Category Archives: game

Virtual Heritage: A Guide

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“Virtual Heritage: A Guide” is published and open access!

Why did we write it? For all those interested in an introduction to virtual heritage, but facing steep purchase costs for academic books, so it is especially suitable for university undergraduate courses. Download what you need, for free.

And given it was written from go to whoa in less than a year and to a tight word limit, I am very grateful to the authors for their time…

Cite: Champion, E. M. (ed.) 2021. Virtual Heritage: A Guide. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://lnkd.in/gNkNWiB. License: CC-BY-NC.

Advisory Board setup

3D and game editors, heritage, serious games, virtual heritage, ,

A major game company (I’d say a global company, not in Australia) invited me to quote/ setup an international advisory board in relation to intangible heritage and digital games to meet annually or biannually virtually or in reality. It is a bit of a challenge looking forward to estimate the budget in this time of pandemics, lockdowns, and border control issues.

digital games and intangible heritage

3D and game editors, Academic, archaeology, Architecture, digital heritage, game, heritage, serious games, UNESCO Chair, virtual heritage, visualisation

If you have or know of digital games that helped in the “regeneration” of intangible heritage, as well as related organizations, projects and websites or organizations, please let me know…I have been asked to present on this topic on Monday 5 July to overseas gaming companies and academics..

Here was my initial beginning list (woefully incomplete but will soon expand):

Heritage organisations

  • UNESCO Chairs … I am investigating, most lists of Chairs and Networks are a little out of date and a few seem to have changed or expanded their remit.
  • Historic Urban Landscapes [UNESCO-associated]-none I know of use digital games but I think that would be useful…
  • ICOMOS none I know of but it is a huge association.
  • Europeana/CARARE/ARIADNE are more into digital archives/preservation?

Game organisations

Universities Research or Courses

Games

I am going to include Never Alone. There are at least 6-12 in my head that I need to review to see if they really were “regenerating” intangible heritage..

cfp soon: Living Digital Heritage

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Macquarie University in Sydney, NSW, Australia, plan to hold the above conference 5-7 November 2021 in Sydney Australia (and remotely). I imagine the CFP will be out soon, website is at:

https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/resilient-societies/centres/cache/news-and-events4/living-digital-heritage-conference-october-2020

The Macquarie University Simulation Hub

“Integrating the Past into the Present and Future”

Modern, innovative data collection and digital visualisation capabilities are able to capture ancient artefacts and structures, contexts, and traditions faster and in greater detail than ever before. Their sophistication and multi-dimensionality promise engagement with the past at many levels offering opportunities for deeper analyses and experiences to increasingly broader audiences.

This conference will be organised and hosted by the Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment (CACHE). CACHE is a multi-disciplinary research centre focused on research on cross-cultural interaction in ancient cultures from Western Europe to China. Concentrating not only on the history of the societies concerned, but on the languages used, with a special focus on the close study of physical artefacts from antiquity. CACHE engenders transdisciplinary research into ancient knowledge by gathering leading MQ researchers across several disciplines (archaeological science, ancient history and literature, bioarchaeology, biology, environmental sciences) and departments (Human Sciences, International Studies, Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Ancient History, Geography and Planning). CACHE particularly welcomes contributions reflecting the Indigenous Australian context – submissions concerned with Indigenous issues are especially relevant to the symposium and will be warmly welcomed.

Visiting Fellowship to Finland

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Received a Visiting Fellow invite to the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (member of the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies), very honoured.

I am just wondering if

  • The Australian government will let me leave.
  • Some of this can be done remotely as stretching the funding to cover all the costs (and 2 weeks compulsory hotel stay in quarantine on my return) will be difficult.
  • I can visit colleagues in Europe over the September-October period.
  • There are new and specific Covid-era visa requirements in Finland.

“Rethinking Virtual Places” can be ordered in September

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Out in November, purchasable in September. Contact IUP for reviewer copies “Rethinking Virtual Places” (in the IUP Spatial Humanities series) https://iupress.org/9780253058355/rethinking-virtual-places

update: “Virtual Heritage: A Guide”

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Dear Rosa and Andrea (and Michael)

Thanks to the colleagues and co-authors who helped inspired me to edit a concise book for students that will be open access (i.e. free PDF downloads).

Virtual Heritage: A Guide will be available on Thursday 22 July 2021 at https://www.ubiquitypress.com

I’d appreciate any feedback from staff or students for future editions.

