hroughs.” With an active player community (or a preserved collective memory), we also have what can equate to “tavern archaeology” in the natural world. Yannis Lolos wrote about this Land of Sikyon, about approaching local Greeks in taverns and other gathering spots to share a drink and listen to stories. At times these stories would provide clues to where to look for previously undocumented archaeological sites, which were then compiled into a gazeteer for future archaeologists to use as they continue to understand the history of Sikyonia. Video game archaeologists should do well to spend time with player communities on reddit and elsewhere for the same reasons as Lolos. We can learn from indigenous populations, can work together with them, and can share what we find with them.
When an archaeologist explores the landscapes within a synthetic world, they notice both presence and absence in the archaeological record. The archaeologist applies filters, scanning for vegetation, animal life, water and other topographical features, and evidence of current or past use and occupation. One landscape flows into the next, synthetic biomes bleeding into each other. The archaeologist looks for boundaries, for patterns, whether confronting the landscape head-on, or floating above it in a flying vehicle or in a disembodied “photo mode” provided by the game. The archaeologist can ask why some spaces are neglected and others used, and if used, how frequently and why. It is a search for an underlying algorithm or a set of landscape behaviors as designed. In most synthetic worlds, landscapes are very much characters and have their own rules on how to act, which includes weather-making and resource-production. Landscapes in synthetic worlds have personalities, or at least that is how players perceive the spaces in which they occupy.
There is a haptic necessity to understanding landscapes. In order to write about landscape in an archaeological way, it must be experienced first-hand by the archaeologist. What applies in the natural world is also applicable in the synthetic. Christopher Tilley articulates this in “Phenomenological Approaches to Landscape Archaeology.” The more we experience a landscape in person, the more we understand its rules, which include formation processes and use by both human and non-human actors.
In “Object Fragmentation and Past Landscapes,” John Chapman writes that “landscapes consist of a network of places, some natural, some culturally constituted, some created by human manipulation of the landscape. It is this network of places that gives human lives their meaning, through an identification of past activities and present embodiment.”
This also describes synthetic landscapes and the networks that run atop them: some created by human manipulation (players create networks through their own agency in a synthetic world), some culturally constituted (these networks are created in advance and by design prior to player-arrival), and some natural (emergent behavior independent of player or designer agency).
So what’s in a landscape then that immediately grabs the archaeologist’s eye? Architecture is a start, and is one of the things most easily recognizable in synthetic worlds. Players expect architecture, and most games deliver. As part of the synthetic landscape, architecture behaves in the same way as its natural counterpart: it is recognizable, is used/re-used, assists in wayfinding, and contributes to the understanding of a place’s present and past. This raises an interesting point regarding determining the age of something in a synthetic world. How do we do this?
Dating landscapes in synthetic worlds varies greatly from those that are natural. This is perhaps the greatest difference between the two. In synthetic worlds, there is no real stratigraphy, and no real superposition of layers of earth. For most synthetic worlds, there is no geologic time. The spaces just sit there not eroding, unless you count “bit rot,” the slow decay of underlying data. The archaeologist is left with software version and build numbers,