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Photogrammetry and GIS in Human-Occupied Digital Landscapes - Ep 205
847 Plays1 year ago
Today we talk about gaming and archaeology, but, in a very different way than I’ve hear done in the past. Our guests, Andrew Reinhard and Sara Zaia have written an article for Advances in Archaeological Practice about doing photogrammetry and mapping in a gaming space and bringing that into a GIS. It’s step one of a bigger plan and they tell us all about it.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/205
Links
- Andrew Reinhard
My Archaeogaming book: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ReinhardArchaeogaming
The Archaeogaming Mastodon account: https://archaeo.social/@archaeogaming - Sara Zaia
My academia.edu page https://harvard-yenching.academia.edu/SaraZaia/
My scholar page https://scholar.harvard.edu/sarazaia
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 205
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Meet the Hosts and Guests
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 205. I'm your host, Chris Webster. My co-host, Paul Zimmerman, is wandering around the desert somewhere. Today we talk to Andrew Reinhardt and Sarah Zaya about mapping digital landscapes in online worlds. Let's get to it.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul can't join us today because he is still gallivanting around the desert in Saudi Arabia. I'm pretty convinced he's a spy. And this is just a cover and I'm trying not to blow it for him. But, you know, we'll see. He just gets called out to the desert on a moment's notice and, you know, does what he does. So hopefully he'll be back at some point and we can get on to these shows. I've got a few other articles that I'm waiting on people to confirm
Discussion on 'Photogrammetry and GIS' Article
00:00:50
Speaker
for. There was actually a lot of good stuff in the advances in archaeological practice this time around.
00:00:54
Speaker
that just came out in, I think it was, it just came out in June of 2023. And one of those articles is entitled, Photogrammetry and GIS in Human Occupied Digital Landscapes, written by Andrew Reinhard and Sarah Zaya. And we have both of them on the show today.
Exploring Archaeogaming: Andrew's Perspective
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome to the show, Andrew and Sarah.
00:01:10
Speaker
Hi, thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Yeah. So we'll get to both of you in a second and we'll get to the article in a second. But Andrew, I wanted to ask you real quick because some people may know your name from, I mean, multiple episodes of different programs you've been on in the archeology podcast network, but also you were one of the founding members of the hosts for the archeo gaming podcast that we had on the APN, which I still want to restart. If anybody's listening to this, that feed is
00:01:37
Speaker
Still there. If anybody wants to do an archaeogaming podcast and be the host, just contact me and we'll get that going. But I'm wondering, how have you been in the archaeogaming space since then? Have you stayed in that space? Is that a primary focus for you? Or is it just an interest that you keep coming back to?
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's no longer a primary focus, especially since I got the PhD from the University of York back in 2020. And so I've got one foot in archaeo gaming and then another foot squarely in, I would say, digital built environments that aren't necessarily games. So basically, software and virtual worlds, video games and stuff like that. Basically, any place that human beings
00:02:18
Speaker
are present and they're leaving evidence of material culture, settlement, and abandonment in a digital space, you'll find me there. So games is part of that equation, but really like with this article, this was a pivot from going from strictly video game archeology into something that could be applied to other kinds of digital things where people, quote unquote, live.
00:02:42
Speaker
Okay. So I still keep in touch with my colleagues and friends and everything. I run the Archeo Gaming Mastodon account since we nuked the Twitter account. Right. And I'm currently a board member for Saving Ancient Studies Alliance, or SASA. Awesome. Sounds good. And Sarah, what brings you to the Archeo Gaming Sphere? I don't know if this article really belongs in Archeo Gaming. I mean, it does, because like you said, Andrew,
00:03:07
Speaker
It's applicable, you know, bringing real world techniques into the digital, the gaming sphere. But Sarah, what brings you to this space before we really get into the article?
Sarah's Background and Article Contribution
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm a spatial archaeologist, and I just finished my PhD. And I'm also a gamer, so I really enjoy playing video games. And I mostly enjoy the games that have an archaeological background and a flavor. I think I bring the technical part into the article, but I really, really enjoyed it. It gave me a different perspective of gaming. And whenever now I play video games,
00:03:42
Speaker
I can look at the space and the traces that I found on a different light.
00:03:47
Speaker
So let's talk about the article then. Again, this was in the advances in archeological practice and we will link to this article. You do need a login to see it because it's part of the, um, the SAA, the society for American archeology, but there are typically ways around that. If you want to get a copy of the article, this is actually a open access access paid for through New York university. Even though it's on the site, it's totally free to review.
00:04:14
Speaker
Oh, I didn't know that because I logged in to go download it and I didn't even, I didn't even notice. So, okay. Well, that's good. So we'll link to it anyway and seriously go download it because there's some really good stuff in here, including the references and some, some images that will be handy actually, as you're listening to this. So look down at your show notes. There'll be a link to the article.
