Archaeogaming session online!
At the last international CAA in Amsterdam, I was co-organising a session on Archaeogaming. I already wrote about it, but since a couple of weeks, we also have all the presentations online. The VALUE Foundation thankfully recorded everything and put it on their YouTube Channel…
What happened at the CAA?
So in April 2023, the international conference on computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology (CAA) took place in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The conference is about Digital and Computational Archaeology, but in recent years there were also presentations and sessions on Archaeogaming. In the Amsterdam CAA, I co-organised a one day session on the topic together with Aris Politopoulos and Csilla Ariese from the VALUE Foundation, a university-based group of people that research the crossroads between games and academia.
Aris had the idea to record all the presentations and so he did. We collected the consent of everybody presenting and used a simple camera setup to record each presentation. Although the light is of course dimmed due to the conference setting, the presentation is quiet visible and the sound pretty good.
Content of the videos
So there is a YouTube list with all the presentations online. All in all there are 13 presentations from all over the world and with diverse topics. After an introduction by Aris Politopoulos, Angus Mol & Csilla Ariese, there were two presentations on the use of Archaeogaming in an academia setting by myself and Valentina Hiseni and by Robert Stephan. This was followed by some practical examples by T. Electra et al. and Samanta Mariotti.
Afterwards there were many more presentations of people showcasing how Archaeogaming can be used for research, knowledge dissemination and visualisation. Florence Nicholls for example showcased her PhD work on generative archaeology games or Coleen Morgan talked about Archaeology as Worldbuilding. Best have a look at this list yourself, get a coffee and lean back to listen to a range of interesting presentations.
Where to go for more Archaeogaming?
If this is not enough for you, you should definitely check out what the VALUE Foundation is doing. You could also have a look at the Archaeogaming Blog founded by Andrew Reinhard and continued by Kaitlyn Kingsland. You could also have a look at the Archaeogaming page of the University of Cologne (I actually made this), where students showcase games they created during a seminar. At the moment, there is only one semester visible, but soon enough there will be more!
If you are more of a book worm, you can also have a look at the foundational book of Andrew Reinhard called Archaeogaming. You could also look at a blog post I have written a while ago to give a summary what Archaeogaming actually is. Enjoy!
