The Interactive Pasts Conference: Erik Champion
6Presentation at the Interactive Pasts Conference, April 4th 2016, Leiden University.
Erik Champion (Curtin University)
Archaeological Discovery, Game Genres, Game Mechanics
"My talk will focus on the types of interaction in general and mechanics in particular that could better help the design of video games for archaeological (and heritage) purposes.
How to classify and predict the range, success and future of video games in archaeological research? I suggest a revealing way of evaluating such an area is to examine how they employ interaction and that an effective educational and engaging mix of archaeology and video games would be far more likely if we leveraged game mechanics to help teach archaeological methods, approaches and interpretations. According to Sicart (Sicart, 2008) “A game mechanic, then, is the action invoked by an agent to interact with the game world, as constrained by the game rules.” But where are easy to translate mechanics for archaeological discovery that we can transform into game mechanics to engage and educate the public?
Digital archaeology as immersive virtual environments should be interactive because data changes, technologies change and interaction can provide for different types of learning preferences while drawing in the younger generations. That said, interaction alone is not very useful if we don’t know how the interaction reconfigures the narrative, interpretations or other types of evidence."
https://erikchampion.wordpress.com/