00:04:32
Speaker
And you can bring that up while you're listening to the show. Hopefully you're not driving or doing survey or anything like that. So, you know, be careful. But all right. So let's get into this.
Mapping Digital Landscapes: Goals and Challenges
00:04:41
Speaker
This article that we find out a little bit later in the article is actually part of a a multi-step process that you guys are doing to
00:04:49
Speaker
We'll talk about the other steps, but why don't one of you just explain what this step one is and give the elevator pitch or abstract version of the purpose of this article. Dealing with digital games and working with digital landscape archaeology.
00:05:05
Speaker
You know, it's really difficult to kind of pinpoint where things are happening. So if somebody builds something in a game, if somebody, you know, put something up, you know, whether it's a fortification or a residence or they, they put, they put some kind of.
00:05:20
Speaker
material evidence of their visit in a digital space, there's no coordinates. It's kind of fake north, south, east, west. There's kind of a fakie grid, but there's no GIS because we're dealing with these procedurally generated spaces or designed spaces that are independent of the grid that covers the earth.
00:05:44
Speaker
And so I'm like, well, if we're going to do some archaeology, especially if we want to do landscape archaeology, we probably need to pinpoint where things are happening precisely in the environment. I wonder if we can do that. And so knowing full well, I do not have the technical expertise with GIS and with mapping software, although I play around with QGIS a little bit.
00:06:06
Speaker
or working with point clouds or DEMs, digital elevation models. You know, I know the words, but I don't know how to do them. And so I reached out back when I had a Twitter, you know, before the hostile takeover there by Musk and cast around. And Sarah's like, sure. So, Sarah, you want to fill in what caught your eye and what you brought to the article as well? Sure. Well, since I was
00:06:34
Speaker
I think it was a few years ago I started to get interested in arcade gaming and so of course I ran into Andrew's blog website and I started reading and so his name was like a big name in my head and so I started following him and treated him and then I saw what I was scrolling down his tweet and I
00:06:57
Speaker
I was kind of shy at the beginning to reply. So I was like, I'm a PhD student. I'm sure that it's a long, long line to work with Andrew. He's not going to listen to me. And then I went back a couple of days after, and I said to myself, well, if you don't try, you will never know. But the tweet was queso at that point.
00:07:21
Speaker
Or I couldn't find it anymore. So I think I DM'd you and say, hey, I saw you tweet. Do you still need someone to do some GIS?
00:07:30
Speaker
And that's the rest is history, I suppose. Absolutely. So the theory was, can we make actual usable maps, topographic maps, DEMs from point clouds that we gather on these spaces that don't exist on Earth? And if so, how do we do that? And if we figure out how to do that, we should probably write it up so that other people can do it too.
00:07:57
Speaker
All right, so we'll get into your methodology on that probably in the next segment. But first I want to talk about the games you guys decided to use for this. Now, No Man's Sky and Fortnite are the two games, very different games. And I've actually played No Man's Sky. I haven't played Fortnite, but I know of it and what it's all about. But I'm curious about the games before we get to why you chose those. I'm curious about the games that didn't make the list because
00:08:21
Speaker
Again, another game I haven't played, but that first came to mind when you were talking about a persistent online world that's changed by players is World of Warcraft. I feel like it's been around since, I don't know, the late 90s, early 2000s or something like that. I don't even know if it's still around, but that seems like something that has one of the longest histories. Do you know in your research what gaming environment has the longest online continuous history? Did you find that in your research?
00:08:46
Speaker
Oh, geez.
Game Selection: No Man's Sky and Fortnite
00:08:47
Speaker
I don't know. I'll get myself into trouble by being wrong. Sure. Just be close. Things like Neverwinter Nights or Everquest. Yeah. And things going back into the 90s, there's going to be stuff from way, way back. And this includes things that's like persistent digital spaces and environments like Second Life and stuff like that. So those places and
00:09:14
Speaker
You know, they let you craft, but you really can't build. And, you know, so yeah, we could have done. Wow.
00:09:21
Speaker
You know, because that's been around, you know, for a very freaking long time. I actually let my account slip. I quit. I rage quit when Mr. Pandaria came out because I'm like, you can't change the lore like that. What are you doing? And, you know, I was just a big nerd, you know, with wow, it's proprietary and you've got to pay, you know, in order to do this in Fortnite's free and no man's sky, you still have to pay as well. But it's.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, I might have given it a moments thought, you know, I was thinking maybe G or maybe Eve online or something like that. But, you know, these are the two games that I was really familiar with personally.
00:09:59
Speaker
Yeah. Second life. I kind of forgot about that. I still have an account. I don't think I've logged into second life in years, but it's still there. Every, it's still there. Every time I get a new computer and it's like faster and better, I've got a, I've got the M one Mac now and I have the M two yet, but every time I get a new one, I'm like, well, let's see how second life plays. I just, I head over there for a second, see what it looks like. And then I leave and I don't go back until I get a new computer. Yeah. But that, that world is crazy.
