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Representation, Hoyuk, and Procedural Generation - Episode 7
161 Plays7 years ago
The Archaeogamers are back! The hosts discuss representation of archaeology in games; review the Hoyuk board game; and explain and discuss "procedural generation" and how it relates to archaeogaming and the user experience.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Message
00:00:00
Speaker
you are listening to the archaeology podcast network the archaeology podcast network is sponsored by codify a california benefit corporation visit codify at www.codifi.com
Challenges and Humor in Podcasting
00:00:15
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is Chris Sims, the editor for most of the shows on the Archeology Podcast Network. We had a really great episode of the 8-bit test pit recorded for you, but we ran into some problems since this is an international podcast. It was unfortunately turned away at the border. I know it was an outrage, but this is life now, right? Well, I've been editing the show
00:00:44
Speaker
Long enough basically to get the gist of it. So I'm just gonna fill in for the all the hosts today. So I'm gonna do my best. I think I can I can basically get everybody's bits. So I'm Megan Dennis. I'm I'm the main one I guess and hold on my dog is running around like crazy and I'm Andrew Reinhardt. I've been on TV and I'm going to talk about something really heady
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm Tara cobblestone. I'm from New Zealand
Archaeo-Gaming: Bridging Archaeology and Gaming
00:01:19
Speaker
mate. I reckon we'll have a good go at this archaeo gaming a fish and chips
00:01:29
Speaker
So what do we talk about when we talk about archaeo gaming? And really, it's all in the name, archaeo gaming, archaeology, and games. And what does that mean, really? So there are a couple of ways to think about this, kind of going at the top level, which is learning about how archaeologists are portrayed in games, or how people perceive them when they play games, and how an archaeological mechanic might be introduced in games, and what does that look like.
00:01:59
Speaker
you guys have been playing games, you know, as long as I have maybe more, I don't know. But, you know, I mean, Megan, you've played like some of these old Atari cartridges, like, like, Tutankhamen. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the representational issues that we have go back all the way to the beginning. When we start to see the first places that we have archaeology and games, it, from the beginning, starts with a problematic representation and
00:02:29
Speaker
We just continued to layer on tropes and issues from there and things have changed a little bit over time as far as what particularly games focus on in archaeology, but there's a couple.
00:02:42
Speaker
main areas that anyone who plays games with archaeology, you're going to know these. You're going to know that there's looting. You're going to know that there's destruction of cultural property. You're going to know that there is a general undervaluing of the scientific process of archaeology as shown within games. These things are just there and why they're there. But they're fun.
00:03:09
Speaker
Well, and that's the problem. That's the thing that we get at is, yeah, they're fun. And how do we ask people to not do the things that are fun when the things that we take from archaeology, not those things as archaeologists, we don't go out and loot. We don't destroy cultural property. We do value science. Those things may be
00:03:35
Speaker
fun for us as we're doing them, but they don't necessarily translate into a fun playable game. I totally agree with you, but I mean we've got to remember where a lot of these representations come from, right? Like these are spawned from like the pre-pulp fiction like Agatha Christie, adventuring, romance, and from a time where archaeology was basically rich white dudes going out and taking stuff from other places. I mean it sounds really awful to say, but like
00:04:02
Speaker
The reality is like during the, especially the empire years, like we would go out to these adventuring exotic places and take cool shiny stuff and bring it back to all the land. Well, that was all part of the grand tour. You know, exactly. Take your souvenir and go on vacation, go around the world, collect stuff, bring it back and have everyone come over and look at it. But the problem even with that is that we started this. This is our fault. Exactly.
00:04:28
Speaker
And I mean, like, I think on one hand, those are problematic representations, but I think there's something historic and archaeological within them as well. I mean, like, it's not that, I think the problem comes that that's the only thing that we see. And that our representation has not moved on and we haven't found new and fun and interesting ways to challenge it. Because what we do is fun. Like, it's not like, oh, we sit in the lab and we're really dull and archaeology is like super boring
Reimagining Archaeological Portrayals in Media
00:04:52
Speaker
now. Archaeology is not boring. I hear somebody saying this at the other end of the hall. Exactly.
00:04:57
Speaker
So it's, you know, how do we, do we need to move beyond these representations and how and what do we do with that, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you think about representation of archaeologists typically, and this is coming out of Indiana Jones and some of these other things where you've got the safari hat or the fedora. And I know some of our listeners are wearing a fedora right now.
00:05:19
Speaker
But with, you know, with this, I mean, I don't see why we can't have a class two high visibility vest on a protagonist who's an archaeologist or a hard hat, steel-toed boots, and they're still, you know, kicking ass and beating Nazis and stuff. But at the same time, you know, we can kind of update the image and maybe have them do something a little more meaningful than what they've been doing currently or previously. And to jump in a bit on that, we've talked a bit about the representations of archaeologists.
00:05:45
Speaker
but also part of the representation of archaeology that is problematic. And Megan can speak to this quite a lot. But I think, to sort of preface this, again, these representations come from a time where archaeology was really mysterious. People did not have access to information, so they didn't know what was going on in the tombs, on the landscape, in the ground.
