ynthetic worlds have nearly infinite space with which players can engage, creating lived-in environments where players can spend more time than in the natural world. Players inhabit these spaces, invest time, money, and resources, and create their own culture side-by-side with any synthetic culture pre-built by developers and/or algorithms. Some synthetic worlds (e.g., Minecraft and No Man’s Sky) offer players the chance to manipulate the landscape themselves for whatever reason, be it for entertainment, or for something more practical. Create a real or synthetic garden. Dig a hole to see where it goes and what resources might lie beneath your feet.
Every landscape (natural or synthetic) can contain material remains and networks connecting agents, materials, and places. A goal of the landscape archaeologist is to connect the two. While this can be easy in designed games (synthetic worlds where everything has been crafted by the software developer), it becomes increasingly more difficult (and arguably more “real”) in worlds where everything is procedurally generated. This is especially true when algorithms are entrusted with the task of building a world and populating it with things for the archaeologist to discover. This placement is almost random, but bears some logic based on the landscapes discoverable within the synthetic world. The landscape shows the archaeologist where to look.
A landscape, either natural or synthetic, can be interpreted in any number of ways. A synthetic world’s designers interpret their digital built environments from the perspective of narrative, player engagement, and aesthetics. From the player’s perspective, the landscape exists as something to explore, as something to be traversed, and as a provider of materials for quests and recipes. In the natural world, one must also consider the landscape from the indigenous perspective(s), understanding how the landscape is a permanent resident, a host of memories, and perhaps a space of spiritual resonance. How do non-human denizens of synthetic worlds “perceive” their landscapes? For now, automatons unquestioningly operate within the constraints of a world’s rules. They “see” the landscape through software instructions. They engage with that space based on parameters, acting when acted upon. It’s little different than a human commuter in a rut.
Inhabiting synthetic landscapes can, over time, create a material record of that occupation through in-world crafting and building, through rubbish, but also through documentation of what came before. Players record and photograph their creations, share them, save them. It’s a rich record of space and time that the natural world will never see. It is perhaps easier to illustrate synthetic landscapes because they can be recorded during exploration, and can even “instanced” for exploration by others on their own hardware, helpful if one wishes to have results independently confirmed by others, something not normally possible in field archaeology, which can be a destructive process leaving only data but not the primary source(s) of that data (i.e., strata).
Speaking of visualization, how does the archaeologist-player map the landscape of a given synthetic world? Some games come with built-in maps, while others tease out their mapping only through a player’s progress. Other synthetic worlds have no maps at all, so players may either hand-draw their explorations, or rely on memory, the latter of which most non-human entities do. In many games, players rarely see their world from above, but frequently at eye-level. We remember how to get from one part of the forest to another through experience, or from following something, curious to see where it goes. We create a mental map, which is visual, at times aural, occasionally punctuated with memories of events that happen along the trail or traverse. We learn the game’s rules for wayfinding in the synthetic wilderness, and then lead others to what we’ve seen, or we write about it so others can follow in our footsteps. Some of these writings are literally called “walk-t