00:10:24
Speaker
Let me tell you a really quick story. And I logged into Second Life a few years ago, and I hadn't been in for about five or six years. And I used to have a villa in the Roma SPQR sim when I worked for Balchese Cardici Publishers doing Greek and Latin stuff. And the people I saw five years ago were still there, and they were still building, and they remembered me. And they gave me a tour to show me what was new. It just totally blew my mind. Wow. Wow.
00:10:51
Speaker
I mean, there are, speaking of online worlds, I mean, there are real people that just like, I mean, practically live in second life. I don't even know if they're second life anymore. It's almost their first life. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's a, it's a lot. So, all right. So let's get to no man's sky and fortnight. Why did you guys choose those games to do your mapping experiment?
00:11:10
Speaker
You know, this goes back into, you know, like, why, why do our gaming in the first place? And the fact that we're using video games as a vernacular for digital spaces, people understand games. They know what games are. They know what they're called. They see them advertised.
00:11:25
Speaker
So if we can start there as kind of the low hanging fruit, then we can gently move people towards other digital spaces that are a bit weird. So ultimately, I'd love to do a GIS survey of Microsoft Word or something. But nobody wants that. They want to see a game. So I was like, OK, fine. We'll do the game. So Fortnite is played by tens of millions of players around the world all the freaking time. And the island changes year to year, season to season.
00:11:55
Speaker
And so it's nice to see those changes and people do kind of the same thing when they go in, you know, they build fortifications to protect themselves and they move around. And it's really, really fast. So you can get a really good data set in about 20 minutes. And then for No Man's Sky, again, wildly popular game played by millions.
00:12:11
Speaker
And it's a procedurally generated space. And so we're like, well, can you map a space that's never existed before until you log in? And so we figured those are two games that people know. A lot of people have played, at least they're familiar with it. And they allow us a couple of different variables to tinker with when we're mapping.
00:12:30
Speaker
Regarding Fortnite, what is the value, do you think? I mean, sure, if it's just a thought experiment, it's can you map a procedurally generated space that doesn't exist after it's been used? Then that's a question, right? And if that's the only question you're asking, then yeah, that's a yes or no question. We can do this or we can't. But I'm wondering like.
00:12:48
Speaker
If you can, what's the value in that? You know what I mean? With something that persists and is around for years, let's say, that I can really see. But Fortnite, the world's gone in, what, 20 minutes or something like that from my understanding?
Documenting Digital Spaces in Games
00:13:00
Speaker
What do you think the end value could be there? Were you not answering that question yet?
00:13:05
Speaker
No, this is the main question, and this is the question that really bugs me as a digital archaeologist and what keeps me up at night because it gives me nightmares. It's like all of this digital occupation, all of this digital construction, software is coming and going, these rounds last 20 minutes and then are gone without a trace.
00:13:25
Speaker
And so if you're a digital archaeologist and you're not on the ground recording things as they happen, that stuff will be gone. And so by documenting these very discrete, very fast happenings, we can then build a data set. And I was telling Sarah earlier that for me, this is
00:13:46
Speaker
It's a merging of salvage or rapid archaeology with slow data. We get into Bill Caraher's ideas of slow data and slow archaeology, same thing with Jeremy Huggett. And this is kind of a revelation. It's like we have to work really, really fast to collect the data, but then we can take our time afterwards to see what people are actually doing in this limited time that they have. Are they following different patterns? How are they interacting with the digital landscape versus a regular one?
00:14:12
Speaker
What kind of community building do they have? What's the nature of the architecture of the constructions when they're built under stress? There are all kinds of questions that can be asked, but we have to be really fast in getting this information so that we can interpret it later.
00:14:29
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's pretty much the why of this. I really want to get into the how of this. So I think we'll just have a little bit longer of a segment two. And for that, we will take a break right now and come back on the other side and get into how you guys did this back in a minute.
00:14:43
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archaeotech podcast, episode 205. And we are talking about photogrammetry and GIS in human occupied digital landscapes. Again, take a look down at your show notes for a link to this article. And we're talking to Andrew and Sarah, the authors of the article. So in the first segment, we talked about
00:15:01
Speaker
a little bit about the why anybody would do something like this. But now I want to talk about the how, because this is where I think for our audience in archaeotech, this really gets to be the interesting part.
Photogrammetry in Virtual Worlds
00:15:11
Speaker
And we've talked about photogrammetry a lot on this show. We've talked about drones a lot on this show. Any longtime listeners know they have to take a drink now, because anytime we say drone, that's what happens. Seems like they come up a lot on this show.
