Archaeogaming Antics: Computer Science Meets Archaeology

Archaeogaming Antics: Computer Science Meets Archaeology
Date: Tuesday March 12, 2024
16:00-17:15 GMT
Speaker John Aycock (University of Calgary)

How can a digital artifact like a video game be studied? One approach is to reverse-engineer the game's code and data, the language of binary 1s and 0s that instruct the computer how to bring the game to life. My collaborators and I have applied this method to the study of old, "retro" video games, (re)discovering the clever ways that game programmers would create games on highly constrained computers, and seeing that human interactions with technology have changed little since stone tools were in vogue. This interdisciplinary work fits under the umbrella of "archaeogaming", which has been defined as the archaeology in and of video games, but at the same time challenges traditional ideas of what an artifact is and how it can be studied. Multiple examples will be used to surprise and delight.

The Spring 2024 Material Digital Humanities seminar is organised by Gabriel Bodard, Shawn Graham and Rada Varga and co-hosted by the Digital Humanities Research Hub, University of London, UK; Department of History, Carleton University, Canada; Star-UBB Institute of Advanced Studies, University Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj Napoca, Romania. 

This seminar series will present a range of discussions around materiality and the research possibilities offered by digital methods and approaches. More than just the value of digitization and computational research to the study of material culture, we are especially interested in theoretical and digital approaches to the question of materiality itself. We do not restrict ourselves to any period of history or academic discipline, but want to encourage interdisciplinarity and collaborative work, and the valuable exchange of ideas enabled by cross-pollination of languages, areas of history, geography and cultures.