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Archaeogaming and the No Man's Sky Survey - Episode 1
175 Plays8 years ago
In the first Episode of 8bit Test Pit: Main Campaign we meet our host panel Andrew Reinhard, Meghan Dennis, and Tara Copplestone. We talk about what Archaeogaming is, the history of the field, and what the overall goals of studying the intersection of gaming and archaeology are. We also talk about the upcoming No Man's Sky Survey and why a survey like this should be done.
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Transcript
Introduction to 8-Bit Test Pit
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Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. 8-Bit Test Pit is here to put archaeogaming on the map. Hosted by key players of the archaeogaming world, 8-Bit Test Pit sets to explain the weird and wonderful connections between the study of our past and the virtual world we like to explore. 8-Bit Test Pit breaks the field of archaeogaming down into three accessible formats.
Podcast Structure Overview
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Speaker
The main campaign is the monthly show featuring a panel discussion led by Andrew Reinhardt, Megan Dennis, and Tara Copplestone.
00:00:30
Speaker
on a number of issues and topics, all of which revolve around the intersection of archaeology and gaming, everything from coding practices to ethics in and about the game reality. Dug up content is bite-sized 15-minute episodes released every six weeks, filled to the brim with information covering key terms and concepts in and about the field of archaeo
Meet the Hosts
00:00:50
Speaker
gaming. These will inform and educate in the time it takes to load your saved game. Archaeo Deathmatch
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Speaker
Two archaeogamers enter, one archaeogamer leaves. When a field is new, disagreements are going to happen. Here in the virtual arena, two archaeologists debate a topic related to archaeogaming, hosted every five weeks, or is needed. Archaeogaming covers not only the study of archaeology in video games, but also the study of games as material culture. Some of our hosts you already may know. Andrew Reinhardt, who was featured in the documentary
00:01:20
Speaker
Atari Game Over, Tara Copplestone, who studies how games are made through an archaeological lens, and Megan Dennis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of York who is studying ethics in video games. Plus, many more interested and insightful players in the archaeogaming world are ready to load.
What is Archaeo-gaming?
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The show is hosted and produced by Sarah Head of Archaeophantasy Spain and Tristan Boyle, content creator of the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:01:48
Speaker
Welcome to the first episode of 8-Bit Test Pit, main campaign. I'm your GM for the night, Sarah Head, and I'm joined today by Andrew Reinhardt, Megan Dennis, and Tara Copplestone. Today we're talking about what archaeo gaming is, and a little bit about the history of the up and coming field. We'll talk about why archaeo gaming is important, and then we'll delve into the No Man's Sky survey, which we'll be launching along with the game in August. So find your dice and get ready to roll initiative.
00:02:22
Speaker
Hey, everyone, and welcome to the first episode of the main campaign, part of the 8-bit Test Pit podcast. I'm your host today, Sarah, and I am joined with Go Megan. I'm Megan Dennis. And Tara. And Tara Copplestone. Copplestone. Yes, Copplestone. Copplestone. Andrew. Andrew Reinhardt. Here we go. Today we're getting a history of what archaeo gaming is and
00:02:45
Speaker
what we hope to get out of the field of archaeo-gaming as it develops. So who would like to start with that? Archaeo-gaming generally can be defined in the five words, which is basically the archaeology in and
Origins of Archaeo-gaming
00:02:58
Speaker
of video games. So treating video games as their own physical artifacts, their own part of material culture, or the archaeological record of the present day. And also considering the archaeology within virtual spaces.
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How do machines create material culture. How do people interact with the virtual world in relationship to built environments and things like that so there are
00:03:23
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There are a ton of little things to consider, everything from looking at soft video games, to considering games as archaeological sites and artifacts, to archaeological reception. How do people perceive archaeology and archaeologists within those virtual worlds? What do we do with looting and how does that work?
00:03:45
Speaker
So you have ethics involved in there as well. And it's really grown since, I think, Ethan Wachrell at Michigan State started publishing on this back in 2002. And we've seen that grow until the creation of Tara's blog and Sean Graham's as well.
00:04:08
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you know, basically having a public facing side to further explore what it means to do archaeology within a digital environment, specifically games.
Ethics and Looting in Games
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Megan, you want to add to that? I think Andrew covered a lot of it. I know when I think of it, I talk about it as doing archaeology within immaterial space that happens to be game spaces.
00:04:34
Speaker
and the inner sense in between how that immaterial space and the material space in which the player resides, how they cross back and forth, and what sort of material culture comes out of that sort of intersection. So it can get very theoretical, but it can also be straight, what we think of as field work, actually going into a game
00:05:05
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conducting survey, conducting innovation, conducting cultural reports.
Games as Arguments about the Past
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So there's a lot of different ways to do this. And one of the things that I've really enjoyed as we've watched this sort of grow and become something that other people take seriously enough to give us a podcast is how there's so many different ways that we're all approaching this right now.
00:05:31
Speaker
Okay, Tara, would you like to add to that? Yeah, I guess my sort of particular take is how us as archaeologists can use games to construct our argument about the past and to kind of use the affordances of the video game media form to kind
00:05:47
Speaker
to think about and actually do archaeology as well, as well as representing it. And then sort of another strand to that is to go into the field, so it may seem, and talk to the people who are making the games at the game studios, the designers, the developers, the artists, the sound people, the everybody involved, and think about how are they mediating with archaeology, and how does that transcribe to what we see? How do these levels of code and people in industry
Narrative and Ethics in Archaeo-gaming
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is with what we're doing and how we use those things as archaeologists to further our discipline. That's one, Tara, that's a great point. That's one of the things that I've always been interested in as an archaeologist, especially coming from a classical tradition of studying ancient Greece, for example. We never have the opportunity to talk to the makers of the pottery that we find from the sixth century BC.
00:06:41
Speaker
And as contemporary archaeologists, we really have access that we've never had before historically, you know, in our field to be able to talk to the makers and ask these archaeological that we would love to add, you know, to be living 2000 years ago. So so here we are. And then how does that inform our perception of the material culture that's being produced right now?
