archaeology departments or like at the York Center for Digital Heritage, there should be some kind of track or at least some kind of course where you can go and learn this stuff. I mean, when I was at the University of Evansville,
00:38:03
Speaker
Um, learning some field techniques we had, we had 1 semester where half of it was learning how to do CAD for mechanical drawings of whatever it was worth finding. And the other half was how to do a survey using Seattle lights. Um, and that was just part of the toolkit. We took that and now we knew what to do. So, so what can we do now?
00:38:22
Speaker
I was going to be controversial and say that us as archaeologists have a really good track record of just appropriating technology and using it as a tool. I know you didn't mean to use that word in a kind of loaded way, but we just had a big conversation at this digital meeting about how do we move beyond just using tools? Because if we look at video games as just being another tool in the archaeological toolkit, I think we're missing a lot of potential there.
00:38:50
Speaker
And so rather than teaching a class on how to code games, isn't it more teaching a class on critically engaging with digital? So like, why does code exist?
Interdisciplinary Knowledge in Archaeology
00:39:02
Speaker
How do we use it? How could we use it? Why do we GIS in this way? Why do we use theodolites in this way? And what does that mean for our practice? And I think a lot of the stuff ties into some of the bigger issues that we've also talked about today, which is like, well,
00:39:16
Speaker
We lack, you know, compass directions or static points that we can measure to in no man's sky. But then why do we use like a yodelite in the field? And how does that influence how we view the world? And why do we want to apply that into the digital? Like understanding like the core, the foundation of these things, I think is with a critical lens is probably more important than having a class in coding games.
00:39:40
Speaker
Oh, no agreed. Totally. Yeah, I think what you're talking about is teaching understanding, not necessarily teaching technology. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's critical, but I would also argue that even within departments that have serious digital have a serious digital focus that doesn't always happen.
00:40:00
Speaker
And it doesn't happen with accessibility to people who might not necessarily be working in projects that seem to be digitally oriented. I don't see why we're not teaching our cultural heritage people and teaching our museums people and all of why are we not teaching them to do this stuff, not just the archaeologists who think that they're going to be engaging with digital in a very like code focused way. Andrew, you had something to add?
00:40:27
Speaker
No. I think that we need to maybe do it as a year-long course where half of it is mechanics and half of it is synthesis. Okay, let's get under the hood and make something together to see how that works. And then the other part of the equation is
00:40:49
Speaker
Now that we understand how something works, you know, how is that contributing to the way we understand data or collect data or interact with data from an archaeological perspective? I think both are needed. Where are we going to slot that in, though, in the educational process? Oh, there is so much we need to change about the educational process. I apologize to just kind of slam that in there.
00:41:09
Speaker
From a US versus UK PhD standpoint, those of us who are doing our PhDs in the UK, we're expected to know all this stuff before we start because there's no coursework, there's no point to coursework to teach us for doing this. Maybe that's great if you're in a US program where you're doing coursework before you start doing your research and doing your project. Do you not have coursework while you're working on your masters?
00:41:35
Speaker
or your master's equivalent? Yes. And you two are both doing PhDs, right? Yes. Okay. Okay. I just have to keep that in mind. Sorry.
00:41:44
Speaker
I think our generation is kind of at a weird point that we grew up not having computer science or having coding taught to us in school. And I look now and a lot of the people who are entering school age now, they get taught very, very basic like scratch programming, which is like drag and drop. But the point is they get taught the fundamentals of programming alongside English, alongside maths.
00:42:06
Speaker
So they grew up kind of understanding the system. And I think that we'll see a shift in that as more and more people grew up with this, and they grew up being makers and being creators as well. And this is kind of a culture which is starting to emerge and become at the forefront of how we're making, whereas it wasn't when I was growing up, that maybe this will shift that rather than just teaching a class on one thing or another, or just teaching a class on the theory or just on the mechanics,
00:42:31
Speaker
There'll be an encouragement to sort of experiment and participate and to play with code and to play with what that can do with archaeology. So I'm quite excited actually about the future. But I think it's a full system thing, not just a...
00:42:43
Speaker
Yeah, one thing that we can change, I guess. Yeah, Tara has a point. I mean, I'm already teaching coding to kindergartners. I'm teaching coding and basic electronics to kindergartners. I'm not even kidding. Like they're programming their own computer games and stuff. So they are learning much younger now. But I think with Andrew's point is that we're not educating those kindergartners to be archaeologists yet. What we have is a whole generation of archaeologists who need to learn the basics of
00:43:11
Speaker
or the in and outs of coding. But let's go to break real quick and when we come back we can maybe hammer out some of the finer points here.