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“Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture” revised chapter, authored with Juan Hiriart, for “Playing Place” (edited by Medina Lasansky and Chad Randl, MIT Press) sent off today. Each chapter has a 1000 word limit, I believe. Took me some time to trim this! Great to work with Juan on a chapter, I think our different strengths blend well. When (or if?) the book appears on MIT Press I will add another post, the list of authors and topics looks really good, possibly essential reading if you are into boardgames, or are not, but want to know why so many people are …

Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture

Conveying built heritage values and historical knowledge through boardgame design may seem an odd decision. Communicating space, place, and culture through play is a challenge let alone through a medium inherently incapable of evoking the direct experience of inhabitation and architecture as a spatial art. Boardgames are engaging, social, quick to make, and fast to learn, intuitive or nuanced. From the complex to the spontaneous, boardgames can be effective, visceral tools for cultural immersion, challenging cultural assumptions and preconceptions, encouraging discussion and collaboration between players, provoking insight and enjoyment with simple props or intricate rules.

The following explains our experience hosting participative design workshops with historians, archaeologists, and heritage professionals. In small groups of three to four people, participants determine the design decisions, discussing and solving problems that often arise in an iterative process where historical research, game design, and play-testing both blend and butt heads.

Hacking Simulations and Simulacra in e-VR

Academic, augmented reality, game, serious games, Virtual Reality

Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.

The desert of the real itself.

“ The Precession of Simulacra” from Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan, USA: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Aim of Essay

Update and Relate Simulations and Simulcra to the current era of Hacking and Virtual Reality.

1 Theoretical Frameworks

  • Simulacra and Simulation (primary text), link briefly to Dreyfus’ On the Internet (distance learning), and Jenkins’ Convergence Culture (hopeful solutions but also issues with walled garden social media/VR).
  • Establish key Baudrillard terms and judge their impact and usefulness.

2 Mediated reality

  • Explain links between the Matrix films, social issues, information, entertainment, and VR, under the heading “Synchronicity between film, fiction, philosophy and fact.”

3 Baudrillard’s theory-Video Games, Cybersecurity, hacking and VR

  • Focus on hacking, hacking versus cracking, and hacking versus crafting and tinkering.
  • Give examples of VR, social media companies and VR, personal and sensory data issues) and biofeedback interfaces/affective computing), and hacking issues.

4 Digital mediation, simulacra and simulation, digital artifacts in education

  • Expand on the relevance to digital humanities, teaching and learning (and research), especially in Australia (and perhaps Oceania).
  • Contextualize in terms of distance learning during the era of COVID and lockdowns.
  • Expand upon the implications for educating current and upcoming generations.

5 VR Hacking-digital paradigm, education and computer hacking

  • Does the theory/framework hold up? Can it adjust, must it be adopted wholeheartedly, is it more of a warning than a framework, has it remained relevant?
  • Implications.
  • Future possibilities, threats, strategies in education.
  • Tie all above together, explain originality.

Learning outcomes

  1. Analyse and discuss a range of theoretical frameworks for understanding our mediated ‘reality’ and the digital paradigm, and in particular the work of Jean Baudrillard.
  2. Apply the reading of Baudrillard’s propositions regarding our mediated reality to the analysis of the Matrix Trilogy to identify the degree of synchronicity between film, fiction, philosophy and fact.
  3. Critically review the value of Baudrillard’s theoretical frames for understanding video games, cyber security events in general, and computer hacking in particular.
  4. Critically evaluate the implications of Baudrillard’s propositions around digital mediation, simulacra and simulation for the use of digital artifacts in education.
  5. Communicate effectively to present a coherent and independent exposition of knowledge and ideas within and across a range of discipline areas related to the digital paradigm, education and computer hacking.

Unreal on a Curved Screen

3D and game editors, game, serious games

Google reminded me of a 2017-18 summer student intern project I supervised 3 years ago. I asked Corbin Yap to calibrate Unreal to larger screens (as with the French intern hybrid reality project I have not written this up although Corbin wrote an excellent report on how to do this).

The screen is 3 metres high and 8 metres in diameter, forming a near half-circle of approx 179 degrees, designed by Paul Bourke in 2013. It can also handle stereo (which Corbin did not have time to adjust the display for). Funding by Curtin Institue for Computation. Corbin was hosted in the library makerspace, great people to work with. Presentation was, I believe, 16 February 2018. Yes I wanted to port my Palenque models but the then-new version of Unreal would require a complete rebuild.

If I have the chance to teach game design again I would greatly appreciated having access to a similar environment that is accessible and immediate for game content. I have many ideas for this.