00:07:01
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Exactly. I think this particularly comes into play and we'll talk a bit later about it, but with things like No Man's Sky where there is this procedural generation and this like real use of code to do things that aren't applicable in other ways and how we can kind of see that relationship between code and outcome and maker and how we can actually like investigate that space and how we could then apply that to what we do physically in the field. It's an interesting kind of, not a theoretical but methodological applications for a lot of the stuff.
00:07:31
Speaker
So, Andrew, you mentioned that someone had been doing this back in 2002. Can you give us a little bit of, just kind of fill the history of the development of the field of archaeo gaming in a little bit?
Historical Development of Archaeo-gaming
00:07:46
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I could do a little bit of that, sure. In doing research for the archaeology book that I'm working on, I was trying to find the ERR document, which is talking about the archaeology of video games. And one of the earliest that I found was by Ethan Watrol. And he goes by Captain Primate on Twitter. And this was a publication. It was an article for the Society of American Archaeology Journal that he'd done.
00:08:12
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And it's basically exploring how games can be interpreted archaeologically. You fast forward a little bit, and you've got blogs, very old blogs, especially one that Sean Graham involved with called Play
Academic Recognition of Archaeo-gaming
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the Past. It's at playtheast.org, where you're taking a look at video games as documents of
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various histories. So you're taking a look at like Sid Meier's Civilization, or you're taking a look at other games that are set in an imagined or real historical past. And how do these games arrive at their goals? You know, how do they use history to communicate something? And this gets into serious gaming, it gets into education and edutainment. And so you have that blog, which has been going
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for 10 years. And so there's real depth of content there. You've got folks like Colleen Morgan, who's currently at the University of York, Azar, Tara, and Megan, where she's writing about not only the Wii version of Tomb Raider, for example, where you're using controllers as your actual excavation tools,
00:09:20
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to really doing a lot of work with Second Life, whether it's 3D reconstruction or taking a look at built environments and a culture within that virtual space, even though Second Life's not necessarily a game. It does have virtual environment, is akin to a lot of other open worlds that we use as play spaces.
Atari Excavation Project
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You fast forward a little bit to maybe 2013, and this is, I think, when Tara's getting her blog started, maybe it was a little earlier, my blog, archaeogaming.com, was in 2013.
00:09:50
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And I think all of us kind of came to the same portmanteau of archaeo gaming at about the same time, which is really cool. And we kind of found each other. And I thought I was doing this by myself. And Tara was thinking, oh, she was working in a vacuum.
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you know there are lots of us who've kind of come to the woodwork thinking about the same thing all of a sudden we've got an archaeo gaming collective. In 2014 we did the Atari excavation which is real world archaeology of video games which hadn't happened before and then we started seeing conferences. You had
00:10:26
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conferences in Sweden for archaeo gaming conferences. The most recent one is by the value project at the University of Leiden, which was all about archaeo gaming and it's now being treated as a serious thing in the academy.
Career Path: Tara's Journey
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That's pretty cool. Was anyone involved with the ET dig?
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, I played lead archaeologist on the ET dig. So what were your stats? Well, I was an elite. No, I'm kidding. Far from it. But yeah, if you watch Atari Game Over, the documentary, you can actually watch the dig happen. It was more of a salvage excavation and kind of a media circus. But at the same time, we were trying to do some real science
00:11:17
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Yeah, and everyone was really fascinated by the discovery of all of those. I still don't understand why they just buried them. Like, why wouldn't you burn them or something? But anyway. It was cheaper for them to bury. This is weird. I heard some of them still played.
00:11:32
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No, we actually, this is a bit of a digression, but as we were digging, we were pulling out cartridges that were in excellent condition. And then we actually had a pair of 2600s hooked up to old school television sets at the side of the trench.
00:11:51
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And so there was a runner and they would run from the from the side of the trench with the cartridge over to the to the console and they plug it in, they dust it off, they plug it in. No. All right, let's try another one. And so none of them happened. None of them were able to be played. However, during during the auctions that the city of Alam Gorda was running, there was one buyer, and I've forgotten his name now, but he's a
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He's a tech and also a gamer and he was able to buy one of the ET games that was recovered and he was able to rehab the chip or the wafer in order to play in his 2600 and the only game out of the excavation that was able to be played and it's only because he did some TLC to it after the fact.
00:12:34
Speaker
That's pretty cool, though. So, Tara, can you tell us a little bit about the work that you've done in the past with the archaeo
Ethical Considerations in Gaming
00:12:41
Speaker
gaming? Since you are all coming about at the same time, can you tell us a little bit about your work to begin with? Yeah, definitely. So I come from a bit of a different background. I come from IT or, well, computer science, and I got dragged into archaeology. Was it kicking and screaming? Originally, yes. But then I got to go in a couple of excavations and I was hooked. I was like, this seems like
00:13:04
Speaker
But anyway, so I was doing agent based modeling, and I'd also had a background doing like semi professional gaming for a year. So I was doing both at the same time, and I kind of came around to this idea that video games as a media form are kind of quite special.
00:13:20
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And at about the time that I was about to start my Masters, Andrew's blog kicked off in full swing. And I was fascinated by this idea that we could make arguments or see archaeological arguments through games.
00:13:36
Speaker
There's a lot of course going on about what is or isn't good archaeology in a game. And I was kind of curious as to, well, why does this whole process happen? What else could we be doing? Why do these things occur? So I thought I'd go out into the world and talk to people who are making the games and playing them.
00:13:59
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But I sort of came at it from the approach which was that media or that games are a media form and that archaeology has this like long, long relationship.
00:14:09
Speaker
a very virtuous relationship using various different media forms, like whether that's like plain text or films or appropriating things like Second Life for their own nefarious purposes all the way through to video games now as well.
Misrepresentation and Ethics in Games
00:14:25
Speaker
So I guess that's my kind of take on it. And I think that Andrew brought up a really good point earlier about how we've been using games a lot or like game-based technology. So we've used things like Unity as a game engine, but we haven't necessarily used it to make games. We've used them
00:14:39
Speaker
for other things. We've used Second Life, but not as a game. We've used it for other things. There's kind of turning point. Yeah, exactly. Very much so. But there was this real turning point around like 2013, 2014, where things kind of switched from it just being like, oh, we're just going to use these things that other people are doing to suddenly being like, oh, let's critically actually look at games as a media. Let's actually build upon this. And I think that
00:15:08
Speaker
My research kind of comes in from the media side and the making side. And then we have like Andrew and Megan, who are doing this amazing work, thinking about, well, why are we making things this? How does it talk about other things? And I'm sure in the future there'll be these other great discourses that come up as well as part of that. Megan, do you want to talk a little bit about what you've been doing too? Sure.
