This is a great looking program, looking forward to catching up with some old friends.

My abstract is

Games People Dig: Are They Archaeological Experiences or Archaeological Systems?

One of the many but important dilemmas we may encounter in designing or critiquing games for archaeology, (and for history and for heritage), is determining the why: why we should develop, buy, play, and teach specific games for the above disciplines. For archaeology, I propose there is a further interesting bifurcation: between games aiming to convey an experience of archaeology (the what, what it is to experience archaeology), and games aiming to show how systems, methods, findings and unknowns interact either to produce that experience, or to reveal what is unknown or debated (how knowledge is established or how knowledge is contested). Central to this investigation is the question of whether video game genres or games as modes of interaction can be compared against what is learnt from that interactive mode or genre of interaction. Can a schematic framework show what can be communicated and why it should be done? Can it help (schematically) accomplish these goals, and provide criteria for determining when this is or is not useful? Or are we risking a banal gamification of archaeological learning?