Virtual Heritage: A Guide

Academic, Book, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, Open Access, publication, serious games, virtual heritage

I am not sure this will be the final title but just finished (I hope) my editing for the following open access 10 chapter book: Virtual Heritage: A Guide, Ubiquity Press 2021.

Table of contents:

 ForewordStuart Jeffrey
 Virtual Heritage: from Archives to JoysticksEar Zow Digital
1Speculating the Past: 3D Reconstruction in ArchaeologyR. P. Barratt
2Photogrammetry: What, How and WhereHafizur Rahaman
3Animating the PastMichael Carter
4Mapping Ancient Heritage With Digital ToolsAnna Foka, David McMeekin, Kyriaki Konstantinidou, Nasrin Mostofian, Elton Barker, Cenk Demiroglu, Ethan Chiew, Brady Kiesling
5Hybrid Interactions in Museums: Why Materiality Still MattersLuigina Ciolfi
6Video Games as concepts and experiences of the pastAris Politopoulos, Angus Mol
7Mixed Reality: A Bridge or a Fusion between Two Worlds?Mafkereseb Bekele
8Getting it Right and Getting it Wrong in Digital Archaeological EthicsL. Meghan Dennis
9Evaluation in Virtual HeritagePanayiotis Koutsabasis
10Preserving Authenticity in Virtual Heritage Ear Zow Digital

New book cover

3D and game editors, Academic, Announcements, archaeology, Architecture, augmented reality, Book, design, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, publication, serious games, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation

Was one of two book covers possible and I think due to some email confusion they didn’t choose my preferred cover but I really appreciate permission by Dr Anthony Masinton to use his rendered image. The publisher of Rethinking Virtual Places will be Indiana University Press, via their Spatial Humanities Series.

New Journal Article!

Academic, Announcements, digital heritage, heritage, publication, serious games, virtual heritage

Champion, E. (2020). Culturally Significant Presence in Single-player Computer Games. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 13(4). doi:10.1145/3414831. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3414831

Cultural presence is a term used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects but is less frequently used for video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this article investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and ICOMOS definitions of cultural significance. The aim is to determine if cultural presence can be communicated via video games and across a range of game genres.

Observations derived from game prototyping workshops for history and heritage aided the development of a teachable list of desirable game elements. To distinguish itself from the vagueness surrounding theories of cultural presence, a theory of culturally significant presence is proposed. Culturally significant presence requires three components: culturally significant artifacts and practices; an overarching framework of a singular, identifiable cultural viewpoint; and awareness by the participant of both the culturally significant and the overarching cultural framework and perspective (which gives sites, artifacts, and practices their cultural significance and relational value).

As awareness of cultural presence requires time for reflection, single-player games were chosen that were not completely dependent on time-based challenges. Another criterion was cultural heritage content: They must simulate aspects of heritage and history, communicate a specific cultural framework, or explore and reconstruct a past culture. Four games were chosen that simulate a culture, explain archaeological methods, portray indigenous intangible heritage, or explain historical-based ecosystems of the past based on educational guidelines. The games are Assassin’s Creed: Origins; Heaven’s Vault; Never Alone; and a Ph.D. project: Saxon. Their genres could be described as first-person shooter/open world/virtual tour; dialogue-based puzzle game; 2D platform game; and turn-based strategy game.

The aim is not to evaluate the entire range of interactive virtual environments and games, but to examine the applicability and relevance of this new theory and to ascertain whether the four games provided useful feedback on the concept and usefulness of culturally significant presence. A more clearly demarcated theory may not only help focus evaluation studies but also encourage game developers to modify or allow modification of commercial games for classroom teaching of digital heritage.

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom

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Have sent out a proposal to people who use the above game series in the classroom and/or write about it. Have spoken to Ubisoft about this so possibly can work with historians and archaeologists working with Ubisoft as well.

Authors: Will be an ongoing negotiation process, from abstract/title to publisher and external reviews (depending on the publisher).

Audience: Would be useful if it can be used in a classroom (perhaps university-level undergraduate) but with some thoughtful articles.

Content: How Assassin’s Creed evolved in terms of history and simulation, how it is seen (inside and outside Ubisoft) in terms of its potential in education, heritage and tourism. Indeed a book I am co-editing has a chapter on Assassin’s Creed and screen tourism and I have been tasked to write it! But for this project, I would be very happy to get a conversation going between game designers, consultants, historians, academics and game design teachers.

Focus: How could Assassin’s Creed change or create more flexibility for use and reuse and input from these sectors? How do the scholars and designers see new ways of using games to learn about aspects of history that would be of interest to Ubisoft in particular and game companies in general?