00:15:30
Speaker
I got into this because I was doing field archaeology and I was doing contract work in the States, and I was doing my archaeology, which is what my training background is in, in Belize. And I was encountering lots of looted context. And it was one of those visions or the concept of the right people together at the right time.
00:15:56
Speaker
Um, and I had started talking to, uh, Andrew and Tara online. Um, and I was literally in the jungle, uh, and Donna Yates showed up. Um, and so she and I got to talking about, um, looting in the antiquities market, sitting around in the jungle. Um, while I was, you know, also using the rigged, uh, cell network to like check my Twitter.
00:16:24
Speaker
and start putting these ideas together about why is it that these behaviors become, these behaviors that we know as archaeologists are unacceptable, why do they become the narrative? Why is that what people know about archaeology? Why is unethical behavior and looting and destroying sites? Why is that what people believe in a lot of parts of the world that we do?
00:16:51
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And I was putting that together with my secondary
Ethics in Game Development
00:16:55
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job, which was doing community management for an MMO and kind of looking at how players were thinking about these things in the games that we were making. And it all just kind of came together for me to decide to look at representations and look at how the way in which we're perceived as professionals
00:17:19
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Uh, and the way in which, uh, avocational archaeology is perceived and the way in which ethical and unethical decisions are showing up in these games. And how does that influence what we think of ourselves as archaeologist? No.
00:17:37
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know, we, we need a bad rap, but I think a lot of us come to it from that. So now we have this generation that is not necessarily film based, but is game based, they get their ideas about the world from what they see in video games. How does that play into how they're feeling about archaeology? And does participation in these bad behaviors in games lead to
00:18:03
Speaker
either an allowance of or a direct participation in bad behaviors outside of games. And I got fortunate that this all came together at the right time so that I could actually look at this as a serious academic study instead of what I did when I wasn't digging. So I feel really lucky that we all came together at the right time for this.
00:18:27
Speaker
So we could effectively say that you three, along with Sean and maybe Colleen Morgan, are actually the pioneers of this field then. I feel very second wave already. But I say that, yeah, these guys are definitely the ones who put it out there so that we could start to have a second wave. And at this point, I'm already seeing like third wave people who
00:18:56
Speaker
I'm having to tell them, like, you need to go back and look at this stuff because you're trying to design projects and you don't even know what was happening two or three years ago. But that's how it works. Yeah. And with the first wave, you have people kind of toying around with the idea of archaeology and video games and how they might
00:19:18
Speaker
relate. I think our group, we're coming across with developing some kind of method and theory, you know, to understand what it is that we're doing with the third wave, maybe the new wave, I don't know, or no wave, who knows, dark
Open Access and Ethical Game Development
00:19:37
Speaker
wave, maybe. I was gonna go there.
00:19:42
Speaker
You've got a lot of people who have interests in a particular game, a particular series, or taking a look at a single question as opposed to a bunch of questions and running with that. So it's been interesting to watch the tree grow from the trunk to the branches and now out to these tiny little budding limbs.
00:20:01
Speaker
Tara, did you want to add anything? Yeah, I was going to say that there's a long history of people who have been looking at how we can construct things using game engines, like one that springs to mind very strongly as Eric Champion, who's done wonderful, wonderful work looking at virtual reality, augmented reality, game-based stuff, pedagogy. But it's kind of really been literally in this last year or so that things have been condensed and solidified to being, like, archiving is the best discipline.
00:20:28
Speaker
And it's a serious discipline. It's one with very far reaching consequences outside of academia, as Megan said, with engaging with the general public, not just with teaching them, but also with how we can structure our discipline internally and everything. It's become this this like real powerhouse, I guess, where we can actually all let into and do stuff from rather than just disparate people kind of putting things out into the world and hoping for the best.
Archaeological Narratives in Games
00:20:55
Speaker
All right, well, we're going to go to break real quick. And when we come back, we're going to continue our discussion about this developing field. The Archaeotech Podcast, hosted by Chris Webby Webster and Chris Boone Sims, is a show dedicated to the technology of the modern archaeologist. On the Archaeotech Podcast, we interview people using interesting tech. And we dig into the issues, advantages, and try to uncover the disadvantages of the digital age and going paperless.
00:21:24
Speaker
We all know there is no paper in the future, or should we say, paper has no future. Check out the show at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeotech. Let's get back to the show.
00:21:38
Speaker
And we are back and we are still talking about archaeo gaming because that is the point of our show. And I would like to talk about some games that have had, I guess, the field of archaeo gaming applied to them from the past or something quite recent. I know Megan's been doing some work. Taro, did you apply? Is there a specific game that you can use as an example that you have used some principles from archaeo gaming in?
00:22:08
Speaker
Well, most of my work focuses around making games or analyzing how games are made. So I've worked on games, both commercial and non-commercial. Yeah, so Andrew, what games have you applied in the past, archaeo gaming principles to?
Games Redefining Archaeological Theory
00:22:23
Speaker
Um, I've, I've done a few. Um, I remember when I was starting at the very beginning to think about archaeo gaming back in 2013, um, I was immediately drawn to world war craft as well as, uh, the elder scrolls, you know, specific skyrim.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yes. God help me. I love that game too. And just, you know, I was playing as an Imperial, which was awesome because right out of the gate, I'm working with classical reception. That is to say, how is this game appropriated? You know, the armor and the culture and the mores of Imperial Rome and what does that mean? And because I'm a big pothead, that is to say I like pottery. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
00:23:04
Speaker
I, I do. Oh, my gosh, my thesis was in pottery. So, so I was looking at the pottery typologies and how they, so it was a bowl look like in Skyrim compared to a bowl from a similar culture and oblivion compared to Daggerfall.