00:15:24
Speaker
So hopefully you're listening at a good time. Yeah. So anyway, you mentioned that drones and cameras and things like that have been used to do photogrammetry for many years in archaeology now. And even just saying drones have been used for many years is a pretty powerful statement. It's kind of weird to think that. They still feel new in some cases, but they're very much not in other cases. But with photogrammetry, and I've done drone photogrammetry,
00:15:48
Speaker
You really need the, I mean, you don't need, but it's helpful to have the ground control points. And then you've got the, you've got the spatial nature of the, I guess, of the photographs themselves. And I've even done it where you take high resolution video and then chop images out of that. It's not quite as good as taking high resolution images, but you know, we've, we've experimented with that in some cases. And I'm just wondering, you know, getting to this.
00:16:11
Speaker
What methodology did you use to get the, let's just call them photographs, really screenshots of the worlds of Fortnite and No Man's Sky in order to be able to do this actual photogrammetry? Because you ran these just like you would any other images through Metashape to produce your DEMs and your 3D models. So I'm just wondering, how did you come up with a way to get these images in an accurate way to be able to do this?
00:16:35
Speaker
I'll do a very short answer and then, and then Sarah, if you could do the detailed answer, because this is when I really started to lean on you and I was emailing you twice a day. You know, because, you know, I have access to the games and, you know, when you play a video game, every video game is different.
00:16:53
Speaker
Every video game will have its own way of maybe doing a photo mode or photo capture, video capture, or you have to do it through the console's native video capture and photo capture software that comes with it. And so I was like, well, OK, I have these two games. They behave very differently with the photo modes and everything. So what's my camera? How do I use it? Can I fake it out and pretend I have a drone? But it's really not a drone.
00:17:20
Speaker
And like in Fortnite, you actually become the drone. So you have this all seeing eye that you can move around. And then in No Man's Sky, you're dealing with like a sphere. It's like a hemisphere. And then your camera's at the top of that. And then you shoot around. And it was a disaster. I'm a terrible drone pilot and a bad photographer when it comes to this kind of thing. And so Sarah, how did you help me? Because you helped a lot.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, the way that I, so I wasn't sure if this was going to work out or not. And the way that I addressed it was as any other photogrammetry project that I carried on in real life. And so I found out that flying the drone and then
00:18:03
Speaker
extracting frames to use apps photographs don't really work out. I prefer to spend a little bit more time in taking the pictures, but then they're going to work out much better in the software. And so I asked Andrew to just take a picture, pause while taking the picture and then move the drone, the virtual drone a little bit forward.
00:18:26
Speaker
taking care and making sure that the next picture will overlap at least 50, 60% with the previous one and just go on and on until he would cover the entire surface that we wanted to do the photogrammetry for. Okay. And there was no, no distortion or anything at the edge of the images. I mean, in my, in my experience in the past, sometimes they're a little bit fish eye, you know, kind of on those pictures and things like that. Did you guys have any problems?
00:18:52
Speaker
I mean, there's always a distortion, but it wasn't that bad. If I remember correctly, it wasn't that bad. So it was not like a whole 360, you know, that kind of distortion that you see the parable or anything like that.
00:19:08
Speaker
now. Yeah, we didn't have to fix too much of that. And especially like with Fortnite, there's no curvature of the earth. Oh, sure. It's flat, you know, granted, it's got topography, but but but yeah, and you know, shooting from the top down, and then moving things around and then making sure we had the overlaps, you know, seem to have taken care of that. And it was fun to kind of hand the files off to Sarah for her to do her magic and whatever she did on on her PC. My magic.
00:19:35
Speaker
I seem to work out okay. We tried a couple of times and I think the first set of image wasn't working and but the second time like I give I guess more detailed instructions and Andrew was great in taking the pictures and that worked out perfectly. Nice. You know I'm wondering with Metashape I mean obviously a lot of us that are listening to this have put images into Metashape before but obviously they're usually images of the earth and or objects and things like that.
00:20:05
Speaker
Did it just accept these, these digital images that, uh, that don't necessarily look like, you know, anything on the earth that just accepted them and did it like normal? Or did you have to use any special settings? No, it actually worked. I was very surprised, but I guess these digital spaces are very, very accurate so that they resemble real spaces and the software just pick them up.
00:20:30
Speaker
Right. Okay. Yeah, it was a gamble. You know, this is one of these things, it's like, yes, this what if question and it sounds really crazy, but it's like, it's so crazy, it just might work. You know, it looks like a mountain. Let's see what happens. And it did, it did it. No, I was very, very surprised about it. Because, I mean, I don't know how specifically, you know, the software works. Like, I know what I have to do to make it work.
00:20:57
Speaker
but I don't know what the parameters inside the algorithm or whatever, how they are set up. So I don't know the tolerance. In my personal experience with real world, the tolerance is pretty high, more and more with the new updates.
00:21:13
Speaker
And so, you know, slight errors that you might have and they would create, would have created issues in the past, like different light. You know, if one image is darker than the next one, maybe it won't, you know, match them because the, the RGB values of the two, of the pixel, the same pixel in the two different images is different. And so it doesn't recognize it.