00:43:22
Speaker
Hosted by archaeologist Emily Long, Trial Tales is an archaeology podcast with stories told by archaeologists about the crazy world of archaeology. Emily weaves a tale of wonder and excitement with her intriguing questions and imaginative editing skills. Check out Trial Tales today at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash Trial Tales. Now let's get back to the show.
00:43:48
Speaker
And we are back and we're going to kind of shift topics just a little bit and discuss. Well, first, let's fill in a hole. Can someone explain agent based modeling to me? Sure. So basically, a lot of simulation modeling takes the approach of simulating the environment and then basically, or
00:44:10
Speaker
in simulating macro-level events and what agent-based modeling tries to do is switch it onto its head and you simulate individual interactions and how those can build up to a wider system or how those can actually be the system itself.
Agent-Based Modeling vs. Procedural Generation
00:44:25
Speaker
So to kind of put a light on this a bit more, I guess, you could use it to look at trade networks in say, Hawaii, archeologically, or the emergence of hierarchy. And so rather than looking at it from a top down perspective, what you do, you say, okay, well, how does hierarchy emerge? So do I, I can generate more wealth? Well, how do I generate more wealth? Here, here are some parameters for foreign, which that happens. And then you say to an individual agent, so maybe you say there's a hundred thousand agents in my simulation and each agent is
00:44:55
Speaker
representing a person or whatever you want it to be and then you just let the system run and do its thing and you see what happens as these agents walk around and interact based upon the parameters that you've set. So maybe you say you like to interact with people more based upon x and y parameters and less based on z and d parameters.
00:45:16
Speaker
And then as the system goes, each agent will walk around, talk to another one or interact with another one. A decision will be made and then they will go on about their life. And from that, the system will, a system that you can analyze and a result you can analyze will emerge from that.
00:45:30
Speaker
And that's different than to say No Man's Sky in that none of that is defined in No Man's Sky, right? Well, interestingly, I don't know if you could call No Man's Sky an agent-based model in the sense that it's using procedural generation of which agent-based modeling kind of features as a part of that.
00:45:50
Speaker
in this, it's in the same ballpark of computational models. But No Man's Sky, rather than simulating the individual actions of the people of the like NPCs in the game, and then generating the archaeology of the world that you then see, it goes out of the other way. And it just generates the archaeology as far as I can tell, abstract to the people or the
00:46:11
Speaker
NPCs that are living there, so that the outcome is not tied into the interactions of the agents in the system. It's secondary applied, if any of that made any sense. I followed most of it, so we're good.
00:46:26
Speaker
We chose we, the global we, chose to use No Man's Sky to study. Now, is No Man's Sky apparently categories here? Is No Man's Sky considered an indie title or is it considered a triple A title? And what is a triple A title because I think indie title is kind of self-evident.
00:46:43
Speaker
I think that using it with No Man's Sky is actually a very complicated question. Because in terms of platform support, console support, the things we talked about earlier with optimization, they got a lot of help is not right.
00:47:04
Speaker
a lot of attention from Sony and PS4 people to make sure that that game worked on that. So in that regard, it doesn't feel like an indie, but also when we talk about how small the studio was, how small Hello Games is and
00:47:19
Speaker
what they had to work with and all of the things that they went through in order to get the game going, it does feel quite indie. And I think this gets into some larger issues about what exactly makes an indie and independent title versus
Indie vs. AAA Games in Archaeological Study
00:47:33
Speaker
a AAA title, which would be your big blockbuster flagship for the franchise sort of games. And I think those lines are definitely blurrier than they used to be. It used to be quite clear. You knew what you were getting and
00:47:46
Speaker
If you wanted a game that was artsy, you went to an indie. If you wanted a game that was big and flashy and large, then you went to a AAA title and that's not necessarily the case anymore. Interesting question because independent or indie game technically means that it's independently published. Yeah. So No Man's Sky is published by Hello Games. So it is an independent game.
00:48:10
Speaker
But it's distributed by Sony. And you get into this interesting cycle because in the same kind of vein, Paradox Interactive, which does a lot of big Forex kind of games, they publish their own games yet they are really big now and they have a lot of stuff behind them. So as Megan says, the differentiation becomes very blurred between what actually defines independent development versus AAA.
00:48:36
Speaker
And at the same stage, there are AAA games which are incredibly indie, incredibly experimental now and are published through these big platforms and supported through these big platforms.