00:23:22
Speaker
And looking at all these games in the series and watching the typology and the shapes and the forms change over time and trying to determine what's going on with the design aspect. So that's one thing.
No Man's Sky as an Archaeological Tool
00:23:31
Speaker
I think most recently, I mean, prior to going into No Man's Sky in August, I played Hearthstone, which is this free-to-play card game that Blizzard put out.
00:23:42
Speaker
And they had an expansion pack called League of explorers, and you have all these people were wearing characters and I was really interested to see how archaeology was represented or interpreted in the card game, and what was going on and so I found
00:24:00
Speaker
that the game it's not even parodying archaeological tropes it seems to have been developed to interpret archaeology for pop culture which in turn interprets archaeology from what real real archaeologists do and how they appear and what they say and takes a real colonial approach
Episode Wrap-up
00:24:18
Speaker
or looks at it through a colonial
00:24:20
Speaker
And so being able to look at archaeological reception, which is a big part of archaeo gaming, was important. And Hearthstone, that tons of people play, was a really good way to get a feel for how a developer is looking at archaeology and how players are looking at archaeology, not necessarily derived from archaeologists themselves, but specifically from pop culture tropes that exist in media and using that as the way to inform the game. Megan, can you talk about the work that you've been doing?
00:24:50
Speaker
Sure, I did initially a lot of work with Uncharted and specifically I was looking at Uncharted 3. I have not played 4 yet because I've said it as a case study for my dissertation so I'm just like waiting and it's killing me. It's gonna be like six months again before I can play it. So I did work with Uncharted. I did some work with
00:25:19
Speaker
two-reader series. I did recently work with Dragon Age Inquisition and I made a lot of work with Curious Expedition, which is a smaller game that I think has done some really interesting things with ethics and archaeology
00:25:40
Speaker
and representations of past people, including real archeologists. What was the name of that game again? It is The Curious Expedition. Okay. Oh yeah, kind of love that game. Yeah, it's so great. And right now, I am going back and playing through the first two Uncharted games again. And I am trying to get my hands on some early games,
00:26:10
Speaker
Really, really stuff arcade stuff to.
00:26:14
Speaker
start working on really early stuff and figure out how we can trace it, basically, through history. So before I attack Tara again, what have you guys found? Andrew, you were talking about the pottery typology. But my initial question there is, how do you know that you're looking at typology? And how do you distinguish that between, obviously, the graphics for the games in the Elder Scrolls
00:26:42
Speaker
have improved since you know the first Elder Scrolls game came out to all the way up to I think Skyrim was the last release. Yeah I mean yeah discounting Elder Scrolls online and I think they're doing another one I mean they're remixing Skyrim. They are remixing Skyrim. Awesome yeah awesome and then ESO and then I guess they're getting ready to do a new one too but that's just hearsay right now so don't quote me on that but
00:27:06
Speaker
But you've got to think to the technology and the use creation of technology in the real world, as well as in the virtual space. And finally, these two things are in parallel, although the timeline is much more accelerated when you're looking at things in a virtual space or in a digital environment. So yeah, you go from game to game, and because you're working with
00:27:29
Speaker
uh you know everything from you know eight bit 16 bit 32 bit 64 bit and so on um you know the graphics get better and better and better and the tools to make those graphics get better and better and better as we approach photo realism and now there's this big kick with retro gaming so things look old even though they're like an undertale but but in any case um you compare that to the history of of pottery or of any technology where they look really grotty and really ugly but they serve a function of holding
00:27:56
Speaker
Things you know right and then you look at a bowl you know a hundred years later two hundred years later and and they have improved the technology it still has the same function. But it looks better and it feels better and they've applied decoration and everything like that so you know you're looking at these things in the games and the designers are doing best with the technology that they have and in fact their needs.
00:28:16
Speaker
I would assume drive the notion of new technology to make this better or easier. And so the same is true of things in the real world, which is a real tie-in. And I think it gets beyond analogy. It's how people make things. And a game is a thing, even if it's virtually downloaded. It's still produced by people. And that makes these archaeological artifacts that do change over time and hopefully improve with quality.
00:28:45
Speaker
Megan, I'm going to ask you about ethics real quick, and then I'm going to ask Tara about, because we're talking about the user end of the game here, Tara's focused more on the creator end. So let's talk about ethics in the game. And then I'm going to ask Tara about archaeology and the making of games. Well, when I'm looking at ethics and archaeo gaming, I'm looking at two different things. I'm looking at ethics as they occur within the game narrative, which is
00:29:14
Speaker
do you have the option to play a game that may involve archaeology or involve artifacts? How about the option to play that ethically? And I'm also looking at, as archaeo gaming researchers, what should our policies of ethics be as we approach this new field of research? How do we talk to the communities of players? How do we talk to the developers? Should we be talking to the players and developers in what ways?
00:29:43
Speaker
What sort of access to our data should we be providing to the communities that we interact with? How should we be interacting with those communities when we play a game? So it gets someone into photography and there's a lot of people who've done really great work on researching in digital spaces. Now we just have to kind of twist it to figure out how it's going to work in a game space. So there's those two
00:30:08
Speaker
threads of ethics as I see it in archaeo gaming, narrative and researcher. And figuring out how you act as an ethical researcher while perhaps playing and researching in a space where you can't behave ethically as a character or as an actor within the game, that's a place that I'm very interested in looking at. And does it influence what our data is?
00:30:37
Speaker
if we have to behave unethically within the narrative to collect.
00:30:41
Speaker
data that we want to use ethically as a research tool. Now, when you're saying, acting ethically within the narrative, I mean, obviously, ethics in the outside world, those are mostly defined-ish. Yes. But when we're talking about ethics inside of a game space, what do we mean when we're saying that? Like, in the games, give us an example of in a game when you have to act unethically. All right, so a real big obvious one is
00:31:11
Speaker
let's look at the Tomb Raider games, specifically the two most recent Tomb Raider games. Within those games, you are presented very frequently with artifacts, and you have to interact with them, and Lara Croft, in these iterations of the games, has this extra twist put in, and that she actually is an archaeology student, so she's credentialed, and not because of
00:31:38
Speaker
expertise and how expertise should be treated. But what do we do with those objects? In some of the scenes in the games, it becomes very clear that when you interact with the object that you are taking the object and taking it out of context and removing it. In some scenes, it's not clear whether you are. And in some scenes, it's clear that you are leaving it there. And what does it mean for us to interact with those artifacts
00:32:06
Speaker
And to get that extra information within the narrative either pushes their narrative along or gives us extra background information or acts as flavor within the world. What does it mean to have that information knowing that we're not necessarily obtaining it in a way that if we were an archaeologist in that situation, we would not find acceptable. Same thing with treatment of human remains.
