CAA 2023: Florence Nicholls
0Archives (Not) Of Our Own: Procedurally Generating Object Biographies
This paper argues that the affordances of procedural generation allow for productive reflection on simulating the archaeological record. As mentioned above, one feature of procedural generation is randomness, though within set parameters. This controlled randomness is analogous to the analogue archaeological record which may be subject to known disturbance or environmental factors, but which is unlikely to be predicted in its entirety prior to analysis. In short, procedurally generated object biographies allow for an exploration of archaeology as process. The argument
that the video game medium can affect how we construct archaeological knowledge builds on Tara Copplestone’s chapter “Designing and Developing a Playful Past in Games”, in which she states “video games have the potential to not just be viewed as a tool or an entertainment medium to be tacked on after all the research has been done, but as a part of the process itself” (Copplestone 2017, 95).
This research forms part of a wider doctoral project on “generative archaeology games”, a term coined by the author to refer to games with procedurally generated material culture that a player interprets to understand past events. The wider implications of this research involve future user studies into how players react to and interpret the procedurally generated content in Nothing Beside Remains. This paper also functions as a call for archaeogaming and computational archaeology
to engage more with video game development as a creative practice. There is great potential for future collaborations between game developers, narrative designers, computer scientists and archaeogamers, who are all in one way or another rewriting the procedural rhetoric of video games.
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