00:06:06
Speaker
And so in a lot of ways, it was easier and more exciting to create these backstories to them, which us today were like, but we put all the information up. Like, why can't you just read it? Like, there's so much interesting stuff in this information. And so again, yeah, I guess we'll hand over to.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, it comes out of this time when, I mean I've said this in a couple venues, that this is our fault because the initial guys who were doing archaeology, who were trying to get, at that point just like we do now, trying to get funding so that they could go out and do what they were doing, they were either using their own money so they could do whatever they wanted to when they went out there and there was no checks and no balances on what they did or
00:06:47
Speaker
they were advertising and promoting themselves to the public through a swashbuckling image and the media that they used at the time created the images that we have inherited and they created the ideas that the hats come from that the whips come from that the jungles all of it comes
00:07:11
Speaker
from very identifiable archaeologists that we can look at and say this person did this and that's where our trope comes from this person did this and that's where our trope comes from and it was successful and it worked for a long time and it spawned the image in other media so you know we have these tropes that yes we are responsible for that have come through historic and historical archaeology through time we see these in games but really you know
00:07:40
Speaker
what's happening now is this continues to snowball through television media where you still have adventure person, adventure guy, typically it's a guy or it's or it's yeah and we you know which is a which is a damn shame um and actually is not uh representative of the male-to-female ratio of archaeologist in the field right now that's correct actually i was gonna say like it was quite unfair of me earlier to say like mostly well i mean like there's what we see in the media over time but like there's like
00:08:09
Speaker
Kenton Thompson and Bell, and they were all out in archeological fields doing stuff, but they were almost never represented in the media.
00:08:17
Speaker
Complete of a discussion. What we do need to do in one of these podcasts, whether it's the next one or the one after, is certainly do like a trial blazers edition of archaeo gaming, because there's certainly a lot to talk about with female representation within games. And female creators and inputs to some of these games.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, Rihanna Pratchett just officially left the Tomb Raider series this week very loudly and publicly, which is something we may want to get into at some point, but not today. Send some time next time. Yeah.
00:09:00
Speaker
What do we do? What do we do about this problem? What are we gonna do? I'm gonna fix it. I mean, like, do we need to fix it? Fix it now! So I guess the first thing that I kind of want to raise is it's like, we kind of have this thing in academia within, like, critical reception studies. As we say, like, these representations are wrong, and that they're bad. And like, I don't disagree with the fact that they have damaging and ethical impacts, and that we should be critical of that.
00:09:24
Speaker
But I do think that they are part of our history and that we need to embrace that and understand where they come from.
Integrating Ethics into Gaming
00:09:32
Speaker
And then what happens now is obviously you said that they were so effective at creating this image for themselves and that people really enjoyed that. There is so much stuff in archaeology that we could do that for. So like how do we, as archaeologists, how do we leverage media? Because I think we're not great at that. We tend to wait for people to come to us or complain about what's made about us.
00:09:53
Speaker
rather than necessarily being proactive. That was a long rant to get to the point which was basically, how do we affect real change rather than just saying it's wrong and it's bad? If we want to change it, how do we change it? And what impact do we see that having on us as a discipline?
00:10:12
Speaker
Well, we don't have the money to change it in terms of having, you know, a counter industry or anything. We simply, we don't have the dollars or pounds or euros for that. So is the goal that we try to get more archaeologists involved in development? Is the goal that we try to make ourselves more available to studios?
00:10:39
Speaker
Does any of that matter if we haven't figured out a way to make what we do fun to the public without the other stuff? Yeah. Well, I think that's it, right? I mean, like, I think there's a lot of mechanics in archaeology that are really fun. It's just that they're not traditional game mechanics or they're not what we've like built a repertoire of over the past 35 years. So breaking, like making those mechanics requires someone
00:11:03
Speaker
either brave enough to do it themselves, so it's not going to come from AAA, it's going to be independent, or for us to make it ourselves, or for us to have developed a shared lexicon so we can actually speak to developers and really express what we mean rather than just saying, no hats and whips like we can actually hold a prolonged discussion.
00:11:24
Speaker
making a space like that and making those connections between game developers and archaeologists, I think it's going to go a long ways towards building that bridge and sharing that, as you say, Terrell, Lexicon. Is some of it generational? Is it looking at it and saying,
00:11:48
Speaker
The people who are running things right now in the AAA studios. Presumably everyone who works in the AAA studios came from somewhere. So is the goal that we reach the people who will be the next generation of producers and designers and
00:12:07
Speaker
do things so that by the time that the studios are seeded with those people, that the change has occurred on a lower level to where it's within their idea of what we look like to begin with. Yeah, I guess like, I can't really speak directly to this, but I can speak around the point of it. Like in my master's research, I went and I sat in a whole different bunch of game studios. And what I found was that the people who are like the writers, the narrative designers,
00:12:35
Speaker
the level designers, the engine designers, the artists, basically anyone at production level, so people who are making stuff, are not only really interested but genuinely care and really want to connect with this stuff. The problem is that there has to be a sale point, right? There has to be
00:12:53
Speaker
a point of reference that can be pointed to and say look this game in the past has sold really well like Tomb Raider has sold really well so it's easy to say like let's take that kind of a representation and replicate it but change this one thing to make it you know alrighty now
00:13:09
Speaker
Whereas it's very hard to say we're going to make a game about a very modern-day archaeologist using non-losing mechanics who's all about ethical kind of engagements with the
Diverse Cultural Perspectives in Games
00:13:23
Speaker
general public. It's a much harder sell because it's not a lexicon that we're used to.
00:13:27
Speaker
So part of it is like us being willing to affect change and have a discussion and part of it as well as finding a way to make it financially viable and prove that it can be. And that change also has to come from like sadly lower down. So like doing game jams and showing that these products can be made doing like small level independent products and then moving on from there, I guess.
00:13:49
Speaker
I think also part of this could be worked into the games as well, where in modern games there are all these decision trees where your character makes a decision and that affects future gameplay, your reputation with other factions in the game and stuff like that. And that's quite a modern model too.
00:14:05
Speaker
And so being able to have these trees where what happens when you decide not to loot something, what happens when you decide not to destroy something, how does that affect your relationship with other factions and other people in the game and how that game works and how your story changes and making that as rewarding as it does when you go in and you kill stuff and you sell stuff and you steal stuff. And maybe you get better gameplay and actually better magic, better buffs, better loot and stuff by doing the right thing as opposed to just kind of smash and grab.
