This is a draft. It has non-sequiturs, typos, incomplete thoughts, and errors. Read at your own peril. But it’s getting close to the point where I’ll submit it.

Archaeology and video games share a number of affinities, not least of which because they are both procedurally generated. There is a method for field archaeology; follow the method, and you will have correctly excavated the site/surveyed the landscape/recorded the standing remains/etc. These procedures contain within them various ways of looking at the world, and emphasize certain kinds of values over others, which is why it is possible to have a marxist archaeology, or a gendered archaeology, or so on. Thus, it also seems obvious to me that you can have an archaeology within video games (not to be confused with media archaeology, or an archaeology of video games). Just as you can have ethics of archaeology, you can have an ethics of video games. What is interesting for us in the present moment is how these ethical perspectives intersect.

The obvious starting point in a discussion of the digital ethics of video games insofar as they intersect with archaeological ethics is of course the depiction of ‘looting’ as a game mechanic. Looting happens in a variety of games as a way of enabling the player to improve his or her character’s abilities by the performance of an otherwise meaningless task in the game environment. In games that explicitly frame their narrative in a way that intersects with cultural heritage, this looting is demonstrably archaeological looting, in that the objects collected represent the actual material culture of an in-game culture (or more commonly, uses a ‘real-world’ object as the model for the in-game object). Thus, the depiction of looting in games can be seen to normalize the activity of looting in the real world.

This is true, and is a serious issue. But the ethical dimension of video games, especially as they pertain to archaeological ethics, goes much deeper. In what follows, I am heavily influenced by the work of Miguel Sicart (2009), who draws attention to two extremely important aspects that seem obvious but are actually rather subtle:

1 – that the player is an ethical agent in the world

2 – that the game is both a designed object and a player experience in this world, and hence ethical.

In which case, ‘the experience of a computer game is the experience of a moral object by an ethical subject’ (5).  Too often, in discussions of video games, the player is depicted as some sort of secondary thing that is merely influence (ethically) by the game. But for Sicart, the player is an ethical creature and can make moral judgements about the experience within which she is immersed (11). So while a game that depicts unlawful acts – like looting – under a virtues-ethics perspective would be unethical, Sicart reminds us that this account does not take into account the player-agent’s ability to reflect on this (or indeed, to play in a manner that subverts it). A game that permits looting but also allows for such an act to have meaningful game play consequences for the player to act upon would be ethical, per Sicart (160). A game that permits looting, but has no meaningful consequences, is unethical (159). Sicart uses the example of Bioshock and the Little Sisters. Kill the Little Sister, and the player collects a certain amount of ‘Adam’ from the corpse, a valuable in-game resource; let the Little Sister live, and the Little Sister gives you very nearly the same amount of ‘Adam’ anyways. There is no in-game consequence, and for Sicart, this means that the game design is being unethical (160).  ‘A good computer game is that which fosters virtuous players, a game designed to create player-subjects who can understand and develop their ethical values, and where those values can be reflected. The player is responsible…’ (126). A game that features looting as a mechanic, from an archaeological perspective therefore, would be ethical if the consequences of that decision to loot gave the player a meaningful opportunity to decide whether or not to do so. It need not necessarily make the equation that looting = bad; but the consequences have to meaningful within the ludic narrative of the game so that the player can reflect on those consequences. We read novels to experience the world from another’s perspective – every decision within the novel is meaningful. So too should games be replete with opportunities for meaningful interactions and choices. The genius of Bioshock – where it is at its most ethical – is where it reveals at the end that the player never had any real choice in events anyway; that the designers have been puppet masters all along (163).