00:21:37
Speaker
But now it doesn't even matter anymore. If it's not completely off, even if it's slightly different, it still works. And I really think the trick here to make it work is to give the software, even if it's a digital
00:21:55
Speaker
landscape, even if it's a fake mountain, if you give it enough angles, like if the pictures are taken with the right angles, it will still recreate the shape of the mountain, even if it's not real real.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, that took a little bit of doing though. I mean, you had me go back and shoot stuff again, and let's do that again and try it again. One of the beautiful things about the project is just it demonstrates how technology is really iterative and the archaeological approach or the digital archaeological approach is you take steps and it's like, okay, and you just tweak and you tweak and you tweak and then you finally get it, hopefully.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think I might have asked you to go back and take some oblique images to kind of...
00:22:48
Speaker
Complete the set of the Zenit picture, you know, the one from above straight from above. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you produce this photogrammetric model and you bring it into a GIS and you've got this, well, first off in Metashape, you've got a, you've got a model that has spatial components to it, right?
Challenges in Digital Modeling
00:23:05
Speaker
How did you apply units to that? Right? Because I mean, how do you even know what the units are in the online world? Right.
00:23:13
Speaker
This was the funniest part. It's like, Oh my God. It's like we get to this point where like,
00:23:20
Speaker
How many meters is this foot? Because, you know, this stuff is like totally made up. And so we had to believe that with both of these games, that they were designed for an average sized adult human being. I don't know, you know, less than two meters tall. And let's just go with that. Now in No Man's Sky, they have units which equate to meters. And so you can kind of do and actually did this is that you can
00:23:50
Speaker
do a field survey in the game and you can have a starting point. You set a little beacon and then you start at the beacon and you walk onto the horizon to a point. And when you finish, you can see how far you walked. It's like, oh, okay, that's cool, but not so much in Fortnite. Fortnite, you just had to make it up and take a best guess. So yeah, dealing with units of measure in video games does not really exist.
00:24:13
Speaker
I mean, they have it in the underlying code, right? You know, because you have to have things, you know, make sense when you're doing the design, but they don't really impart that to the public. You know, it's just part of their gaming mandate or whatever.
00:24:25
Speaker
Well, I noticed, I noticed in the article you read one of the, I don't know, one of the updates or additions of Fortnite had Indiana Jones. There's a known quantity Harrison Ford has a predictable height. You know, that's one of the wonderful things about archeology is that it's, you know, all of it's got so much synchronicity. And so, you know, like having Indiana Jones show up while we're doing this project, it was just a godsend. I was like, Oh my God, I can't even believe it. You know,
00:24:55
Speaker
Speaking of distances to one thing I would wonder, and I don't know if you were able to assess this out or not because they're like a no man's sky. There are some flat planes, but a lot of it's like rolling Hills and things like that, that distance measurements back. I'm familiar with that from, you know, playing this a little while ago. Do you know if that's a linear distance, like line of sight distance from you to the target, or is that taking into account the landscape, the topography?
00:25:17
Speaker
No, it's, it's line of sight kind of as the crow flies distancing. So it's going to be pretty accurate, but not a hundred percent accurate. And I don't know that we would be able to get a hundred percent accuracy, at least not yet anyway, until we figure that out. Right. Right.
00:25:32
Speaker
Once you accept that is going to be an approximation in distance, and that was not even, you know, it wasn't the goal of the article to be precise, precise. We just wanted to see if the project was possible or not. But, you know, once you...
00:25:49
Speaker
approximate the distances, we just marked them in a way that I could see them in the pictures. And instead of using coordinates from a total station or GPS or whatever that I didn't have, I just scaled the model with those distances. And I treated it as a regular cloud point that needed to be scaled.
00:26:14
Speaker
Okay. So regarding the online worlds of Fortnite and No Man's Sky, how did you guys decide really, I guess, Andrew, how did you decide what you were going to map
Mapping Decisions and Ethics
00:26:24
Speaker
for this? That would make a good representation for testing your, your guys's theories.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah, with Fortnite, we knew that we were doing the project during a season, which meant that the island itself wasn't going to change. For those of you who don't play Fortnite, you play on a place called Battle Royal Island, which is this kind of crab-shaped island. And every three months, things happen to it. There's a volcano, or then there's an implosion, and the middle of the island goes away, and the climates change, and stuff like that. And so being able to document it one season and comparing that to the next is always something very interesting.
00:26:57
Speaker
But for me, I wanted to play over several different rounds because the rounds are always the same. You start, you land as a player on the island, you find out other players to eliminate. And in order to protect yourself, you build things. And so I wanted to go and play a bunch of rounds and then be able to record.
00:27:16
Speaker
what people were building and where they were building them and in relation to other landmarks, other landscape features to each other to see if we could draw some conclusions, you know, potentially. And so, you know, that was that was pretty easy to do because people just build and you just film the building and then you map it.
