I’m well underway on my next book which I’m thinking of as the necromancy book (provisional title: ‘Digital Necromancy: Archaeological Enchantment, Agent Modeling, and Archaeogaming’). I’ve just pounded out a chapter that shows some of the sausage-making behind building an agent based model, ie, the messiness of it all. It comes in the final third of the book, after much discussion about enchantment and vibrant materials and sense and sensation and a whole host of other things.

Ideally a reader who hasn’t built a model before will be able to piece something together from the code snippets bundled with Netlogo, and I show how one can take inspiration from the included models and code to build a re-implementation of my Itineraries model published in 2006. I finish it off by showing that digital modes-of-thinking transfer to the analog world with a quick glimpse at the logic and rationale behind our board game, FORVM

You can read the piece and leave comments at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X581PPzo5XvVC5UTvwjJlU5703J2Pe8kQKCAyoTXQB4/edit?usp=sharing

This is the first draft of this section. It’s going to be rough and awkward and unpolished.