The second part of Sicart’s ethics (the first being the subtle interplay between virtue ethics and the player’s own moral agency) is drawn from informational ethics (as he interprets the work of Floridi and Sanders). In this perspective, beings are data entities. Not all beings are biological. The materiality of a pawn in a game of chess is not what is important; rather it is in its relational situation on the board and the contingent interplay of that situation within the rules for movement for pawns (Sicart, quoting Floridi 2003). Data entities make meaning, or have meaning, in terms of their relationships with other data entities. Thus, data entities exist in an ecology of relationships – the Infosphere. The practical import of this is to extend agency to the game, or to objects within the game, and to situate them at the same level as the player agent. What constitutes an ‘agent’ in this perspective depends on how the Infosphere is abstracted (128-130; see also Morgan 2009 where she argues that non-player characters are non-human manifestations of a network of computation). Informational ethics sounds rather similar, to the archaeological ear, to ideas drawn from complexity theory or actor-network theory. Objects actually do want things (Gosden xxxxx).

‘Information ethics describes a moral universe in which not only is no being alone, but every being is indeed related, morally related to other beings, because in their well-being is connected the welfare of the whole system. Agents are systems that affect larger systems with their actions, affecting themselves as well, since other systems are procedurally and informationally related to them… Information ethics considers moral actions an information process’. (130). Emphasis in the original.

The point of considering the ethics of games from Sicart’s perspective is to explore an issue – like looting, for instance – and to situate it within the the web of interrelated elements and agents to develop a weighted network. While he does not mean an actual network-analytic approach to measuring things like centrality or degree within such a representation (he is more metaphorical than formal here), Sicart provides us with a way of operationalizing our ethical analysis of games. The locus of ethical responsibility within a game (whether it is with the player, the designers, the labor system, the market, the player community structure, the non-player characters, or what have you) can be read from this weighted  network.

Let’s consider for a moment the moral agency of the player.  Sicart points out games and their narrative layer, their ludic layer can be damaging to a player’s virtue when the player is not sufficient mature (201). That is to say, if we play games for which are own moral compass is not yet completely formed or developed, then these games can be a source of harm for the player. The obligation then rests on the game designer to create games where the ethical choices in the game have meaningful consequences. Then we as ethical agents ourselves can play the game to explore and probe the limits of our own ethical understandings (205). For archaeology, this means that our codes of archaeological ethics can be operationalized, made real and consequent, and testable in the sense that a player can begin to explore the consequences for herself.  Are our archaeological ethics deontological, rule-bound and duty-bound, and not necessarily meaningful for us as individual archaeologists? In which case, how do these intersect with the ethics of games as Sicart imagines them? A game should be a safe space to explore this contrast.

This I think is one of the main avenues for exploration in the nascent area of ‘archaeogaming’. Instead of concerning ourselves with visual fidelity to an imagined past (for instance), we should actually be making games that embody our codes of archaeological ethics. When we play games as archaeologists (when we are consciously thinking as an archaeologists and using the morals and ethics of our profession) we should therefore be reflecting on what the game as a designed object is doing to how we think about the world.

In what follows, I recount a play through of Minecraft, trying to behave as ‘archaeologically’ and ethically as I can. I then follow up with some more questions about where an ethically informed ‘archaeogaming’ might usefully proceed. When I write about video games, I am the player-subject I know best (and for whom I do not need to obtain ethics research board clearance). What are the web of weighted relationships in the games that I play most often? Are they ethical games? Am I an ethical player? How can we design games where the ethics of games (as described by Sicart) intersect with the ethics of archaeology?

A Playthrough of Minecraft as an Archaeologist

Video games are simply the latest incarnation of humanity’s long history of creating virtual worlds. Whether the virtual world are the Caves of Lascaux, or the play-world of Hadrian’s Villa, one of humanity’s defining abilities is its ability to construct worlds removed from the everyday. What is perhaps unique about the current incarnation of virtual worlds is their accessibility: the ability for the virtual world I create to be shared with you; the ability for both of us to enjoy/explore/engage with that virtual world; the ability to be changed by that virtual world (provided that this virtual world is designed ethically: that is, *not* in its representation of a/the world, but rather in providing meaningful choices in how that world is experienced).