00:27:34
Speaker
Now for No Man's Sky, because it's procedurally generated, you never know quite what you're going to get. So I wanted to find a settlement that was simple. I didn't want to do like a big complex or anything, at least not yet. I just wanted to find something that had a simple structure that was anchored in the landscape.
00:27:49
Speaker
And then I wanted to see if we could, you know, measure it, if we could place it in the landscape and map it. And so I looked at about five or six different candidates. You know, I've got a kind of a gazetteer that I keep because I'm a big no man's sky head. And so I was like, Oh, well, we'll go to this planet and this person lives there. And so, you know, check to see if they're home and they weren't. So, you know, we, we went and we got our video done, got our photos done.
00:28:15
Speaker
Nice. You know, I'm wondering if, uh, well, so you guys were going into these worlds and, and taking these, you know, just doing this. And I know there's a section on ethics in the, in the paper there where you talk about, you know, reading the terms of service and being conscious of, you know, the fact that there's other real humans in there and, and things that they created and, and, and those along those lines, plus also the game designers. I mean, these are proprietary environments.
00:28:40
Speaker
game designers technically own and can shut down at any point in time, but they do have provisions within their TOCs to allow for online play and things like that, which made this possible. But I'm wondering, did you guys contact or do you think you'll contact in the future the actual game designers themselves? Because they have all the source material. They have the
00:29:02
Speaker
They have what they know the measurements are. They have probably maps of all these areas and a lot more information that could ever be gained by one person going in there and doing a study on this. Have you thought about involving them in this anthropological study, so to speak, the bigger picture?
00:29:20
Speaker
Actually, when the archaeogaining book is getting close to publication, we need to get permission for the cover image, which was a screenshot from a procedural world in No Man's Sky. And so it took me about two months to actually get a response from Hello Games, and they actually did.
00:29:36
Speaker
And the CEO actually was the one who responded, which really blew me away to give me permission to go ahead and use the image. I'm like, wow, this is awesome. They are super busy and like trying to write epic games, you know, to get info about Fortnite. You know, I have a feeling that we'd be signing NDAs out the wazoo and we wouldn't be able to necessarily publish on that, even though we would have the information and
00:29:59
Speaker
And they don't really have a lot of time for archaeologists. It might be a curiosity. But, you know, that's that's normal, you know, because it's a business, you know, for for these AAA games anyway. I mean, for if we were to do more of an indie game or something like that, you know, working with maps in season, you know, for example, then we could write and we'd probably get a response and actually have a collaboration, which is something that is would be super awesome because it connects the company with the community with the archaeology.
00:30:29
Speaker
and then we can do some public archaeology there. Yes. So Sarah, I don't know if you've got experience or if you've tried to reach out to some of these different places that you've been interested in. I tried twice. And once I had a very good response, but it was more like, as you said, an indie production. And they were very interested and thrilled that I used their game and talked about their games in my research. The other company never even responded to me.
00:30:57
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah, that that's pretty typical. It's not that they're being rude. It's just they're super busy and low priority. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know. I guess that we will have to make a, to make a compelling case for them to be interested. You know, maybe if it can be something for business exactly like, you know, Ubisoft opened historical department for their games and that became like another business for them. So.
00:31:23
Speaker
If we can make a similar combining case, maybe we could start a collaboration. That would be great. All right. Well, that's a good point to take a break and we'll come back on the other side and talk about a little bit more big picture and next steps for this back in a minute.
Research Questions on Digital Worlds
00:31:39
Speaker
Welcome back to the architect podcast episode two oh five. And we're talking about mapping online environments. And the first question for this paper that you guys were trying to answer was basically, can it be done? Is this even possible? And to your shock and surprise, it can be done.
00:31:57
Speaker
I mean, once you figured it out, it sounds fairly replicatable. And I think that this shouldn't be too hard just following those steps to reproduce this in most environments. So there were three other, I guess, future questions though, that are building off of this one. And I'm just going to go ahead and read those out so we have a frame of reference for this segment. And then we'll talk about that. So point number two is,
00:32:19
Speaker
Can the study of human interactive virtual environments contribute to the understanding of past human behavior? Can it contribute to the development of an ABM model? Number three is, how can we preserve temporary evidence of human occupation within a landscape that changes so quickly? And number four, would people behave differently in a virtual landscape than they would in a physical one? Are there any cultural biases in a player agent's behavior or in the developer's choice?
00:32:45
Speaker
So that is the ultimate goal of this project is to essentially answer those four questions. Really, it all comes down to the last question, to be honest.
00:32:55
Speaker
I'm wondering, let's just talk big picture. We don't have to break all of those down, but let's just talk really big picture here. And I'm really interested in the, would people behave differently in a virtual landscape? I'm going to go ahead and say probably yes, right off the bat, because normally you don't shoot people in the head on a daily basis. And normally, you know, you're not behaving the way you are. I mean, some people do, but normally, you know, that's not really the question though.
