Rapid Archaeology of Human Constructions Within Interactive Digital Built Environments

Abstract

Software is an architectural outcome of human labor which today houses the collective creative output of billions of people. Video games are a subset of software; they enable users to create their own built environments within a digital framework which can be shared with others for enjoyment, but these are later subject to abandonment and destruction. These digital constructions in synthetic, ephemeral spaces provide a unique challenge to archaeologists: how to document, preserve, and analyze archaeological evidence of human occupation of digital spaces, especially when that period of occupation can last mere minutes and can vanish from the digital landscape without a trace

Gaming the Past– Commercial Video Games with historical contexts: Evaluation of the Iranian Lotf Ali Khan Game

“…Year after year, the discipline of historical game studies expands. Scholarly work in the field varies from issues of historical textual representation to videogames' function as a sort of historical representation in and of itself; archeogaming [20]- [22]; using videogames to teach students about history [23], and research into player reception of historical accuracy and heritage in videogames [24][25]. Individual studies are often carried out on popular franchises such as Assassin's Creed [26]- [28] and Sid Meier's Civilisation [20], or the excessive amount of videogames concerned with representing the American West [29], World Wars [20], [30]- [32] or other lesserrepresented conflicts(Sterczewski 2016).…”

Photogrammetry and GIS in Human-Occupied Digital Landscapes

“…The use of such tools and methodologies represents only part of the digital turn in archaeology, which began in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Opitz 2018; Perry and Taylor 2018; Stobiecka 2020). Archaeological investigations now also include digital environments recently created by humans for other humans (Aycock and Biittner 2020; Boellstorff et al 2012; Reinhard 2019; Smith Nicholls and Cook 2022). One sees this human–digital environmental interaction most easily in video games and virtual worlds, which often contain comprehensible, human-scaled spaces in which to engage.…”

“…Because this evidence is so fleeting, and because the underlying landscapes of digital games and synthetic worlds change with great frequency (i.e., updates, bug fixes, new versions, etc. ), archaeologists of digital landscapes must operate almost contemporaneously with their subjects of study, interpreting the data postcapture (Reinhard 2021b). To obtain sufficient data to be used for archaeological analyses, archaeologists need to develop a methodology for recording human evidence in temporary landscapes.…”

“…Palabras clave: GIS, fotogrametría, arqueología del paisaje, arqueología digital, archaeogaming Since at least 1997, archaeologists have been conducting ethnographies and archaeological surveys of human-occupied interactive digital built environments-namely, virtual worlds and video games. These archaeologists investigate the possibility of using evidence produced by players in digital worlds for archaeological and anthropological research regarding human behavior in physical spaces (Aycock and Biittner 2020;Boellstorff et al 2012;Jones 1997;Reinhard 2018Reinhard , 2019Smith Nicholls and Cook 2022). Such studies have shown how the investigation of these landscapes both observe and record ephemeral traces left by players on them.…”