Roger Travis has argued that the playing of video games bears deep affinities to epic oral tradition, that through play and reporting on what happened, we enter into a bardic mode of making meaning from the set pieces and action of games. Note that this is very similar to how Sicart defines the ethical player: one who has a mature reflection on the nature of the game; the moral presence of a player matters (Sicart, 201-2). For Travis, how those set pieces are encountered, in what order, and in what circumstances, are defined by the game’s mechanics and story – that is, its rules. The rules of a game encode the worldview of the game’s designers. You’re good at the game? You’re performing the worldview of the game’s creators (note again the way Bioshock plays with this at the end of that game). What’s interesting is the way the player’s moral compass, and her agency in the game intersects with those rules, and merges with the player’s own story, the story the player tells to make sense of the action within the world.  Play is the act of discovery. The story we tell about that play sits at the intersection between the player’s own agency, and the god-like agency of the game’s creators to specify the rules. What happens at this intersection is emergent, and if we examine that point, we will understand something of what it means to explore a game ethically; and to see that some ethical points of view are hard-coded and cannot be challenged.

Imagine then that Minecraft is a real place. After all, if I tell you that the seed I used in Minecraft 1.64 was Double Village with default biomes, you can travel to the exact same place that I visit, a parallel world in a multiverse that has suffered my interventions, but as of yet, not yours. What story shall you tell? Here is mine. I initially told it in a series of tweets, and so added another layer of performance to the game.

The texts all say the same thing. Set the portal to ‘Double Village’ and soon you’ll find the exotic and lost desert villages. I put on the archaeotrancerebretron, grabbed my kit bag, and gritted my teeth. My companions all had theirs on too. We stepped into the charmed circle…

…desert sand gives way to a compacted sedimentary stone. Is it natural? Or is it built? I had to stop myself & remember my training.

… The next day we found the village. Much of it was above ground, including what looks to be the tower of a temple. We arrived on what appeared to be a market day. The locals go about their business, unconcerned about the ruined temple in their midst. No one stops us; but no one helps us either. Our ways are as alien to them as theirs to us; so long as they don’t get in way of Scientific Exploration!

I considered the temple, and began trying to record stratigraphically what I observed while I dug. The different kinds of blocks do help differentiate context – sand fill is quite different from the sandstone blocks the temple was built with. Unfortunately, sandstone is also part of the geology of Minecraft, and typically happens around 3 or 4 blocks down from the surface in this biome. So it became difficult to figure out where the temple ended and the local geology began. Since the temple is of a common ‘type’ in Minecraft (while the environment is procedurally generated and varied, the generated architecture conforms to a limited number of ideal-types),  and I was already familiar with it, I could just dig to exhume what I already believed to be there already: my ideas about the architecture of the place dictated what I would find. The act of excavation creates the archaeology in more ways than one, it seems.

As I dug, the sand shifted underneath me & I stumbled into the tower, breaking part of its friable decoration. “What do you see?” “…. beautiful things!” I replied

Shortly thereafter, an armed skeleton began firing arrows at me. But – in this world with no ‘rules’, no overarching ‘story’, deciding to go an an archaeological expedition forces a story on us.  Temples in Minecraft invariable contain ‘loot’, with booby-traps and revenants protecting it. Here, the influence of pulp fiction (and in particular, Indiana Jones) is clearly evident (the archaeologist-as-tomb-raider trope litters video games. The rules of interaction force me, an archaeologist trying to perform a facsimile of reasonable archaeological investigation, into the trope whether I liked it or not).  Killing the skeleton and looting the temple makes no meaningful difference in the story of the game, insofar as it gave me new materials to work with and to construct my own story. Given the Indiana Jones vibe, the moral action here is to kill the skeleton and obtain the material. After all, it “belongs in a museum!”

It’s impossible, without seriously modifying the game, to excavate in anything other than a brute-force manner. While the NPCs will gather round to watch me work, they communicate with each other in an unintelligible murmur. As night falls, they respond to their own instincts and return to the village. They are Other. The information ethics that Sicart describes means that their agency within the game is as important as my own, and yet, my interaction with the NPCs, and the crude excavation tools that Minecraft gives me, pushes me towards a 19th century frame of mind, a colonialist discourse of ignoring as less important anyone who doesn’t look like me (one wonders at the consequence of this in other games, and in the wider demographics of game players). The archaeologist-as-better-class-of-looter trope seems to emerge naturally out of my interaction with the game mechanics.