00:32:34
Speaker
We treat human remains in video games in ways that we would absolutely never treat them in the field. We would not handle human remains the same way we would not expose them to the same way we would not replace Ocala with them. But in games, you wonder through mortuary spaces and mess up mortuary spaces and throw bones around and knock skulls over and nobody says anything about it.
00:33:04
Speaker
So that's what I mean by the narrative space, things that are part of the storyline or that you need to advance the story to keep playing the game or to level up in the game that if you were an actual archeologist, you would not do because you probably had some sort of a violation. So taking that into consideration, Tara, how do, or how much of that
00:33:32
Speaker
do game creators take into consideration? Do they think about ethics when they're creating a game? Or is it what can I do to make this game the most awesome game? And if that means I have to throw a couple skulls around, then hey, so be it. Well, you find that a lot of people who are working on the ground, I'm going to talk about
00:33:54
Speaker
companies start with. So you're going to talk about which companies like smash AAA companies in general. I can't talk about specifics. No, that's fine. Non-disposure agreements for my stuff. But it's like big, big, big companies that produce like the headline stuff. The people who are working on the ground, so like your narrative designers, your level designers,
00:34:13
Speaker
Even your programmers, your sound people, they're very, very conscious of these morals and ethics and these like, because everything that they create in this game world is deliberate, right? Like you can't just, things don't just happen. You have to create everything. So everything is a deliberate decision they make.
00:34:30
Speaker
The film is a drawing from what has happened in games previously and they're drawing from what's publicly available. And there's not anything out there at the moment that really says in an accessible way, how do archaeologists actually deal with this stuff? And we can kind of get a sense, right? Like being archaeologists, we think it's a given. And in the general world, as you work around, you're kind of like, well, I get that I probably shouldn't just rifle through the space, but
00:34:53
Speaker
That's how a lot of the video games at their very, very like first iterations, they relied on very, very simplistic mechanics to achieve because the process. Those mechanics about like Rob to get more, more gear to get more power ups that has stayed with us as we go on for want of better examples. And the other side that drives is that games at this AAA commercially viable level
00:35:18
Speaker
operate in the sphere where they have to make money, right? And the way that they kind of think about this is, well, if games have sold well in the past, well, then why would we do something different? And making a case by saying, well, that's not how we do it in archaeology is not really enough to kind of say,
00:35:33
Speaker
we should do it differently. There has to be a real sort of ground to what mechanics we make. Would that be more interesting for a player? What else does that tell us? So people are very receptive to these ideas, but it's just we lack a lot of the groundwork, which is where I think Megan's research is so great, because it's going to sort of start actually pushing a bit of this boundary. By redefining ethics as they should be used in a narrative,
00:35:57
Speaker
Do you think maybe, and here we can pull in some actual other archeology field controversy, do you think making actual archeology
00:36:09
Speaker
more accessible to the public, like open access. Do you think by having research data and final papers and that kind of stuff, obviously things that would not jeopardize a site or a set of artifacts, but making the open access, do you think that would help game developers create a more ethical game?
00:36:29
Speaker
Absolutely on one level. The other side to this is that we need to produce material which is relevant and makes sense to games. So games are their own media form, they have their own foundations and their own ways of making arguments.
00:36:43
Speaker
We as biologists are used to writing in text. We've moved on a bit. We use photos now. We sometimes use videos. We use GIS. We're slowly making these part of our normative practice, but we don't write interactive or multilinear or reflexively or in these kind of ways which games excel in.
00:37:02
Speaker
So the problem then comes that as a game developer, they're being asked to take these narratives, these very structured linear formal narratives that we write and translate them without actually knowing that much about our practice because they're not archaeologists in the same way that like we're not brains we can't expect to do.
00:37:19
Speaker
make a lot of these higher theoretical leaps. So there's kind of a two way process here, right? Like we need to have better games, we need people to be receptive to it, or I say better games, different games. We need people to be in the game development side to be receptive to this. But us as archaeologists also need to acknowledge how we are producing our narratives and how we can make those accessible in a way which makes sense to these people. So when we actually talk,
00:37:43
Speaker
And there's a couple of examples when I was working at various geos where they would actually bring in archaeologists to be advisors.
00:37:53
Speaker
The problem was the archaeology was speaking archaeology in this like very formal up and down way. And the game design is just like, what are these people talking about? I have no idea. And so you just end up with these like ships crossing in the night. So it's a two way thing. We need to think in games as much as game developers need to be receptive to all this great open access stuff that we're also starting to throw out there. I think we have the opportunity to do that now when we talk like we mentioned earlier about generationally.
00:38:21
Speaker
that we have a generation of gamers now, solid gamers. I think that the fact that we have gamers who are archaeologists and archaeologists who are gamers, and now we have this sub-discipline of archaeology, this archaeo-gaming that looks at this in an academic way and in a methodological way and in a field applicable way.
00:38:46
Speaker
that we have the opportunity right now to make that crossover statement, to have people embed into industry and have industry interact with archeologists and have finally the truth to people effectively speaking a common language of game and can use their expertise on both sides to get the good stuff across so that we start seeing better representations.
00:39:15
Speaker
Well, and it seems like this kind of thing, thinking in game as an academic or just as an archaeologist, it seems like there would be a much better way for us to learn to start communicating to the general public as a whole as well. Because I know that I have shared on my feed now two different 3D interactive archaeological sites. One of them is the cave in which the hobbits were found.