00:33:21
Speaker
Okay. So the question is will they behave differently in the landscape? And the way I interpreted that question was, you know, there's a mountain in the game. How do we go up the mountain as opposed to behaving badly on the mountain? Right, right. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, even then, I mean, a lot of times you can fly, you can teleport, you can do different things because of the game mechanics, right?
00:33:46
Speaker
Oh yeah. Yeah. The digital physics are awesome and they're either good or bad depending on if you're studying them or if you're using them. Yeah. Well, in No Man's Sky, you can just flip over to it. I can't remember what it's called, but you can just tunnel right through the mountain too.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what is the ultimate value here then, you know, to, to study this information. I mean, one of your points is, can we use this to, to look at the past? And I did like in your article near the end of it, when you were really talking about big picture here.
00:34:18
Speaker
observing what we can see in the virtual landscape, and then having the ability to actually talk to the people who created that ultimately to find out maybe what motivations were, because we can't do that to people in the past, right? As archaeologists, all we can do is observe the past and make our best guess based on information. But with here, we can observe something and say, hey, why'd you do that? What's the point there? And try to apply that to something in the past. Do you think that's still possible with the, like you said, the massive digital physics of the online world and how different it is?
00:34:48
Speaker
I think so. I hate to say the real world. In the physical world, I guess, you can talk to descendant communities and they can tell you things that have been passed down or they can give you the interpretations of the landscapes in which they live that exhibit features from antiquity.
00:35:06
Speaker
however, you know, sooner or longer ago that was. With digital games, you know, you can certainly engage with the player community, you know, as long as you identify yourself and what you're doing and get permission and all of that and behave in an ethical way. And then this happened with the No Man's Sky archaeological project where, you know, you would talk to people who were like day one players and they would be building and stuff and they would tell you how it was like. And then you might talk to people who joined the game two or three years later and they don't have that initial lived experience.
00:35:34
Speaker
they have a history because they have a wiki and a reddit and stuff like that and then you know they hang out with some of the old timers you know but that's only been three years but you know in a game that's that's ancient history and so you know being able to document in the beginning and then dipping your toe back in the water you know after a year after six months or something is always great because things are changing at such an advanced rate
00:35:57
Speaker
We're not looking at big data. We're looking at little data, as Jeremy Huggett says. But when you put it all together, you're able to create this historical picture, granted one that's been created in real time over just a few years as opposed to EOMs. Interesting. Do you think that this question for both of you, I guess,
00:36:19
Speaker
you know, when you start documenting stuff like this, you know, you start getting these landscapes documented, you start making, you know, doing other studies based on those models, because, you know, usually the first step in any archaeological project is mapping, right? So this is how we're approaching this. And once you start documenting this world and you start making it, I don't know, you start putting it into the archaeological record,
Preservation of Online Game Environments
00:36:42
Speaker
so to speak. It's not even so to speak. This really is the archaeological record. It's just the digital archaeological record.
00:36:47
Speaker
Do you think there will be a time, or do you know if anybody's thinking about protecting some of these worlds? We have the National Register of Historic Places, and one of the things that is important for the criteria on the NRHP is not only data, so important things about humans, but architectural things, unique architecture, unique people, and unique events. Those are basically the four criteria.
00:37:13
Speaker
Well, these online worlds are important for, as you mentioned, in the case of Fortnite, I mean, literally hundreds of millions of people. Right. And you look at the whole gaming community and it's and it's billions of people. So these are really important things where really important things are happening that are shaping people's lives in the in the physical world. In some cases, you know, whether it be success through their, you know, through, you know, e-gaming and things like that or other things.
00:37:39
Speaker
Do you think there's any validity here for protection of these worlds in the future? And I'm wondering if the developers would fight that. Now that would actually look if the government tried to take over No Man's Sky.
00:37:51
Speaker
I have a quick answer and then Sarah, I always thought like the internet archive should be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It ticks all the boxes for UNESCO World Heritage Site, albeit digital space. And whenever the United States decides to rejoin UNESCO, because I don't think they have yet.
00:38:11
Speaker
Then we'll be able to nominate the Internet Archive for that. There are actually physical monuments. There's one that was built in Iceland to commemorate something from EVE Online. And then there are in-game memorials like Make-A-Wish stuff in various games like WoW, for example, where
00:38:29
Speaker
You know, you have these permanent spaces that developers put in, you know, to honor something or to honor an event. And then you've also got commemorative blogs and wikis for all kinds of stuff. And there's actually a history of memorial building a no man's sky, you know, people building things and honor family members, you know, with the understanding that these will persist, at least for a while.
00:38:46
Speaker
Sure. And so, yeah, I think that some kind of designation would be great. And, you know, why not Azeroth, you know, as a protected space? I don't know. I mean, they had to bring back the vanilla server due to popular demand. And so, you know, that just seems to be a case in point of what people want to need and they want to revisit and have nostalgia and all that stuff. Sarah?