Truly surprising. As night fell, gunshots rang out over this sleepy village on the desert’s edge. We set out to investigate. The villagers were congregated in a single home, discussing amongst themselves. ‘Let us in!’ we cried. We forced the door. Their conversation and shouts stopped. We all stared. The door was broken.

The NPCs, responding to their own desires and needs, gather together inside a building to protect themselves against the game’s monsters, against whom they have no other defence. My desire to wander amongst them and my clumsiness at working the controls meant that I broke down the door. My decision to intrude – an ethical decision – has meaningful consequences for the other data entities in this game.

‘Back, men, to the camp!’ And we abandoned them to their fate.

From above, I watched the zombies and creepers and who knows what else hunt each NPC down and kill them.

Throughout the night, we heard their cries. Part of the men wanted to go help, the others huddled together in fear. As the sun rose upon my reentry to the village, I found no traces. It was as if the villagers had not existed.

My one attempt to engage the locals led to their annihilation.

Provocations

I will close with a list of provocations on the ethics of video games constructed or explored by archaeologists. I will offer no answers, but rather try to frame what I see as some of the more provocative ideas that are emerging around the idea of ‘archaeogaming’. If there is anything that truly defines ‘archaeogaming’ (see Dennis, Reinhard), then it must be the act of playing where the player’s ethical being is situated in the professional ethics of archaeology. Games do not have ‘ethics’ on their own, but their ethical nature emerges at the intersection of play and design. I expect to be wrong, to be challenged, and to be overcome. This too is in the nature of playing games: games challenge us, and provoke us, because they enhance or alter our abilities to inhabit another space, which is all the more reason to consider them ethically.

Provocation 1: Video games are built environments and thereby invite archaeological study. In which case professional archaeological ethics apply.

If video games are built places, and we are thinking like an archaeologist (as per Sicart’s ethically-informed player), then we have to treat them as we would any other site. Given that games are a designed experience and that they are part of an informational ethics, we also have to treat other data entities with the respect that our archaeological ethics accord them. How did my play conform to accepted ethical practice? How did it break it? What are the implications?

Provocation 2: Games about the past/material culture exist in the world and draw their associations from the past and material culture of that world and so are entangled in the ethics of that world.

When a game draws on the artwork or the cultural heritage of a people in the ‘real-world’, the designers have an ethical obligation to consider how their instantiation of a looting mechanic (should they use it) has meaningful consequences in the game and for the people whose material culture is now being looted again.

Provocation 3: the ethics of making games are the ethics of labour, and power, and control.

The components that go into our electronics, that make game playing possible, are at the end of a long chain of exploitation, social and environmental damage. One need only think about the illegal and dangerous mining of rare earths in central Africa, the profits from which continue to support and prolong civil war and violence. Closer to home (as I write as a white North American academic comfortably ensconced in an ivory tower), labour laws permit exemption to number of hours of work per week in the special case of ‘information work’. If you make video games in Ontario, you can be made to work as many hours in a day as your employer desires.  Given this, should we, as ethically informed archaeologists, make games or play games at all? How do these conditions of exploitation and control of workers and resources square with our ethical codes of practice?

Provocation 4: Performance and adherence to the rules of the game are an act of submission

Urrichio (2005) and Bogost (2007) convincingly argue that the mechanics and rules of a game can be thought of as the historiography of the game, the argument itself about the past that gets performed by playing a game. If we play games not as ethically informed archaeologists, if we do not write about games or critique games from an archaeological perspective, we are submitting to the power of the game publisher and the game maker to set the terms of reference about the past.

Provocation 5 Modding and Fan Forums are an act of resistance

The most ethical act we can perform as archaeologists confronting video games is to mod them. Very few of us have the skills, time, or safety to build and release a game from scratch. But we can use the tools of the commercial games themselves to literally reprogram their message, to add that ethical dimension of meaningful consequences, to confront games not just as designed objects but rather as a shared experience that can be ameliorated. We can and must be active in fan forums, Reddit threads, Twitch streams, Youtube ‘let’s play’ videos, blogs, journals, conferences, and teaching.