Language: I think I should find a co-editor and possibly French-speaking, would it make sense to have French language chapters and or a French version?

Publisher: I don’t have funds for open access publisher fees but ideally it would be (at least in part) free on the web so it could easily be picked up by classrooms. Update: have received some interest already.

Timing: We are looking at a mid to late 2021 final submission by authors so the book might have to appear in 2022.

virtual museum kitset/template paper

Academic, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, serious games, visualisation,

My slides for the below EuroMed2020 paper presentation yesterday are on slideshare. We were told the publications will be available at latest in January 2021.

Time-Layered Gamic Interaction with a Virtual Museum Template

Erik Champion, Rebecca Kerr, Hafizur Rahaman and David McMeekin

Abstract. This paper discusses a simplified workflow and interactive learning opportunities for exporting map and location data using a free tool, Recogito into a Unity game environment with a simple virtual museum room template. The aim was to create simple interactive virtual museums for humanities scholars and students with a minimum of programming or gaming experience, while still allowing for interesting time-related tasks. The virtual environment template was created for the Oculus Quest and controllers but can be easily adapted to other head-mounted displays or run on a normal desktop computer. Although this is an experimental design, it is part of a project to increase the use of time-layered cultural data and related mapping technology by humanities researchers.

Not actually published yet, but accepted

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I’m very happy that my rather large article “Culturally Significant Presence
In Single-Player Computer Games” has been accepted for the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. This is despite its 12,587 words covering 4 major games, and attempting to be more conceptual and provocative than normal in a traditional ACM IT-oriented journal..

Very good reviewers too, actually. They made me work hard. I think my abstract is a bit over JOCCH length so that may change but at moment it is:

Cultural presence is a term that researchers have used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects, but less frequently in video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this paper investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and ICOMOS definitions of cultural significance. The aim is to determine if cultural presence can be communicated via video games and across a range of game genres.

Observations derived from game prototyping workshops for history and heritage were incorporated to help develop a teachable list of desirable game elements. To distinguish itself from the vagueness surrounding theories of cultural presence, a theory of culturally significant presence is proposed. Culturally significant presence requires three components: culturally significant artifacts and practices; an overarching framework of a singular, identifiable cultural viewpoint; and awareness by the participant of both the culturally significant and the overarching cultural framework and perspective (which gives cultural heritage sites, artifacts and practices their cultural significance and relational value).

As awareness of cultural presence requires time to reflect upon, single-player games were chosen that were not completely dependent on time-based challenges. Another criterion was cultural heritage content, the games must simulate aspects of cultural heritage and history, communicate a specific cultural framework, or explore and reconstruct a past culture. Four games were chosen that simulate a culture, explain archaeological methods, portray indigenous intangible heritage, or explain historical-based ecosystems of the past based on educational guidelines. The games are Assassin’s Creed: Origins (and its Discovery Tour); Heaven’s Vault; Never Alone; and a Ph.D. game project: Saxon. Their genres could be described as first-person shooter/open world/virtual tour; dialogue-based puzzle game; 2D platform game; and turn-based strategy game.

The aim is not to evaluate the entire range of interactive and immersive virtual environments and games, but to examine the applicability and relevance of the new theory, and to ascertain whether the four games provided useful feedback on the concept and usefulness of culturally significant presence. A more clearly demarcated theory of cultural presence may not only help focus evaluation studies but also encourage game developers to modify or allow the modification of commercial games for classroom teaching of digital heritage. Game content, core gameplay, secondary gameplay, and game mechanics could be modified to engagingly compel players to consider cultural heritage values and perspectives that are not their own.

Board games expose the triple-layering of mechanics

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I’ve been thinking, one of the problems with the concept of game mechanics is it is not always clear who the mechanics work for, and at what level. Mechanics can refer to and include:

  1. The designer’s intentions.
  2. The actual consequences and results of the system-based code in the wild.
  3. The understanding and intentions of the player.
  4. The staging and real-world unfolding of events due to code, circumstance, and player’s decisions.

Tabletops (physical boardgames) remove the abstraction of code and system-based rules.

  1. The designer’s intentions.
  2. The staging and real-world unfolding of events due to code, circumstance, and player’s decisions.
  3. The understanding and intentions of the player.

I want to move from simple prototypes to playable boardgames to digital implementations of serious games. Creating reactive rather than reflective players, for this purpose, extrinsic learning, would not be ideal.

And adding the missing layer of code to the playability and immediateness of physical games/boardgames/physical prototypes should not get in the way of engagement and understanding. But it often does. SO: understanding how to add rather than destabilize with that fourth step, CODE, would be of use to me.