00:14:34
Speaker
mechanics and seeing if we can work through that. I totally agree. I think that that's definitely one way. But to me, that seems a little bit like putting a plaster over the wound. I mean, it is a really good idea, but on one hand, it's like all you're doing is saying, you're in a zero sum game here, right? When you approach it like that, you're saying, rather than being able to win because you loot, we just substitute that directly to you win because you don't loot.
00:14:59
Speaker
And so it's like, yes, that's viable. And yes, that's interesting. But it's, I guess, when people are so used to one thing, why like, if you're so conditioned to do this thing and be rewarded for it, that can be quite jarring to go to that other thing. So managing like, that can be a really effective way to wake people up. But if it goes on again and again and again and again, that just becomes the next trope of archaeology that all we do is leave stuff behind.
00:15:26
Speaker
So it's like, again, how do you create diversity? Like it's not a one or the other.
00:15:31
Speaker
That sounded really quite depressing. I'm just trying to think of how this is applying for things that are happening in Syria or in the Americas, for example, where you've got destitute people who've turned to looting and selling to middlemen, for example, and how that's being countered or attempted to be countered there, too, where you have this other option. You don't have to loot. You can do something else and how that might be translated into games.
00:16:00
Speaker
But I guess like the undertone of all of them, like we've moved away from archaeologists, like what we do is archaeology. But I think there's a lot of ethical things that we need to be concerned about when we talk about digital stuff, like the colonization of archaeology in the digital space.
00:16:15
Speaker
and kind of extending these very empire-oriented, we know what to do with archaeology because we are archaeologists and we, like we, like as, you know, English archaeologists, we know what to do with your culture. Like, how do we then balance that with the ethics and the cultures and the values of archaeologists working elsewhere in the world and their cultures and their backgrounds? Like, I think those also need a lot of respect and ethical consideration.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, decoloniality in archaeological video games is, I think, going to be an emerging field. And if there's anybody out there who is interested in doing an MA or a PhD and you have not figured out a topic, please talk to us. We will make sure that you have the resources to write a good proposal for that topic because I would love to see it written.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah, a real simple one is talking about what you just said, the mechanic and the latest sieve with the British museums and collecting artifacts. Can you speak to how that went? Because I think you've played that through more than me.
00:17:18
Speaker
I have no time to play games apart from the ones I do for my studies, so I've only played one game. But maybe that's something we can research. I can have a legitimate reason to play it and we can talk about it next time. I think that's a good plan. Coloniality is something that deserves its own 20 minutes to talk about. For sure. It would be cool to have NPCs or advisors who are not British or not American, who are indigenous to the regions that are being explored.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, or at least show the opposite perspective, right? Like you can have your clone, because that's literally what happened. But to have someone be like, yo, what are you doing? This is, you know, that's, you know, that's that's important to me. Why are you taking it? Yeah. Yeah. Which I guess is like it goes back to we've talked about this a bit on the show in the past, which is
00:18:02
Speaker
A lot of what we see in archaeological video games is like constructive or reconstructive, so it's like trying to recreate the past or recreate what we do as archaeologists rather than deconstruct it. So rather than making an argument about like, how and why do we do this, it just says like, this is what we do. And I think with a move to more deconstructive like this argument based system,
00:18:22
Speaker
there's the potential to kind of explore and have room for discussion rather than just like straight representation, I guess. Right. And I think that's more interesting than the straight representation.
Board Game Exploration: Hyuk and Archaeology
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah. That dialogue, that argument. I think you need both, right? Like, you know, straight representations can be fun and interesting and surface level enjoyable. Well, the handyman. Well, sometimes you just want to blow something up. But then you also need to question the fun aspect of things or what makes it fun.
00:18:51
Speaker
But, you know, we've played that kind of game for a long time, and I think it's time for us to try some other stuff. Yeah, and I think through just making other stuff plain and simply, you'll start to be able to question that trope because you become aware of it. If the only thing you see is the trope, it's just normative, like, you're like, no.
00:19:12
Speaker
Whatevs. Well, we're going to take a break in a second, but when we come back, let's talk about a different method of representing archaeology in games. And we're going to shift it a little bit and talk about a board game and board game representations of archaeology in here. Sound good to everybody? Yeah, I love it.
00:19:35
Speaker
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00:19:58
Speaker
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00:20:14
Speaker
Hey, we are back. We are going to talk now about archaeology in games in a slightly different format, but tagging on to what we were talking about previously with representation. Tara has been doing some work with Hyuk, a board game focusing on Chital Hyuk. Well, technically just Anatolian settlement during the Neolithic, like it just kind of broadly applies to any kind of Hyuk. But yes, that
00:20:41
Speaker
is not a phrase we often get broad Aventolian settlements dealing with games. So talk to us about this game. Why should we either care or not care about this game? Why is it important to us as archaeologists or people who care about heritage in games?
00:20:57
Speaker
Okay, well, first things first, like I started out as a Neolithic archaeologist and representation in Neolithic archaeology is not super great. There's not a lot of people who are like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about and what you study when you say that. So having any kind of representation through a game was very exciting to me to start with. And so Huyuk is basically a kind of area control tile placement game.
00:21:24
Speaker
which you play versus between one other player or five players. So they can be between two and five people playing at any time. And there's a lot of assets that you have together and you get points for the amount of assets, which is also directly related to the amount of land that you control. Now, anyone who's sort of like familiar with Neolithic settlements, especially at Chadahoyuk in Anatolia,
00:21:45
Speaker
We'll know that this mechanic itself that we're talking about right now is not super in line at all, really, generally, with how we see things there. It's a little problematic. But to kind of step back from that, the graphical representation whilst there's some sort of game design flaws with it,
00:22:06
Speaker
is across the board or on the whole like actually quite good like they actually have a lot of archaeological artifacts represented in the game some of them don't exist on the sites but that's okay most of them do um some of them are really well researched and really well implemented um
00:22:24
Speaker
And I think, on the whole, it's a really good starting point. When we talk about the bad representations earlier, well, not the bad, but the older representations, this game has certainly made a pretty good leap into trying to at least do something quite different, even if not mechanically, than definitely graphically and temporally.