My final provocation:

Ultimately, the ethics of archaeogaming are the ethics of digital public archaeology.

[this is a draft of a short piece I am writing for a society journal, hence not peer reviewed. I would therefore welcome comments, keeping in mind that I wrote it in one sitting this AM. When it comes out formally – if – I’ll post the link here and direct folks to read the final product there. I think it hangs together more or less ok.]

Tell the colleagues in your department, in your company, that you play video games, and you will be greeted with one of only two reactions: a polite murmur accompanied by the dying look of ‘this person is not serious’, or the enthusiastic embrace of the true believer. There appears to be no middle ground. Yet, there is a long history of using games in education, in museum outreach, and in public archaeology. There is even a (much shorter) history of using games to persuade (as ‘serious games’ or ‘news games’). But there is practically no history at all of games being used to make a scholarly argument. This is to miss an opportunity.

It is important however to ask, at the outset, what do games teach? What do games do?

“The game, or any computer game for that matter, is ultimately about mechanics, and not about content. The content is window dressing, and deep playing of a game such as Civilization teaches little about history, but everything about how to manipulate the complex algorithms that model the simulation” (Kee & Graham, 274)

Let us dispense with the notion that there is anything inherently gauche about archaeologists interested in the possibilities of video games, or any ‘natural’ reason why archaeology as a discipline should not be concerned with them. Manipulating algorithms, modelling societies through simulation: archaeologists have been doing this for years, within the ambit of GIS and Agent Based Models. The difference is, games have better eye-candy and production values. They should. Gaming as an industry generates more money than all of Hollywood.

A potted synopsis of game studies

Broadly, there are two camps when it comes to analyzing the affective import of games. The ludologists, as the name implies, are interested in the rules of the games, the possibilities (or not) for action within the game. Narratologists on the other hand consider the story of the game, the story that emerges, or the story within which the game action takes place. Both approaches are useful for situating what a game does, or what a game achieves.

Another (rather archaeological) approach is to consider typologies of games. This is not to be confused with ‘genre’, as genres (‘first person shooter’; ‘rogue-like’; ‘management sim’; ‘casual’) are largely marketing categories that conflate issues of game play, or perspective, or agency, for the purposes of gaining space in the various venues where games are bought and sold. There is a voluminous literature on the typologies of games which try to distill essential features in order to understand the crucial ways in which games differ (the better to understand their narratological or ludological aspects). In the context of ‘historical’ games, a typology that helps us consider what aspects about the past we wish to communicate, to teach, focuses on categorizing how the game treats time and space.

Within ‘space’, we can ask how the game treats perspective, topography, and the environment. Within ‘time’, we can wonder about pace, representation, and teleology. Consider the games ‘Civilization IV’ and ‘Caesar IV’ as in Kee and Graham xxxx:

The value of this kind of typology is that it would allow us consider our archaeological representations of space and time in that light, to work out what conventions of game design would be most affective in communicating the argument about the past that we wish to impart.

Third Space

Despite the neat breakdown between ‘narratology’ and ‘ludology’, which would seem to capture all there is to know about video games, there is a third space that games-about-history inhabit. Elliot and Kappel’s recent ‘Playing with the Past’ (2013) neatly captures this aspect. They point out that while games are systems of rules interpreted by the computer referee, and while these systems are enveloped within a narrative, games-about-the-past have a larger historical narrative within which the game’s narrative must take place. That is to say, the players and designers are working within historical frameworks from the outset that inform their understanding of the past. Hence to make the game, to play the game, necessarily involves the kind of historical thinking (about contingency, about causality, about equifinality) that characterizes professional thinking about the past. ‘Why did that happen? What would happen if?’ are questions players ask about the game, which are very nearly the same thing that we ask of the past.