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think they should be protected and preserved. I think my mind is going just off to how? Because the data would be so massive. And as we mentioned before, the landscape changes so fast.
00:39:25
Speaker
that I'm not sure how we could practically do it. So I'm thinking about, you know, the practical, and like, if I, if I would soon record this, like, I can fly drones all the time on top of people buildings and, you know, try to collect everything. So I don't know what the practical
00:39:44
Speaker
way to do it the best one will be. But I think it should like for just, you know, I think it would be very important because they are manifestation of people behavior. And so for anthropological archaeological studies, they they should definitely be recorded.
00:40:06
Speaker
Well, these, these worlds too, they almost sort of as an analogy follow the Heisenberg uncertainty principle where they don't really exist until you're observing them, right? They're just ones and zeros in a hard drive until you're in there. So, so what does preservation even look like? Does it have to be preserved? So, so anybody can enter the world through some sort of portal, like a, like a video game machine or something like that, or do they need to be preserved so a people, you know, aren't in that world can see that they're looking at the world through a, through a TV screen.
00:40:34
Speaker
You know, that's been one of my goals when I was doing my PhD, you know, that was part of one of the case studies is what's the lowest common denominator of access that we can provide so people can see what it is that we're talking about? You know, so it could be just stereometric five dollar goggles
00:40:56
Speaker
You know, and you've got a split screen that you're watching on YouTube or something. And for some folks, that'll be enough. And it records the audio. Granted, it's a guided tour. You know, you're not able to look around. And I've tried and failed to do like a 360 VR inside a video game where we could do, you know, go where you want kind of stuff without actually having to use the game.
00:41:17
Speaker
So that's important. And you're right. A lot of these games, especially the procedural ones, they don't generate until you arrive. And then you have interfered with the space, even though the space is brand new. And what does that mean ethically? I don't know. And then you're also right in that the archaeologists are actually the leaders in creating the digital archaeological record. Hats off to TDAR. But
00:41:41
Speaker
where there is no archaeological record until we show up and all of a sudden there is one. And so what does that mean, you know, for ethics and for what it is that we're communicating? And if we go there first and people follow us, what have we done? It's weird. It's like Dr. Who or something. It's weird. So or Black Mirror. Yeah, I know. Right. We only got a few minutes left in this episode. So
00:42:05
Speaker
Where are you guys with number two? Talking about the study of human interactive virtual environment contributing to the understanding of past human behavior. Are you guys in process on doing some research on this?
Future of Digital Landscapes in Archaeology
00:42:17
Speaker
No. Not yet. All right. Short and simple. I'm not.
00:42:26
Speaker
I've got two books that I'm revising for Bergham. Basically, what we wanted to do is to create this methodology of digital space specifically for people to play around with agent-based modeling.
00:42:40
Speaker
Here's a landscape. Here's how you can map it. You can put your agents in there. And it doesn't have to be a game. It can be a digitally created space that you put in parameters or different rules to make it look a certain way or behave a certain way. And then you let your agents run around and do stuff. And then you can tweak that and see what happens. Our methodology allows you to do that with the spaces that you create digitally in support of your ABM work.
00:43:03
Speaker
which is the real goal. Now, I haven't, and Sarah, I don't know if you have, I haven't tried that yet with ABMs. I'm hoping maybe Sean Graham might if you're listening or Stephanie Crabtree, you know, moving forward. So we got a couple of minutes left. Let me get your guys's final thoughts on this, on what you want people to get out of this paper and moving forward. We'll start with you, Sarah.
00:43:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think what I would like people to get what I got out of it. And so start thinking about video games and digital spaces, whether they are now fixed or generated as
00:43:41
Speaker
Place is not where to play and have fun but like thinking about, you know, has a as world where you start living it and when you, you know, your action kind of have consequences for you the landscape environment that you're in and also for other players so to start thinking how you interact with things.
00:44:01
Speaker
and the people that you meet in the digital space on top of just having fun and playing the game by itself. This will be more aware that that is still creating archaeological record for other people, eventually in the future, possibly to look at and study. Okay.
00:44:19
Speaker
Andrew? For me, the main goal was to demonstrate that even though digital landscapes are a relatively new medium, an archaeological medium, that you don't have to really change all that much what you do as an archaeologist and the tools that you use.
00:44:35
Speaker
If you're using drones, if you're using modeling software, if you're using GIS software, you can still follow those steps and still use those materials in digital spaces as well as in terrestrial ones. That was really one of the overarching goals for me is to demonstrate that you don't have to be a gamer in order to participate in doing this kind of digital archaeology, especially archaeology that's done in a digital space.
00:45:01
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's about all the time we have. Thanks guys for coming on. I hope that when you continue this research in the future, we can bring you guys back on to, to have a follow-up discussion. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. Thanks again. Bye bye. All right. And we'll see everybody else next time.
00:45:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:45:49
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.