00:22:43
Speaker
So you guys have both played as well. I force you to play with me as part of my research. Yeah. Andrew, you had a word or a phrase that you used to describe gameplay for this game? Frustrating. I would agree with that. Frustrating. Nothing really seemed to make all kinds of sense or logic from an archaeological point of view using these different chits and cards and pieces.
00:23:06
Speaker
and that didn't seem to follow any kind of human logic either as one was playing and so I found it frustrating on both just a simple gameplay respect as well as from an archaeological perspective. We played the game, we finished it, but under duress. I think we're being really harsh because I'm not gonna lie, the game has some flaws, some quite significant ones,
00:23:35
Speaker
But on the whole, like, I'm just really excited to see that people actually care about this representation. Oh, absolutely. And that have been researching. I mean, like, to kind of go back to it, there's, we've talked a lot earlier about like physical representations, like what things look like in games. And we've started to touch a little bit on mechanics, like how things act. And this game is a really good example of something called ludonarrative dissonance, which is when the narrative which the game is trying to tell you. So like, for this example, it's trying to tell us the narrative of
00:24:03
Speaker
how Neolithic settlements happened in Anatolia does not match at all with the mechanics. So the narrative is basically that everything's quite egalitarian, a nice flat society, things get built up collaboratively, people aren't living in nuclear families, they're living in very kind of sporadic groupings which often change as far as we can tell.
00:24:23
Speaker
And the way that the mechanics manifest in this game is you are a clan and you're actually represented as a nuclear family like a mom, a dad, and one child. And then you have like these houses which are trying to destroy your neighbors so you can get more land and you're trying to get like more resources and it turns into this like weirdly capitalistic kind of expansionist game somewhere along the line.
00:24:48
Speaker
And so I guess like if we wanted to start talking about like representation mechanics like how did you guys I mean other than frustrating Did you guys have any ideas or suggestions or comments about the mechanics of this game? My problem
00:25:01
Speaker
was that I could not figure out strategies to win. Well, yes, that's a good point as well. We actually talked about what the win condition is. How do you win the game? What's the goal? You get the most points. That's how you win. Just like in life. Just like in archaeology, you're like, I dug 36 artifacts today. I win. No, that's not how it works. Scrap that. That's not. Maybe not on your side.
00:25:27
Speaker
Oh god. Yes, we have achievement points where I go. You just gamified archaeology. You look down, you're gamified. Now you see the divide between digging in the classical world and digging in the new world. If we find one thing in the new world, we're happy.
00:25:50
Speaker
So winning the game for me, I wanted to win. I wanted to play, but I also wanted to play to win. And I had problems with understanding
00:26:01
Speaker
what I was supposed to be doing sometimes in order to actually facilitate winning. Yeah. And it seemed sometimes like it didn't really matter what I did that we've talked about this that that the luck versus strategy alignment seemed off in this game. I felt like it didn't matter what strategy I put in place.
00:26:26
Speaker
If certain conditions came up in the game, then I just wasn't, it wasn't gonna be possible for me to win from the beginning.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, so we should mention at this point that the way, so there's this huge luck-based aspect in the game which comes in the form of both catastrophes and also the cards you can draw because they get mixed, and also the boards that you draw which tell you what you can build which then gets mixed as well. There's a lot of pieces in this game. There's so many tiny cards. Yeah, but this masquerades over the top of this very complex almost like 4x style strategy game, so it's kind of like, like if you imagine Civilization as a board game kind of thing, like or Risk if you know Risk is a game,
00:27:02
Speaker
Like it's very like the game itself is very very complex like strategically but then implements so much of this like chance-based aspect that it becomes like even if you win you're just like I'm not entirely sure if I won because I was good or if the game just gave me good stuff. Exactly. That was my problem. I couldn't tell where I was in the gameplay. Yeah which might be a powerful argument about the role of like the environment and the role of like natural disasters or interpersonal relationships in the past
00:27:31
Speaker
but it doesn't pan out that way. Wolves destroy ovens, which as far as I know, we have no, wolves don't destroy ovens. I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen. Feel free to write in if you're an archaeologist who's found this. Or if you work in the biological sciences with wolves and you have a problem with wolves destroying your ovens. Just coming in. You would really like to know about that. We'd like to collaborate with you on a research paper about the historical documentation of wolves destroying ovens.
00:28:03
Speaker
I was going to say, my main frustrations with the gameplay was first of all, the game board is a map and the map has a river running through it. It has trees and hills and rocks. It's quite pretty, but it doesn't make a difference to how you play.
00:28:20
Speaker
In the real world, you've got a landscape and you can build next to a mountain or by a river. You don't put a house on a river unless it's on top of something. Or if you did, you would be flooded and you would learn that's a terrible idea. Exactly. And so the landscape of the board is just pictures. It doesn't have an effect on the game plan. The other thing is,
00:28:39
Speaker
is that as things were happening in the game, they seemed to run counter to how they might work in the real world. Why would I want to build a house now? And you've got other pieces. You've got a shrine piece, or you've got a sheep piece, or a buffalo piece, or an oven piece. And those don't do anything. You have these things, and they help score you points and stuff. But there's no use. They just give you points. And so there's no reason why I pick a shrine over an oven. It's because your player has less of them than you.
00:29:07
Speaker
It really frustrates me that you can win the game without ever placing an oven, because if this was the real life, you would starve. You're just dead at this point. You don't need shrines, but we do need ovens. I'm willing to look past it as well. I talked a bit yesterday, I gave a presentation on this, about how could we fix this game?