The fact of the matter is, while the content of a game is important, it is not as important as the system of rules and relationships that govern the emergent play; reflecting on why game play evolves the way it does forces the player to understand the rules of representation. This means that game players think about the past in ways that are the same as the kind of thinking about the past that we want in our students and publics. If one studies the communities of players that coalesce around particular games (especially games that allow for ‘modding’, or re-writing of the game rules, e.g, the Civilization franchise), one finds quite heated discussions about how best to represent the past, debates over the consequences and meanings of modifications to the games, and – while maybe sometimes not the most factually informed debates – a keen understanding of process in the past (Graham, rolling own article).

Flow

The training of archaeologists has long had an emphasis on the practical – we learn how to be archaeologists by doing archaeology. We perform the learning. Where, and from whom, we learn the hands-on aspects of archaeology has a deep influence on how we think archaeologically, how we understand the past. This is of course why we speak of ‘schools’ of thought. To play a video game well involves that same aspect of performance, and the ‘who made this and how did they imagine the world’ matters equally as much. When we play a game well, we have internalized how that game represents its world. We have internalized an understanding of the system of rules and relationships that we might not even be aware of. The learning that happens through video games is deep, and is tied to what psychologists call ‘flow’. Games don’t just represent a world: they actively watch the player. The best games adjust their difficulty in such a way as to achieve a flow state, a sense of mastery that sits in the sweet spot where the challenge is just hard enough to be difficult, but not so difficult that the player gives up in frustration.  The best learning, in whatever context, is tied to that same sense.

In representing a world to use, the system of rules and relationships that govern the emergent game play are akin to the systems of rules and relationships that we as scholars use to construct our ideas about the past: game rules are historiography. They are method and theory, all in one.  In the same way that an agent based simulation of the past encodes our ideas about how phenomenon x worked in the past (so that we can see what the consequences are of that idea for household formation amongst the Anasazi, say) game rules do encode ideas about (inter alia) power, ideology, action, colonialism, and empire. The game theorist Ian Bogost calls these ‘procedural rhetorics’, the arguments made by code (2007); the historian William Urrichio explicitly called code historiography (2005).  Games about the past will be played, experienced, and internalized by orders of magnitude more people than who ever read our formal archaeologies. And the experience will resonate far more deeply than any visit to a site or museum. We ignore games as a venue for our scholarship at our peril.

The Payoff

I have been arguing by omission that the content, the window dressing (the pretty graphics; the hyper-realistic depictions of textures and atmospheres, the 3d sound, the voice acting) does not matter nearly as much as close experience and engagement with the code and its emergent outcomes. That engagements allows a connection here with the kind of archaeology argued for by scholars such as Stuart Eve (xxxx) that seeks to use the mechanics of games and allied technologies such as mixed or augmented realities to focus on understanding the systems of relationships amongst the full sensory experience of the past. Eve calls this an ‘embodied GIS’ which does not focus on the archaeologist’s subjective experience of place, but rather, explores how sound, views, lighting (and indeed, smell and touch) combine or are constrained by the archaeology of a place experienced in that place.  This suggests a way forward for the use of games as both a tool for research on the past, and a way to communicate that research to our various publics.

Finally, we can turn our critical apparatus back to front and consider games as a venue within which we may do archaeology. Search online for ‘archaeogaming’. The most succinct definition of what this can be comes from Meghan Dennis:

Archaeogaming is the utilization and treatment of immaterial space to study created culture, specifically through videogames.

It requires treating a game world, a world bounded and defined by the limitations of its hardware, software and coding choices, as both a closed universe and as an extension of the external culture that created it. Everything that goes into the immaterial space comes from its external cultural source, in one way or another. Because of this, we see the same problems in studying culture in games as in studying culture in the material world.

Archaeogaming is a subdiscipline that requires the same standards of practice as the physical collection of excavated data, only with a different toolset. It also provides the opportunity to use game worlds to reflect on practice, theory and the perceptions of our discipline.

Video games are an extraordinarily rich tool, area of research, and affective mode of communication whose possibilities we haven’t even begun to explore. Yet, they are not so foreign to the archaeologist’s ‘formal’ computational experience, with ties to GIS, Agent Based Models, and reconstructions. Play on!

[yah, I need to work on that ending.]

[update Oct 28: I made a few changes, added a wee bit, nuked the table, and sent the thing off. That version lives on my open notebook].