It Belongs in a Museum - The Archeology of Games
Games include several facets. Some of those are physical remnants, evidence of play. Those can and sometimes are treated as objects of discovery. If you've ever started a D&D campaign to discover that it was a continuation of the DM’s campaign world from a decade ago, you've taken part in gaming archeology. If you've ever acquired a second hand board game or found a half-finished character sheet, same deal.
What does it mean to play in the ruins of someone else’s story?
- This includes adaptations, I think - playing an RPG in Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones often feels weird because you’re never in your own story.
Games Archeology has a few fronts:
Physical materiality
- Dice, boards, miniatures, are ritual tools.
- Basically votive objects - mass produced, but made personal through imbuement of meaning.
- Your lucky d20 is as culturally relevant as a Roman gaming die found in an ancient grave.
Stratigraphy of Design
- Rulebooks and editions create layers of interpretation.
- Scholars can excavate mechanical shifts from wargaming to heroic fantasy to narrative collaboration.
- Same with board games - Monopoly to Risk to Settlers of Catan to Pandemic Legacy showing cultural shifts through methodologies of play.
Play Traces
- Character sheets, annotated maps, house rules, are all artifacts of lived experience.
- These are the residue of performance - a site-specific record of ritual and play.
- A coffee stained, cigarette burned character sheet is a relic of a social event.
Archaeology within Tabletop Play
- Dungeons are based on archeological excavation. Dungeon delving simulates excavation…Sometimes while the subjects of study are still there defending their stuff.
- Ethics of excavation in shared imagined spaces: How does archeology in the fiction of your games intersect with ideas like imperialism? What responsibility does a game or fiction have to representation of archaeology as a practice?
- There are also games that reveal themselves through play. You play as civilizations that rise and fall, leaving layers of history across the map (Dialect, Microscope, Legacy games)
- Once those games are over, what is left is an artifact of both the art object and the experience of play
The idea of Archeogaming comes from video games where we are actively working against digital decay and the materiality of digital experience. In tabletop, it is about the persistence of the objects and experiences of the art.
Further Reading:
Andrew Reinhard, Archaeogaming: “An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games”
Florence Smith Nicholls & Michael Cook: “The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring” and “That Darned Sandstorm”
Sandy Louchart, Daniel Livingstone, Stuart Jeffrey: “Archaeological Storytelling in Games”
Ian Bogost: “Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames”