00:29:29
Speaker
I say fixers, they're like, oh, I'm much better at designing stuff. Like, that's not what I mean at all. But it's like, can we speak as archaeologists about what mechanics would work better here? I think one of the things that we brought up was all the key concern was that this game is competitive against other players who you're trying to build your hook with, which makes no sense to this context.
00:29:49
Speaker
would make infinitely more sense was would be to have a collaborative versus board game. So something like if you played pandemic where it's like events happen and those events can be like natural disasters, they can be faults like in pandemic about disease spread like faults in the lab. Whereas this could be like at Chatterholi especially we see this like systematic construction and destruction of houses which is purposeful, not a natural disaster.
00:30:12
Speaker
So like you could have cards which or mechanics which allow that to happen in a way which rewards that or which means that has to happen rather than penalizing the destruction of houses. I think that was one of my frustrations is there's no reallocation of resources and there's no concept in it that
00:30:30
Speaker
that habitation is an ongoing process, and that it's a changeable process. The idea in this game is you build a house, and someone may or may not build a house near you, and you may build resources near your house, but unless they're destroyed,
00:30:45
Speaker
You never change your ideas about where things go. You never really grow your settlements or move them. They're just there. And they're yours. Yeah, and we know that that's not how settlement processes work. No, and the thing is, right, like, I mean, I can't speak to cheddar hooks, it's the only place I've worked, but it's like,
00:31:09
Speaker
it's such an interesting sight and it's so different to how we tend, I mean I say we as if everyone has the same experience, but how I live my life now in like these very kind of modern city-based individual positions, individual locations, dwelling type thing where my family is the people who are my blood kin. Like it's completely different as far as we can see that, like so otherworldly and so many of the mechanics like the game could have used
00:31:36
Speaker
really individual cool mechanics to make really powerful arguments about that past and through play people could have come to realize this because it's really hard actually like we when we're on site we give tours to the public when they come in to kind of help them get a grip on like archaeologically what's happening and it's really hard like even as an archaeologist standing there talking to someone
00:31:58
Speaker
It's really hard to express like how this place works because it's huge and it's changing and it's dynamic. The great thing about a board game is that it is changing and dynamic and can represent these huge scales. So yeah.
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a lot of promise in the game. But ultimately, both in terms of historical veracity and gameplay, we all had places where we felt like it fell down. Yeah. Which is disappointing, but doesn't mean that we don't want to see more games like this. We want more games that draw on historical and archaeological periods, especially periods that aren't well represented.
00:32:42
Speaker
in media and in gameplay. Yeah, not just in periods, but also in cultures. Yeah. Yeah. And I think they're like, oh, sorry. No, no, I was going to ask, are there games out there that are doing that now and perhaps doing it better than today? I don't know.
00:32:55
Speaker
I have a list in my head of stuff, which I think, again, is another segment where we talk about things. Because a lot of the things which I think are doing it really well are not explicitly archaeological games, but yet use archaeological mechanics really well. But let's not diverge into that because I'll rent for like half an hour otherwise. Great. I think to kind of wrap up this discussion or start wrapping it up at least, one of the things I kind of wanted to drive home was that
00:33:21
Speaker
We've been very critical and it might sound a bit like we're beating up this game and that it's like really awful and we hate it, which is not the case at all. Like I actually really like this game. You don't play a game 28 times that you completely hate. No, exactly. And the thing is right. It's like, like there are problems with it, but there are problems with everything. Like there's problems with chocolate and that it makes me fat, but I still love it. Like there's a problem. There are problems with the mechanics of this game and there are problems with the representations, but these are all things which through critical discussion and I think like through us,
00:33:52
Speaker
actually discussing it this way and thinking what we could do differently this actually would become a constructive thing and hopefully in the future we'll be able to move this this kind of these representations forward and I think to kind of like make a call back to what we talked about earlier about having these very kind of like typical to the time representations I feel like with Herc
00:34:14
Speaker
Whilst it's not a completely modern representation, it's lagging behind by a good 30 years from where we are archaeologically now. It's at least 80 years further forward from where we were with other representations of these very looting kind of
00:34:31
Speaker
taking things away and destroying things mechanics. Like obviously the capitalism thing and the kind of expansionism thing is a problem. But it is interesting that ethically in this game there is no looting. Exactly. And then it doesn't even come up in any of the catastrophe situations. There's nothing in this game where people versus people are an issue. Apart from the destruction. But like actual, yeah.
00:34:56
Speaker
There's no exchange of resources. There's no actual commodifications of artifacts, which are things that we tend to see in these games.
00:35:09
Speaker
one hand good, one hand bad, kind of how this goes. Yeah, I think we're definitely moving in a better direction and I would be interested in us looking at some point if board games in general are doing better than video games are doing as far as representation. It's actually an area that I'm woefully like, I know very little about board games. Yeah, and I know there's some people who are out there doing research with board games and archaeology right now that might be
00:35:37
Speaker
An interesting place to have an interview with them. I think to conclude as well, if you've played Hyuk, I mean, because again, like Hyuk existed as a PDF that you could download and then it's like a full game as well. So we're talking about the actual game that you can buy as a board set, although we also played the other one. Anyway, if you've played either of those things, like we'd really like to hear from you what your experience is and like what you've kind of got out of it or whether you thought it was good or bad and why. Get some feedback on.
