I’ve been thinking a lot about landscapes recently, especially after a spectacular flyover in July above the southern tip of Greenland. I looked down and could instantly see small ice floes, rocky beaches, extinct volcanoes, blue-green lakes, and glaciers. There was no evidence of humanity, at least in that small part I could see of the country (pop. ca. 56,000). I wondered where people might live, where they might fish, hunt, build a place to live. I also thought about where they might shop, where they might work, and scanned for clues far below.
I feel similarly when I play No Man’s Sky (Hello Games) or other games where I can cruise over the landscape in a shape or on a mount, watching it unfold as I make decisions on where to land based on the quests/missions that I have. It’s landscape archaeology even though it’s in a synthetic world. Any landscape archaeologist must create a research plan, must then select an appropriate site in which to do the work, and then conduct a variety of activities ranging from aerial reconnaissance, remote sensing, shovel tests, fieldwalking, finds analysis, and more.
In order to better understand how landscape archaeology works in synthetic worlds (largely digital games, but this can be applied to all digital built environments), we need to understand the definition of a landscape and the varieties of landscape archaeologies, all of which shift neatly between the natural and the synthetic. I’m using the terms “natural” and “synthetic”, following the lead of Edward Castronova, an economist and pioneer in understanding the relationships between people and digital spaces. Video games do not present a virtual space. They are very real environments that evoke real emotional responses, and contain robust, mature economies and societies both human and non-human. “Synthetic” acknowledges the reality of these spaces while also noting that they are not “natural.” Synthetic worlds are designed, the creators and their blueprints/code known. For the digital landscape archaeologist then, we can explore these spaces asking exactly the same questions as our natural-world counterparts. I’m willing to bet that what we find will not be that dissimilar.
In the Preface to 2008’s Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. (Left Coast Press), editors Bruno David and Julian Thomas identify three broad themes of landscape archaeology (p. 20):
- Landscapes are fields of human engagement as in Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. These include both explorations on conceptual ways of approaching, and experiences of landscapes as fields of engagement, as the “in” of “being-in-the-world.”
- Landscapes are physical environmental contexts of human behavior (such as investigations of the tree cover or topography of the environments).
- We should also reflect on representations of landscapes, such as in landscape art, or the identification of colonial tropes in landscape analysis of textual preconceptions.
Both natural and synthetic landscapes share these three themes: 1) For synthetic worlds, players are very much “in-the-world”, completely engaged with their surroundings as they explore and play; 2) synthetic worlds do provide physical environmental contexts, which can include understanding vegetation and topography that can (and often do) dictate player behavior; and 3) synthetic worlds very much provide representations of landscapes, typically created by one or more designers, based on what they conceive of landscapes appear, as well as how they advance narrative or drive player behavior.
When we engage with synthetic worlds, we occupy a place within a place within a place, inhabiting multiple landscapes at the same time. We sit in the natural world before engaging with the synthetic. And once inside the synthetic landscape, we visit multitudes of places dotting our field of vision and beyond. The landscape beckons us in, and affords us new frontiers.
Landscape archaeology seems to be preoccupied with human presence and engagement within the spaces they occupy over time. It doesn’t matter if that space is natural or synthetic. S