00:39:42
Speaker
and the other one is just a panoramic view of one of the Egyptian sites and I know that the cave one where you can actually you can't like click and interact with anything but you can go into this 3D space and you can look up and you can look down and you can move around in it as opposed to the panoramic where you can just kind of spin around and
00:40:04
Speaker
Pan up and pan down, but you're in a fixed position. I know the cave one was a lot more Enjoyed by the average person in my feed as opposed to the panoramic view where people are like and it's cool But you know, I've got pictures or I can look at a magazine The cave one was put together via data points and was made to be a 3d interactive space where the panoramic though need to look at But both of those are received much better than if I just put up a description of something. I
00:40:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's something in that is that games in general, I mean, like we think of them as these entertainment goods and as like communicative tools sometimes. But the way that we experience games like agents, like you make decisions and that you can have like your choices can have impact on how you experience that world is actually how we experience the world that we live in, right? So I think there's something quite powerful about the rhetoric that you can make in a game or an even in something just like an interactive experience.
00:41:00
Speaker
versus how we write text, which is a very formal, very guided way of navigating archaeology. And I think it's more immediately accessible because people are used to doing that. So, Megan sort of mentioned digital literacy as something which is coming through a lot more now, and that's an important step as well for people learning how to use these things and how to operate in their space. But as digital literacy improves both for people to make these things as well as to navigate them, I definitely think that your point about them being
00:41:30
Speaker
if not easier than definitely being able to make different arguments as well, on top of what we already do. It's very valid. Andrew, did you want to add something? Yeah, what Tara has said is quite true. I wanted to add also that, you know, with working with games or creating digital spaces, if we pay attention as archaeologists to actively engaging public, making things engaging, making them interactive,
00:41:57
Speaker
And not forgetting the human element. I mean, archaeology is a human science. We interact with things. We're interested in things. And I think we're more interested in the people who use these things and who made them than anything else. And this goes back to one of my new favorite authors is Cornelius Holthorff and in his books from Stonehenge to Las Vegas and also in his book
00:42:19
Speaker
Archaeology is a brand, you know, he is talking about how archaeologists can make the science, a little more approachable to the general look into them and to engage them. And one of the things that's coming out, and we'll talk about this in the next section on no man's sky and the archaeology survey is the fact that we'll open this up to the crowd after we figure out some best practices and people are just
00:42:41
Speaker
ready to do it. They can't wait to help. They want to learn about archaeology and they want to learn by doing. Okay, well let's go to break real quick and when we come back we will move on to the very exciting No Man's Sky survey that's coming up.
00:43:07
Speaker
Did aliens build Stonehenge? Did the Easter Island statues walk? Did the Vikings colonize Midwest America? What does mainstream archaeology have to say about all of this? Listen to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast and learn about popular archaeological mysteries. Hoax or fact? Learn to tell the difference with Dr. Kenneth Fader and co-host Sarah of the Archaeophantasies blog.
00:43:28
Speaker
Check out the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and get ready to think critically. Let's get back to the show.
00:43:49
Speaker
And we are back and we are going to talk about the upcoming survey in the launch of the No Man's Sky game, which until Pokemon launched was one of the most anticipated games of the year. And it probably still is one of the most anticipated games. But it's, Andrew, can you tell us a little bit about what No Man's Sky is and why this is the one you've decided to target for this particular survey?
00:44:18
Speaker
You bet. I've been looking forward to this game for about three years now. And basically, this is like, you know, when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, this is what we've been training for. You know, everything else, everything else, all these other games that we kind of play around in are the product of direct input from design. You know, somebody writes a game, we play the game.
00:44:41
Speaker
great. Now, No Man's Sky is special because it takes what's known as procedural generation, which is not a new concept. I mean, we've had procedural generation all the way back to, you know, for programming classes, you know, to games like Elite, you know, which is from the 1980s, which basically says, here are some rules that are governed by code. And every time you log in,
00:45:06
Speaker
the game sets up a little bit differently, but according to the set of rules that have been established by the developer. Okay, great. Now, No Man's Sky is a universe-sized game that's like one-to-one scale. So they're apparently a quintillion worlds. You can visit all of them.
00:45:25
Speaker
And they're all different and, you know, in either really big ways or really subtle ways. And because there are over 800,000 lines of code, you have the chance of seeing some really startling things. You know, the developers, Hello Games, based in Guildford, UK, said that they were sending drones into the universe as they were building this thing.
00:45:45
Speaker
And the drones were reporting back or the probes were reporting back some weird stuff like houses walking around on legs. And so you've got that to look forward to as the end product of how the cook.
00:46:01
Speaker
How many other rules combine to create what is known as an emergent behavior? Part of the real interest for me, and I think the sole driving interest for me, I know that others have other research questions that they're bringing to the game.
00:46:16
Speaker
But for me, I want to see how machine created culture actually works. There is sentient life in the game. There are going to be built environments in the game. There are going to be things to interact with that are not natural, that are not made by nature. There's going to be geomorphology. There's going to be, you know, technology stuff like that that appear based on rules.
00:46:37
Speaker
And what does that mean? We haven't seen it at this size before, ever. And so you're dealing with a couple of levels. Developers writing code, the code interacting with the universe, the players interacting with the code in the universe, and creating other behaviors as the rules combine to create something that is unanticipated.
00:46:59
Speaker
I dream about this stuff all the time. And to me, that's what archaeo gaming is. It's a creation of new artifacts in a new space that didn't exist before. And to me, you know, you go into the real universe and you've got all this dark matter and nobody knows what it is. I'll tell you what it is in a game. It's code, you know, all this extra space, all this stuff we're flying around in, it's code, it's behaving in strange ways.
00:47:20
Speaker
So I figured, you know what, this game is so big and it's bigger than me. Maybe I should get a bunch of archaeology friends together who play and we'll survey it. And we're going to do it like a real logical survey. We're going to base it on real world archaeological surveys that have been done in the past.
00:47:34
Speaker
and we're going to set up our data collection forms and we're going to video, we're going to photograph, and we're going to treat this as a logical way. If we want to stop and excavate some units, great. But we want to explore the universe and maybe try to divine what the algorithms are behind what's going on and to see what we could document with the material culture created by math, basically. That's a simplification of it, but that's what I see.