00:36:07
Speaker
And as I understood from your talk, some of the issues that we have might have been issues coming out of the Kickstarter process. When it transitioned from being a downloadable PDF to a Kickstarter-backed game to a sold
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, so as the very quickly and the Kickstarter they had stretch goals and for the stretch goals they added in like more and more and more and more stuff so in game development we call this feature creep it's like this idea that you're like oh we'll just add another thing oh we'll just add another thing oh that would be really cool and suddenly you go from this really nice tight experience which is really like like easy to understand and get a grasp on to just being like oh my god there's so much stuff and none of it
00:36:48
Speaker
particularly adds to the core experience of the game, which I think is where a lot of the frustration actually comes in with Herrück. But if you only played the basic game, then it's kind of like, uh, put some tiles on board. That was fun. Like it's kind of like, where do you find that balance and how do you manage that expansion? Yeah. And this was also a game that really benefited from house rules. Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Cause there's two things which are completely broken, namely, namely the cattle and the clan powers. Just, just don't with the clan powers.
00:37:18
Speaker
It's not a fun experience.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the areas where the game really pitted one player against another in ways that didn't feel necessarily equitable to what you got in gameplay. Yeah, one player can destroy a house that's adjacent to them any turn they want. One player can take a sheep pen from anyone any turn, and one player can move the shaman, which protects a block, which benefits everyone if the disaster hits that, which there's like a one in eight chance. So it's like,
00:37:50
Speaker
you know, two clans have really great powers and one poor clan's like, hey guys, I'm relevant.
00:37:56
Speaker
So I think the main takeaway here though is you're talking about who you think in this fashion, but also this is scalable to talking about historical and archaeological video games too, is that you do have this kind of critical discourse to figure out what's working, what's not, what's historical, what's not, what's archaeological, what's not, which is great. And this is something that one of our mutual friends Ethan Watrol did with the students at Michigan State University is the fact that they made a game called Red Land, Black Land.
00:38:22
Speaker
And they were able to talk about how the game mechanic worked and the historicity of Egypt and all of that. And that's something that we can use as a pedagogical tool as well as a tool for engaging the public in what archaeology is and what it can be within a game space.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that, that takes us to a fairly deep note. Um, and when we come back, we're going to go into a real deep dive into something, um, procedural generation. So if you've hung on this far, uh, it's going to be, it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. Trust me. This is your, you're about to see where the real deep talk
Procedural Generation in Gaming: A Deep Dive
00:38:59
Speaker
at. Oh my God.
00:39:02
Speaker
I'm Jessica Equinto, and I'm the host of the Heritage Voices podcast. Heritage Voices focuses on how CRM and heritage professionals, public employees, tribes, and descendant communities can best work together to protect their heritage through tribal consultation, collaborative ethnography, and indigenous archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:39:27
Speaker
Hello and we're back and this time, as Megan said on the way out, we're going to do the fun, exciting and really try to make it as straightforward as possible conversation about procedural generation in video games. Now, Andrew, you posted a blog post this week about this and you had some interesting ideas on the topic.
00:39:49
Speaker
All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about what procedural generation actually is. Good place to stop. So for those of you who are scoring at home, procedural generation is basically algorithms within code that makes up a game.
00:40:06
Speaker
that gives the game instructions as it's compiling on your computer or on your console to say, okay, if you have a tree, it instructs it to populate the tree with leaves, or if you want to make a forest, it tells the console or the software running on your computer how to make that forest upon the player entry into a particular environment.
00:40:29
Speaker
What this does is it saves the programmer a lot of time and aggravation because they no longer need to write code for every single leaf for every single tree. This actually explains or tells the game how to actually do that. So things become much more fast. But also memory and storage is less of an issue because you no longer have to keep all of those things there. So procedural generation can do anything from
00:40:53
Speaker
populating or masking buildings with different textures like bricks and stuff or making wilderness environments that stretch off into the distance or making cityscapes that stretch as far as the eye can see. Can I ask a technical question? As someone who used to play a lot of MMOs, how does procedural generation as executed now have to do with the old things that we dealt with in MMOs like draw distance and
00:41:20
Speaker
how the games wouldn't load certain areas until there was actually a player in them. Are these things related at all? Or are they completely separate things that my non-technical mind has put together as related?
00:41:34
Speaker
Okay, so two separate things, but that can interact. Draw distance basically describes the... Imagine that you're standing in a city, and basically there's a lot of fog, and that fog means you can only see a meter in front of you. Your draw distance, like what you can actually render in front of you, is one meter. And that's what draw distance is. It's saying, how much do I have to load in?
00:41:56
Speaker
But the thing is already technically designed and coded somewhere just waiting to load in. Yeah, and so then the next thing is something called level of detail, which is loading. So basically that says within one meter you'll load the high resolution model, within 20 meters you'll load a low resolution model, and within 50 you'll just render like some kind of child's finger painting in the background.
00:42:20
Speaker
And this gives, it actually gives like a really realistic effect, this is kind of how we see anyway, right? Like we see really high detail close, mid-level detail, mid-distance, and like some colors in the distance. And this was really important, like this and like level of detail and draw distance are really important back in like very early console era games. I think for example like Silent Hill, where they use this fog to basically get around having to load and draw
00:42:44
Speaker
large amounts of complex set on the fly but it also added the ambiance exactly so this is a really I mean like an artifact or residue for that kind of thing what we're talking about is the mechanic is called Perlin noise you know when it's when it's done in this way it's basically you know named after this guy named Perlin who wrote the first algorithm that made this kind of procedural generation possible back in 1982 or 83 I think but
00:43:11
Speaker
In my mind, this is a kind of noise, or basically it's populating an area to give you the emotional impact of being in a space. It's how a forest should feel, even though it's not necessarily a completed forest. It's how a city should feel, even though you can't see the entire city. It's got elements that it's kind of like Gestalt, I guess, of you completing the forms yourself in your mind's eye as you're going around.
00:43:37
Speaker
And for me as a player and for me as a student of games and archaeology, having that kind of emotional impact and having that tied into a story or narrative is really the core principle for why one has this. At least that's how I'm seeing it. Right. And this is where I disagree fundamentally.
