 which are tied to absolute dates in the natural world. But inside the game, landscapes can be made to look old (or to imply age), even though the game itself has only been playable for a few days. Even playing older games results in landscapes that look exactly the same now as they did in 1983. Little, if anything, changes.
Regardless of when they were created/accessed, these synthetic landscapes in games can provide insight into how people (and their things) move from place to place, offering glimpses into what players (or non-human agents) carry with them, use, sell, or discard. In observing in-game habits of players as well as coded entities, especially in games where the landscape can vary (or can be varied), the archaeologist can begin to experiment with agent-based modeling (ABM), making modest (or radical) changes in order to run experiments to see what happens. In some cases, landscapes could be modeled after those in the natural world to assist in answering archaeological questions about earthbound places and the people who used them.
How does an archaeologist conduct landscape archaeology within a synthetic world? It’s not terribly different from working in the natural world, as articulated by Thomas Richards in his article, “Suvey Strategies in Landscape Archaeology”: first develop a research question. Once a research question is developed, a suitable landscape must be selected. Research problems often require a landscape to be representative of a larger area, so the distributional patterns of the surface record and associated human behavioral interpretations can be widely extrapolated. Following the selection of a regional landscape study area, the formation of its present surface characteristics needs to be considered in developing a survey strategy: geomorphology and vegetation (which affects visibility of the ground surface). Try to determine human land-use history, particularly large-scale ground disturbance activities. Determine the intensity and coverage of your initial survey. Decide on the scale of the survey and what (and how much) to sample. Decide on whether or not to conduct remote sensing or invasive subsurface testing. How will you record this data? Will there be follow-up surveys allowing for more detailed collection and analysis? At the survey’s conclusion, can you develop any kind of predictive model for where one might find other artifacts or settlements?
The survey and research plan points are applicable to the archaeological investigation of synthetic worlds. Any archeological fieldwork much be driven by research questions and a plan on how to answer those questions. For my online archaeological survey, I needed to find a site that extensively used procedural content generation, which would perhaps exhibit evidence of “machine-created culture,” material remains created and organized by algorithms that would populate a synthetic landscape. No Man’s Sky seemed to be the best fit for this need. I wanted to check distribution of sites and artifacts, to see how buildings and landscapes interacted, to look at animals and vegetation and their relationship to the landscape and these structures, and to see how these manifested in the nearly infinite worlds that could be explored. Barring a multi-player option (which would materialize in a basic way one year after the game’s initial release), I had to conduct my surveys as a lone fieldwalker and as a lone pilot. I used different levels of granularity in my surveys, less detail when flying (counting structures and times between them), and more detail when on the ground (noting artifacts, brush density). Future surveys can be undertaken in synthetic worlds that actively encourage guilds (groups of players) who can survey together in the same landscape on the same server. This will also allow for specialization. Depending on the synthetic world, we can sample and “shovel test.”
I mentioned non-invasive survey techniques above. Paul Cheetham covers this for natural worlds in “Noninvasive Subsurface Mapping Techniques, Satellite and Aerial Imagery in La