00:48:04
Speaker
Now, Megan, you're involved with this. Yeah. So I remember when Andrew put up a couple of different sections, one of the sections was ethics, and you were super excited about that. So what are you hoping to get out of this No Man's Sky survey towards your research in ethics? What are you hoping to get out of all of this? I have been really excited because Catherine Flick
00:48:32
Speaker
has helped us to create an ethics policy for the team and for our research. And I'm really interested in seeing how that ethics policy plays out for us as we're actually conducting the survey. Because it's one of the things that in my dissertation research that I'm trying to devise is
00:48:57
Speaker
some sort of overarching archaeo-gaming digital ethics policy for us. The secondary thing I'm really interested in looking at is because this is a complete universe with so many different ways that it can go and so many different potentially sentient races that we can encounter, I'm interested in figuring out how can we create an archaeology from scratch
00:49:27
Speaker
that is ethical, that is not based in colonial practice, that is not based in implied or direct racism. And I want to see how that works. And I think that it's possible in my heart of heart, I believe, that we can do this. So I want to see it play out in a digital form so that we can then take away from that
00:49:50
Speaker
and find ways to adapt our practice within the material world to be better at what we do. So you're actually looking forward to recreating the field. Yeah, yeah, I am. That's an interesting take on that. Tara, are you joining us on the survey? I guess I definitely will be. What are you hoping to get out of it, maybe?
00:50:13
Speaker
So my interest is at the moment, my PhD research looks at how we build games from the ground up to make arguments, and I'm really interested to see
00:50:22
Speaker
if it can work the other way. So whether we can basically apply archaeological methods to then look at how games were made. So basically doing archaeology of the game itself. So we'll catalog the different apologies of certain things, making observations about where they occur, whether we can get back to the algorithm or whether we can get back to understanding at least in part the algorithm which generates these things, and basically doing some tests about how we could try to go about
00:50:49
Speaker
understanding that system both computationally and archaeologically. So intersection of computer science and archaeology stuff. Yes. So you're looking at the artifacts, you're looking at the game as an artifact then?
00:51:01
Speaker
Essentially, yeah, and I'm looking at it, basically, as everything being hinged upon on this kind of like, actual frame of the card and how things that we see visually manifest like the aesthetic, the sound, how those can all interplay back to this this deep structure. Because in archaeology, we have these theories that kind of think about these these structures that
00:51:22
Speaker
dictate or which push or pull or influence or in other ways kind of structure, one for better word, how things happen, how change occurs, why things happen. And in games, those happen due to code and we know why that happens. But can we actually observe these things that we, can the things that we observe at the high end relate back to these structures? Can we see them through observations of it? And how can we understand those?
00:51:50
Speaker
if that makes any sense to anyone. This is like post, post, post, post-processual archaeology. I actually had a conversation with Hodder at Tretelhoi. He's like, what you are proposing is the new, new, new archaeology, isn't it? And I'm like, well, kind of like it. Did he say that? Oh, man, I'm going to put that on my wall. The new, new, new archaeology. Make sure you get enough news in there.
00:52:16
Speaker
So I think it's interesting that each one of you has a different goal coming out of the survey because I guess I'm going into it, like I'm super excited about it just because I'm a freaking nerd and I'm really excited about playing a game and like really- I think that that goes for all of us. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that that aspect of everybody's like, ooh, a game, okay. And just the concept of this game is phenomenal. I mean, there's, we don't even have the time to talk about
00:52:42
Speaker
the nuances of No Man's Sky. But one of the things that there is, as Andrew hit on this earlier, everything is being generated. So you have and nothing is the same. So we're all going to basically start off on or near a planet, our chances of interacting with each other by pure chance are mathematically zero, basically, because there's eight quadrillion planets out there or something crazy like that.
00:53:13
Speaker
So you basically get your own planet to kind of rove around on and get the feel for and you can learn about your planet. And I am interested to see how they are going to create past culture because they've talked a lot about how they put thought into the ruins that you may come across and the abandoned artifacts that you may or may not find.
00:53:35
Speaker
But everything in this game, like Tara was saying, was created for a reason. And I'm really interested to see and to start putting them together and see what I can find out about these imaginary cultures that the game designers were considering.
00:53:52
Speaker
So I'm really looking forward to getting in there and looking at the actual artifacts and being them as if I were in the real world and going, Ooh, what does this pot mean? It must be ceremonial, you know, that kind of stuff. I don't, I don't see the difference. And I've said this before between real culture and virtual culture.
00:54:10
Speaker
I have a feeling that the cultures and the lore that we'll experience in this game, because they are created and generated and have have purpose and interact, that there is no difference between treating that as a new and real culture than we do say if we studied ancient minds. Yeah, I agree. Because when you talk about culture,
00:54:30
Speaker
Culture is all created. Culture all comes from something. Culture doesn't spring a full form out in the head of Zeus. It comes from somewhere. No, Megan, it comes from aliens. Sorry, I had to. Yeah, so it comes from somewhere. So I don't, yeah, I agree with Andrew. I don't think that treating the culture in No Man's Sky
00:54:56
Speaker
as a categorical difference than the culture of classic period Maya is something we should do. I think they are the same thing. And I think the fact that in the logic we are merging so much more of our daily lives with the digital, we need to take into account that what we think of as culture now is more likely to be digital in the future than
00:55:22
Speaker
what we've studied as culture in the past. Kara, did you want to add anything? No, I think these two have very astutely covered it all. I read Andrew's argument on there's no difference between real world culture and digital culture. And I saw you got a lot of kickback in the comments section, but I did actually agree with your overall argument because like Megan was saying, all culture comes from somewhere. And as Tara has said, everything in the game is created for a reason.
00:55:53
Speaker
So even if it's imaginary, someone still sat down and thought about, even if it was a lazy thought, they were still thinking about what is this item going to mean? And what is that item going to mean? And what will a building in this space mean versus a building in that space? And I think it will be interesting to see.
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, what we're seeing is it's hotter and others have been called entanglement also, where you've got everything kind of working together and building off of each other. And we don't know how the cultures will change over time as we play the game or as we go farther into the universe. Right. It'll be interesting, you know, to see, you know, if there are multiple cultures on a particular planet, you may be one of the survey team members, they don't go anywhere else in the universe, but they just adopt their planet and they excavate the entire planet.
