The Critical Archaeological Gaming Workshop was held 25-26 January at UCLA Los Angeles and I was lucky enough to be invited (at short notice). Luckily LA is only two flights for me, one via the ancestral homeland and it was a great opportunity to hear about archaeology games, digital heritage projects, and some criticism of digital (urban) history..

Speakers:

1. Willeke Wendrich Welcome and purpose of the workshop
2. Tara Copplestone Rethinking Archaeology Through Game Design
3. Erik Champion The Sin of Completeness versus the Lure of Fantasy in Contested Possibility-Spaces
4. Eddo Stern Subjectivity, creativity and polemics in historical game design

5. Willeke Wendrich Walking through Empty Buildings, Everybody Wears the Same Shoes
6. Rosa Tamborrino The sense of Time in Videogames: Fragments and Lack of Dynamics in Historical Environment Reconstructions
7. Hannah Scates Kettler Jumping into the Animus: Revisiting old video games to create new ones

8. David Fredrick Secrets in the Garden: Modeling Vulnerability and Information Exchange in the House of Octavius Quartio

To answer some people, I don’t think there will be a publication but here are links to some of the projects discussed:

• Digital Nubia (paper) Willeke and Rosa, also VSim @UCLA Willeke mentioned Lisa Snyder’s project
• Rosa from Turin, an Italian expert on Paris architectural and urban history, talked about the historical limitations of Assassin’s Creed (see also paper http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7419503)
• Tara Copplestone 40 quickfire archaeology games-see her blog (the PhD one does not seem to work?)
• Eddo Stern talked about his game art..
• Digital Pompeii (David)
• Hannah (a 3D librarian specialist based in Iowa, see bio or her website) gave a talk about Assassin’s Creed: Egypt (discovery mode-no violence!) and also 3D preservation issues

In the demo session I also saw some of the things Chris Johanson (UCLA) is working on with the UCLA Romelab plus also Lynn Dodson’s VR tour of Catalina Island.. If you are near Washington DC 11-15 April 2018, Lynn is organizing a panel on Virtual Heritage Ethics at the annual meeting of SAA..(Society for American Archaeology)