The Interactive Pasts Conference 2: Jakub Majewski and Beata Bielińska-Majewska
0Video presentation for the Interactive Pasts Conference 2, October 8-10 2018, Center for Sound and Vision.
Jakub Majewsk (Bond University)
Beata Bielińska-Majewska (District Museum in Toruń)
Video Games for the Palaeolithic: A Case Study of Echo: The Secrets of the Lost Cavern
Numerous games explore archaeological and historical cultural heritage in ways analogous to historical fiction in literature and film, but few reach as far back as the prehistoric periods. The Stone Age remains virtually unexplored, except for the fantastic distortions of various “cavemen vs. dinosaurs” games. While the recent Far Cry: Primal (2016) set in the Mesolithic has received some scholarly attention, the earlier title, Echo: The Secrets of the Lost Cavern (2006/2010), set in the Upper Palaeolithic period, has not been examined. Like Primal, Echo did not attempt to innovate in gameplay, but instead capitalised on its unique prehistoric setting as a selling point. The game was presented not as fantasy but as (pre)historical fiction, emphasising the veracity of its depiction of the prehistoric Lascaux Cave. This paper is a collaborative examination of Echo, conducted by a games developer/scholar and an archaeologist/museum curator specialised in the Stone Age. The paper investigates the depth and quality of the archaeological heritage content in Echo, examining how this content is aligned with archaeological knowledge, and how its presentation works in terms of virtual world-building practices. Echo demonstrates that, while any reconstruction of the Palaeolithic will be necessarily speculative, modern interdisciplinary research enables partial reconstructions of even such distant timeframes. Although partially outdated by progression of video game technologies, Echo remains a noteworthy point of discussion for the question of how archaeological heritage be transmitted, explored, and popularised through virtual worlds.
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