00:56:37
Speaker
that could take years because it's planet sized. But yeah, everything is interrelated and it's no different than the real world because everything is interrelated. And you're getting it dangerously close to a kind of theology that is integrated into this kind of virtual space where you've got people looking for the creator here, as it were, and you're also
00:57:06
Speaker
you know, taking a look within a game space at working your way back into the deep structure of a game as Taro was saying, to understand the mind of the creator as well. It's really interesting to see the crossover of artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy, theology, all space. It kind of makes your head spin and you feel a little bit like Frank Herbert.
00:57:29
Speaker
So I know one of the, we've got about six minutes to wrap up here. I know one of the end goals of the survey is Andrew, you want to get an academic paper out of it. And it sounds like both Tara and Megan could probably get their own papers out of this as well. So what is your, with these papers that you're hoping to present, what is the end goal of the overall paper? Like not the data that you're going to put into the paper, but what's the reception that you're hoping to get out of these papers?
00:57:58
Speaker
Um, I know that, that, you know, with, with leading the team, we want to do a white paper a few months away, you know, which basically says here are our best practices. Um, we want to do maybe at the end of the first year, a preliminary report after the first year of survey, and then a final report after three years of the survey, whoever's left standing.
00:58:18
Speaker
Um, you know, I plan to play this game for the rest of my life. I don't, I don't know that I'll play any other game unless my kid wants me to sit down with her and play something. So, so, you know, that's, that's just, uh, I would be able to publish a side report, a survey report, um, side by side with, uh, other reports of real spaces, you know, in a real archeology journal that's peer reviewed and not some game studies journal or something like that. You know, I want to be able to publish in the SAA.
00:58:47
Speaker
my site report next to somebody else's as a site report of something else they've actually walked around in and to have that kind of equivalence in the understanding of archaeology. That's, I think, my ultimate goal with this. Tara, what are you hoping to get out of this as your end product from the survey? Yeah, I guess a lot of my questions get into the theoretical area, which is that traditionally computing and archaeology has been seen very much on the kind of processual side of what we do.
00:59:14
Speaker
And I'm kind of interested in whether we can develop new theoretical kind of frameworks for understanding how post-processualism and even post-post-post, whatever, however many posts you want to stick in there. Processualism can actually work in the archaeological space using things like procedural generation, using things like regression of an algorithm, how we can explain the phenomenon
00:59:35
Speaker
these different phases. So I guess what I'm trying to look at is how we can use doing archaeology in a video game to explain or further or kind of come to grips with some of these problems that we've been tearing apart and dealing with since the 70s and what space I guess there is for us to move into these and to capitalize on this media form and the way people produce in it in a new way and whether there's this valid applications for that as archaeologists working on the ground as well as in games.
01:00:05
Speaker
Megan, what's your end goal here? My goal is to prove that we can behave responsibly if given a context where the things that make us not behave responsibly are removed and then show that that context that makes us not behave responsibly is really a very thin veneer and that we should all be doing better and be better archaeologists, be better communicators with the public.
01:00:33
Speaker
be better stewards of cultural heritage and indigenous heritage and all things that say we're about, that we can do it better. You want to use this as a way of looking at humanity, basically, and how humans do archaeology. Yeah. I mean, my whole, I guess when you come into archaeo gaming is,
01:01:03
Speaker
I'm interested in how it can be both a new form of practice and how the regular day-to-day dirt geologist can be influenced by this practice to do better science. That's interesting. I'm really interested to see how people think about culture and how that thought of culture is going to reflect into what they think should be generated as culture in the game.
01:01:33
Speaker
I think that was convoluted. People have this concept of ancient culture in their minds, and I interact with it a lot, especially with the fringe. It's always fascinating to see what other people think.
01:01:47
Speaker
ancient peoples were like. And I want to see how much of that is going to affect the artifacts and the spaces and the culture that's going to be considered ancient in the game. And are we going to find a bunch of stereotypical stuff? Are we going to find a bunch of Hollywood stuff? Are we going to find some very subtle nuanced stuff that would be more realistic to find?
01:02:09
Speaker
Is it going to be big and in my face? Is it going to be hard to locate? They've already talked about having alien writing in there that you can actually learn to read. So it's going to be fascinating to me to see how people are making basically a fake, for lack of a better sense of the word, culture that can also be treated as a real culture in the long run.
01:02:33
Speaker
So, all right, final thoughts. Anybody got one? I'm just really excited to see all of this coming together. I'm really excited that we have this group of people who are interested in doing this kind of work and that we have this big project coming up and that there are people out there who.
01:02:51
Speaker
think what we're doing has value. Yeah, I mean, seeing news of the team and what we're going to do come out in places that are widely read like Kill Screen and other sites and seeing the responses being overwhelmingly either positive or curious as opposed to
01:03:11
Speaker
You know, what the hell are you doing? It's reassuring. It's very positive to me and the fact that a lot of people have reached out over email and Twitter to say, what can we do to help? And when will you be able to tell us some stuff and everything?
01:03:26
Speaker
making all of our methods and procedures and tools as available as open access and open source as quickly as possible, I think is really expressing the goodwill of archaeology and archaeological science to the general public and inviting them along. It's exciting and people want to play. Sorry, your final thought? Yeah, I'm really just excited that
01:03:49
Speaker
You know, having gone from being basically shouted down when I first proposed this idea of studying video games and making video games for archaeology to be in a group of people who are accepted and see this go out to the world and who says and for it to go public and to have great reception and great discourse with people in the public, I think is it's really heartening. And I can't wait to see where it goes in the future.
01:04:14
Speaker
Well, we are launching, as I said, this brand new podcast called 8-bit Test Pit, and it's going to have a couple different components to it. So if our listeners have enjoyed this first episode, please stick around. We're going to follow the survey through this podcast, but at the same time, we're going to be addressing other aspects of archaeo gaming as they come up.
01:04:36
Speaker
So if you think it's just going to be a No Man's Sky podcast, that's not what it's going to be. It's going to be an archaeo gaming podcast. So we're going to be hitting a bunch of topics and hopefully my panel today will be coming back on a regular basis to update us as we go. So thank you all for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having us.
01:04:58
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.
01:05:31
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