00:43:59
Speaker
And this is, I think, the first time that we've actually had a really big disagreement on this show. So, we'll see where this goes. But basically, like... Blood on the carpet. Blood on the carpet. So, like, I come... It's just, you know, gonna pick up the bars and just, like, go nuts. No, that's not gonna happen. Finish him. My God. So, back to topic, anyway. So, like, I come from a computer science background and I spend my days, like, making games now.
00:44:29
Speaker
And a lot of the time, I do use procedural generation to generate places. So what Andrew's talking about is the noise. It's like generating things which look nice in the area and give it kind of like a, and correct me if I'm wrong, but ambience, like a sense of place. And the reason for that place is to progress a narrative, to have a direct impact on the player and what their meaning in the world is. Now that is true for part of the time. But part of the time, I literally use it
00:44:58
Speaker
to generate the world because I'm interested in like, well, if I, to kind of go back to what procedural generation is, like it is basically a recipe which tells the world like how things can go together. So a recipe for a recipe. So rather than it saying, we're going to bake a chocolate cake, it says like, we're going to bake a cake and here's all the different ways that cakes can be made. And this is all the different circumstances and how that's going to go together. And these are the possible outcomes kind of from that, but you don't specify the outcomes that's embedded in the algorithm.
00:45:26
Speaker
So sometimes I use it to basically ground truth what I think about something. So I'm like, okay, well, I think that people place houses next to rivers because it looks pretty. Okay. What is the, what is the code? What is the algorithm for something looking pretty? How can I describe that to the game? And then you execute it and you see like, Oh yeah, like that is what I expected. Or you're like, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. And then sometimes I use procedural generation like purely for a mechanical purpose. So it's like,
00:45:52
Speaker
I am lazy when I make stuff. And so it's like, if I don't have to place things, if the machine can do that for me, if it can generate levels faster and better and more interestingly than I can, then I'm just gonna let it do that. And that is devoid of narrative. That does not create place, that does not create any sense of narrative. It is just a purely mechanical thing that it's doing.
00:46:20
Speaker
Okay. Okay! That's my argument. Okay, think about the games for a minute. A game is not a game unless there's an agent playing it. No, absolutely. It's physical.
00:46:35
Speaker
I don't know if I agree with that. I'm not sure how I feel about that statement. And I think that if there is a player in a game space interacting with the game as an agent, that there is narrative, even if the narrative is not coming from the maker's perspective. I think the player brings in the narrative with them.
00:46:56
Speaker
Are you saying that a band, because again, going back former big time MMO freak out here, all of these MMOs that are out there abandoned, there's no players. Are they no longer games because there's no player acting within them? Does it reinstate its game-ness?
00:47:15
Speaker
when we go in and does that count still as a game if for example you or I went in just to research within this space? I love this question because it brings me to the to the focus of games as sites you know if you look at a game as an archaeological site or if you look as archaeological sites as archaeological sites is a site no longer a site when there's no one occupying that site?
00:47:38
Speaker
until it re-emerges through excavation, and then what happens? In my mind, a game is always a game. A game is initially played by one or more people, and then those people might stop playing it or whatever, and that space is still around. So yeah, it can still be classed as a game at that point.
00:47:54
Speaker
But it's like to kind of interject here isn't aren't we talking about two separate things like a game and this is like a terminology thing which I mean keep people in game scholarship argue about all the time god knows like and we argue all the time also but it's like a game is a physical thing like it is like I mean like it can be a cartridge or a CD or it can be a digital thing which is like an amalgamation of
00:48:15
Speaker
code compiled with images. And what we're talking about is gang play. That gang play cannot exist without a player. The game does not run or do anything. It can run, but it's not active. We're getting into the two big arguments and what games have been in a while.
00:48:32
Speaker
It's written in it, but it's waiting for agency to activate it. But you can use procedural generation to seed a whole universe. I can write procedural stuff to tell people to have day-night cycles and how they're going to go about their life and how they're going to interact with the environment. Yes, which still contributes to narrative.
00:48:50
Speaker
But that game would still run. That would still be a God simulated game running on its own. So that's not narrative though, because that doesn't require a player to play. So my argument here is that the primary purpose of this stuff is not purely narrative. Narrative is something which can exist from a player's agency.
00:49:09
Speaker
But that's not necessarily authorial intent or like self-evident within it. And so to categorize everything as narrative. Because narrative is an emergent behavior based on the rules that you've made through your procedural algorithms. But it can also be explicit. So then if you're saying like implicit narrative.
00:49:25
Speaker
then how do we begin to define that? Because that seems like something that is very specific to, I mean, not actually though, like it seems quite specific to video games, but we do it all the time when we read a book, right? Like we imagine the places in our head and we construct the stuff along. Let's go to your cake analogy.
00:49:40
Speaker
Why did you code a cake? It doesn't matter what kind of cake, but you've said, okay, we're going to make a cake in this game. And it can be any of these different kinds based on the rules that have been coded that the computer can follow. So you might get a chocolate cake or a sponge cake or something at the end of it. But why make the cake? Because I can. Because I'm interested. Yes, but that's not a game. But it can be. Like the reason why I make these algorithms is not necessarily
00:50:07
Speaker
narrative embedded it can serve other like ludological or like just personal
00:50:16
Speaker
enjoyment you know you know i have some weird ideas of fun i guess but you know baking is fun baking via code is also fun i guess i guess my problem with this i'm not interested in cakes i can't eat i'm just telling you the cake is a lie it is a lie we won that yeah yes we did so i guess i guess the thing which i'm trying to say here is that like if we categorize everything as narrative if it just is narrative it becomes a meaningless topic like it just becomes a meaningless
00:50:43
Speaker
case to which we just throw all code, all art then becomes narrative, all, like everything just is narrative, like by just existing. Yes. I see. And again, I think there's a place in there I'm having problems. Yeah, because I think narrative requires perspective. Exactly. And this is what I'm trying to get at with this thing, which is, I think that for procedural code to be
00:51:05
Speaker
considered narrative, its function or its purpose has to be narrative, and that there are other functions which exist outside of that. They can contribute to world building, they can contribute to gameplay, but that is very separate to narrative or narrative structure. I mean, I say very separate as if these are like complete black and white lines, which they're not, but you know, like it's... No. We make the space to operate within the space.