00:48:47
Speaker
whilst at the other end you have a lot of indie games which have become behemoths in their own right, almost triple-able publishing other people's games as well. Anyway, sorry. No, no, no. So what is the benefit then of choosing to study a triple-A title versus an indie title when we're studying it using archaeology? Now, even though we've admitted that this is a hybrid of both,
00:49:14
Speaker
It does seem to be a little bit more of a big, it does seem to be a little bit more AAA than indie in that it was hugely hyped. It was put out for PS4. It was apparently optimized for the PS4. I mean, even then you go through Steam to get it for the PC and that kind of stuff. So what is the benefit over that versus an indie game? Or is there one? Personally speaking, I don't think that there is
00:49:41
Speaker
a difference in studying big versus small. I mean, you'll see this in archaeology as well. You've got archaeologists who are out in the field and they study a particular site or they do a salvage excavation or they're studying a farmhouse. You know, that's pretty small potatoes. It's still interesting and still contributes to our knowledge of how things used to work or how things are working now. Yeah, but everybody wants to go excavate the pyramids. No, no, no. You can't say that.
00:50:08
Speaker
But let's take a look, for example, about those who might be studying the Acropolis of Athens, or they're studying the Parthenon. I mean, the Parthenon is AAA. It's about as AAA as you could possibly get. However, it has humble origins. There are several Parthenons that existed on that spot when you go back in history. Not a lot of people know that. And then you've got this tiny little building that had a tiny little wooden statue in it, which was the first Parthenon. And that's pretty endy. So you're basically looking at a transition from something smaller to something just gigantic.
00:50:39
Speaker
But at the heart, the meeting is the same. This is a place for the goddess Athena and this is also a place to serve as kind of a treasury for the city and stuff like that too, right? So you've got that going on as well. And I see no difference in, as an archaeologist, choosing to go big or to go small. You're asking similar kinds of questions. It's really an economy of scale as you're trying to get at some answers.
00:51:05
Speaker
So when you're talking about that, though, you're talking about you want people, ideally, we want archaeologists to study small games, we want archaeologists to study large games, and everything in between. But we want them to study
Standardizing Archaeological Methodology in Games
00:51:15
Speaker
games. Right, exactly. But here's the thing. How do we pull, since each game hypothetically exists in its own world, like that is the point of the game is to pull you into a world that is unique-ish,
00:51:28
Speaker
To the game it does mean that things will be could be radically different from one game to the next How do we as archaeologists studying games as a field? how do we pull all that together and make a cohesive field out of studying things that could be or studying worlds that could be Absolutely opposite to each other
00:51:52
Speaker
Good practice and good ethics. Well, what kind of conclusions can we draw from all that, though? From so much data, from so much data that could be counter to each other, what conclusions are we going to be able to draw from all of that data once we have it? Because we're going to have it eventually.
00:52:10
Speaker
if it's counter, you know, or not. I mean, every game has its own physics that's created from the ground up, basically by the developers. You know, so you have to imagine what gravity is going to look like if there's going to be gravity. You have to see if it's an open world versus kind of a closed platform, you know, experience or something like that. So every game is going to be, is going to be different. But it still is a space to be inhabited by the player. And I think as archaeologists, we have to look at how that works within the game, you know, from a player perspective.
00:52:35
Speaker
But then you have to step back and take a look at the greater cultural context of that game as it's created and as it's played and as it fits in with the rest of the media that we're surrounded by. And I think it raises some really interesting questions with regards to our normative archaeological practice outside of game worlds because we've kind of operated from the standpoint for the last
00:52:58
Speaker
say 80 years specifically, where we've been like, archaeology can be standardized down to one thing, archaeology can be recorded through one method and that can capture the past. And I think that when you start to look at games, you get into this really interesting perspective, which is that the game only exists when it's played in much the same world that like
00:53:16
Speaker
in much the same way that our world kind of exists through the systems and interactions and the events which happen within it, which aren't necessarily captured archaeologically. And so what we're actually recording is not necessarily, in the real world, the past, we're recording outcomes. And so we tend to think and record in outcomes. And then when we try to apply that to a game, that doesn't necessarily make sense. So could playing games and doing archaeology in games and developing systems
00:53:41
Speaker
for recording archaeology in games start to bring up some interesting new ways of thinking about, well, why do we record archaeology in this way in the real world? Are there other ways to do it? Are there interactive or game-based methodologies that might also help that? But as Megan says, we do need to actually bear in mind as we're doing all this to not just be like, throw standardization and ethics out the window, it's a game, whatever.