00:51:29
Speaker
yeah and i think this goes back i mean to get this to get this back on track to a little bit of archaeology stuff as well instead of just ranting but like when we go into a site right like every object is part of a narrative right but it's like and in itself it can have a narrative but that object is not narrative like the object itself is not narrative the act of making is and the act of usage is and the idea of recovering
00:51:52
Speaker
from context is, and the context itself is narrative. And so this is what I'm trying to get at, which is that procedural generation is not narrative. It can be understood as the process of creating narrative, it can be used for narrative, it can tell narratives, but it is not, like, the object of procedural code and generation is not. Can you think of a way in which it could be narrative? Yeah, a game which I made years ago now, Buried, actually uses a lot of procedural generation
00:52:22
Speaker
to make the narrative on the fly. And so like you can absolutely as well, like it can be narrative and it can be narrative embedded in the code as well, but it's not explicit, it's not self-evident. Right, well the act of making the algorithm is also narrative on the maker's perspective. We're coming at this from two fundamental sides.
00:52:45
Speaker
My flavor of archaeo gaming is coming from a player archaeological perspective to understand the mind of the maker through the artifact of the game. And it seems like you're coming at it from the side of the maker, making the space and building the world to see how all of these things operate. And so we're meeting in the middle now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:53:08
Speaker
And I think that's a little bit, I mean, I have this frustration with kind of critical studies with games a lot of the time, which is that people will use the games to make commentaries on what creators were doing or say like, this is what games are. But those people are often not themselves creators, which is not a problem. Critical studies are important. But it's like in this instance, it's like there is this two-sided thing, right, where it can absolutely be narrative to you when you interpret it, but it has to be recognised that that's your interpretation, not the thing.
00:53:37
Speaker
Maybe, from my perspective. Let's step away from narrative for a second. And as a person who writes code, have you ever experienced something where you've written a procedural algorithm and you've run it and it did something that you didn't expect?
00:53:54
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of the time. But, and I mean, like, I say this quite guardedly, because I know this is going to go into the like, whoa, procedural code doing really like, wow, insane stuff. But every single time it is because like, either
00:54:09
Speaker
procedural generation is really good at doing complex mathematics, which a lot of humans who are, you know, like myself, cannot comprehend. Like, I cannot physically think these things through their whole way to their full extent. So a lot of the time when I run, like, if I make something with procedural generation and it executes and it does something that I didn't expect, it's because I was like, wow,
00:54:31
Speaker
That's interesting that it did that like that far. It's not because it did something the code didn't tell it to do. And this is the same thing as well with like, it's a bit like simulation modeling, right? Where it's like, you can't predict everything because you can't mathematically hold that knowledge in your head and calculate it spatially.
00:54:47
Speaker
So you can be surprised by what it spits out. Or if you make an error, like you leave a couple of semicolons off in some places, some things interact, but weirdly you end up with your houses in the sky. Like, you know, that also happens, but that's human error, not code creating random stuff. Sorry. Oh my God.
00:55:08
Speaker
That's the New Zealander coming out? No, no. That's fine. We restrained our American-ness to a great degree and not randomly swore or shot anything during the war. That's just firing time. No, that's... wow. But this is... what you've described is no different than nature.
00:55:29
Speaker
And that nature has mutations that do surprising things because of some kind of strange mistake, which is crept into a system. Yes, exactly. Don't think of it as a mistake. It's not a mistake necessarily. It's a feature, not a bug. It's a feature, not a bug. Yeah. There is a point that you can trace it all back to you and figure out why something did what it did. But in procedurally generated code, the math may get so intense that it may be difficult for us.
00:55:56
Speaker
You can go, this is the thing that you can go backwards, but it requires you to have not only, I mean like, and this is why we speak archaeologically, where it's like, we also can't go backwards, right? We can make interpretations, and same with procedural generation, you can make interpretations, but getting to the actual thing, I mean like, you would have to be a really good programmer with really good maths. You can't unbake a cake.
00:56:18
Speaker
Yeah, but you can like scientifically analyze its components and the way that it turns out to make a fairly good assessment of it. And this is the same with procedural generation. And this is the same with what we do with archaeology. And this is a really good thing, which is I find fascinating about your research and to procedural generation.
00:56:35
Speaker
Which is, I mean, like, on the one hand, I'm kind of like, why don't you just ask the creator or why don't you just write the code yourself? But it's like, like, I really do get, I mean, like, it's the same thing with archaeology. We can't do that. Like, we can't go back and ask our creators of these objects. No, our archaeology inherently takes place in the present. And so it's kind of like, if we can understand this in a controlled environment, like if you can start to understand how we can make assessments of procedural generation going back in time to a creator.
Conclusion and Audience Engagement
00:56:59
Speaker
There are some really interesting implications for how we can start to apply that to archaeology now. And this is back on track, so Andrew, go ahead. I need a cigarette. No. No, you don't. This is awesome. This is exactly what I've been waiting for. Well, I think we're going to end the deep dive at this point where we are swearing and using mild narcotics.
00:57:28
Speaker
Thanks so much for the discussion today, guys. We hit a lot of different notes. We went a lot of different places. It was interesting. And I think that we came out of this conversation today with more things to talk about, which is always the way that you want big conversations like this to happen. So until next time, I am Megan Dennis. I'm Tara. And I'm Andrew. And we'll see you next time. Bye.
00:58:03
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.
00:58:33
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