00:54:04
Speaker
So it's a balancing act between using both of these things to inform each other and developing standards and ethics and methods, which makes sense to what we're doing. So, Tara, you think there could be a paradigm shift coming out of applying archaeology or studying archaeology inside games. There might be a paradigm shift in the real world. I understand it's kind of like the bad terminology to use. I mean, games are basically the real world anymore.
00:54:31
Speaker
I mean, I understand. I just don't have the words for it yet. So if you guys, what you guys are arguing for is standardized methods that are incredibly adaptive because they have to be. So what do these methods look like to you? I mean, I know that answers tried to put this famous together and it
00:54:51
Speaker
we've already admitted it's an evolving recording form and so is the methodology that we thought we were going to be able to use in the game versus what we have ended up using in the game which is completely foreign and the reality of it is once I started thinking about using the times from space from place to place, you can create a map from that and it might be fairly accurate honestly but it's a brand new way of thinking about how to put in provenance and coordinates for me.
00:55:20
Speaker
So right now I have 23 games that I'm looking at and the part of the process I'm in right now is figuring out how do I create a methodology that works for all 23 games. So I want to kill myself a lot of the time. But for me it's come down to figuring out what are the basic things
00:55:42
Speaker
that we need to do to be considering ourselves doing archaeology. What are the the essence of do we have a way to record visual? Do we have a way to record spatial? Do we have a way to record how we interact with the landscape and how we interact with
00:56:01
Speaker
any people or communities involved. It's figuring these things out and then accepting that once I have this general framework of these are the things that I have to do for each game product, it's looking at the product and saying, how am I going to make those things work in this game? So it's a standardized idea of what's essential, but not necessarily of how it's going to be done in each game.
00:56:28
Speaker
I think all of these are born from the research questions that we come to the games with. I think that with the games that I take a look at, I have certain questions about them and those drive the methods or the tools that I want to use in particular. Sometimes they're fine for one game but not for the next. Maybe it just boils down to the questions you want to ask and then you go out and find what's going to work in order to get answers.
00:56:54
Speaker
They're DIY. DIY archaeology. It's punk archaeology, really. It's archaeo gaming. Yeah. Everybody. I like that we worked punk archaeology into that. Terry, did you want to add anything? Oh, yeah. I was going to return a bit to the paradigm shift, because there was a hilarious, at this conference, we're talking about how we think about archaeology.
00:57:15
Speaker
And someone said, like, oh, they created this, like, big, like, working through 3D allowed them to think about archaeology through 3D. And this kind of really resonated to me. It's like, well, we do archaeology in 3D. We do archaeology in 4D, actually. We physically operate in a three-dimensional world. But our practice of doing archaeology, of recording it, of making maps, we always talk about archaeology through the two-dimensional. And so there's been this paradigm shift quite recently between talking about archaeology in the 2D and time-static, time-size kind of things.
00:57:45
Speaker
to talking about it in three-dimensional capture, but those are still...
00:57:49
Speaker
like photogrammetry or 3D models are still static and void from a lot of the interactions and processes which happen. And I think when we talk about games, there's something which sits on, well, the thing which makes a game a game and not just a nice, pretty model is this interaction and the player's position within it. And I think there's something quite sexy, I guess, one of a better word about how we can move forward with archaeology or have this paradigm shift to thinking about systems, but not in this kind of very structural, processional way, but in an interactive, agency
Evolving Archaeological Publications and Narratives
00:58:18
Speaker
-driven way.
00:58:18
Speaker
Go ahead, Andrew. We need to evolve the archaeological publication of this to match the three and four dimensions in which we work. And I've thought about that for traditional or real-world archaeology, as well as for archaeo gaming. It's because we're no longer, you know, print media sucks for this kind of stuff. And so what's the next level publication engine, you know, for disseminating this kind of information, you know, done in an academic way?
00:58:45
Speaker
How do we do that? How do we evolve it to match what we're doing in the field? So you're saying publishing the traditional paper is not the best way to be communicating what we are doing right now? Let me go on record. It is stupid.
00:58:59
Speaker
All right. Tell us how you really feel. I don't think it's stupid. I think it's just a singular method. We have to think bigger. Yeah. It's one of those things that like paper-based methods are really good at telling in a very structured, very authoritative way, one story or like the story.
00:59:16
Speaker
And there's this guy called Imbogos, who talks about how games have this thing which is called procedural rhetoric, which is that games make arguments through the system, through the procedure of the game. And this can kind of be applied out, I mean like it's not procedural rhetoric, but you can say there's a visual rhetoric, there's an audio rhetoric, there's like
00:59:34
Speaker
like different media forms have different ways of making arguments and as Andrew says we severely hobble ourselves in academia and especially in archaeology by saying you have to publish a text-based linear paper which follows very formal conventions because then that becomes cyclical that's the way you think about writing archaeology and that's the way you do archaeology and so therefore you become embedded in the system which is linear text. The other bad thing about this is the fact that it locks in
01:00:03
Speaker
one author's narrative on the interpretation of whatever assemblage it is they're considering. When there are many narratives and many voices, you know, the multi-vocality, I don't know, maybe if that's the right word, but you know, of what we're doing, especially in game space and virtual environments, but even in archaeology generally, you know, covering the digital land and the non, we void all of that out because the director
01:00:31
Speaker
wrote a paper and then that's what happens to the rest of it. It's a one-way communication system which is totally outdated.
01:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, when I was working at Chattel, I was sort of studying how people were talking and doing stuff at the Charles Edge. Chattel is kind of very famously like the post-prosessional site. And what I found is that people are really reflexive, like they're actually multi-vocal and reflexive. But then they pick up their tablet to record what's happening and all of that discussion, all that like complex system-based thinking, all this like interaction suddenly gets formalized to just like,
01:01:02
Speaker
This is this kind of a lithic fountain at this place. There's no space on the form for that, you know? But since we only have a couple minutes.
01:01:16
Speaker
Now, we only have a couple of minutes left. So aside from making new forms, how do you see us presenting this information then if we're not presenting it via paper? What's a good alternative that you can think of right now? I mean, obviously, this will evolve.
01:01:37
Speaker
the internet. But what are you saying when you want that? Do you want a flash site where it's pictures that rotate in 3D? Are you wanting people to start writing the reports via song? I mean, what are we talking about here? Yes, absolutely. If your argument is a game, make a game. If your argument is a song, make a song. If your argument is best suited to a comic, the combination of text and sequential media
01:02:06
Speaker
images then do it that way. I don't know. So I went to the most amazing presentation I've ever seen in my life when I was at Wacky in Kyoto last week and he was in my session so I should have known more what was happening but I didn't realize the direction it was fully gonna go.
01:02:26
Speaker
It was mime interpretation of ceramics. I know, I know. It's like you just want to back away from that slowly. A little bit. So what he did is it was he had a video presentation where a screen would show you a piece of ceramics rotating and you would have someone giving you the traditional, this is where it's from, this is what it was made of, all of that stuff. And then alongside of it,
01:02:54
Speaker
he was acting out the pieces, using body positioning and using costume and using sounds. And when he would do that, you would see what the piece was actually supposed to represent, what it meant by the way that he had to do things in order to make the piece come to life. And I know it sounds crazy, but it was combining the very static, this is the sort of information you would put in a paper,
01:03:24
Speaker
with very mobile and accessible and understandable. This is what the artifact actually looks like. Combine those two things together, gave you a sense of like, this is why this piece was made. This is what it was made to show you.
01:03:42
Speaker
the emotion behind the piece. And when he started doing this, we went from a room that had like 20 people in it to standing room only people coming out the doors into the hallway. Because it was showing a different way to show interpretation and a different way to show
01:04:01
Speaker
what we learn as archaeologists. And I think we have to think in those ways in terms of how can we be showing things in different formats. Okay, I have to stop us here. We're at an hour. But I want to propose now that we touch that we do this topic for the next podcast that we discuss ways of presenting game archaeology and digital archaeology in a less paper format for the next podcast.
01:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's certainly the next step for sure. I mean, communicating on what we do is half of what we do. We collect data. We also need to disseminate the data. So how are we going to do this? And this does reflect the paradigm shift that we were discussing. Well, guys and ladies, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast this month. I really enjoyed it. You guys are a pleasure to interview.
01:05:04
Speaker
If you like what you've heard, subscribe and share us with your social network. 8-Bit Test Pit is available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play or online at the Archaeology Podcast Network site. Be sure to comment and give us a like wherever you listen and consider donating to the show and the network on our website, archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. 8-Bit Test Pit is produced by Sarah Head and Tristan Boyle. Music is provided by Tristan Boyle. Thanks for listening.
01:05:18
Speaker
Just thank you for coming on.
01:05:41
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com