Caesar IV

….ah christmas morn. Opening the new toys… and a copy of Caesar IV! Can’t wait to get into it… it has a ’sandbox’ mode, allowing you to disregard all the preset scenarios and to build your own. I’m going to build me an Ostia, and a Pompeii, and see what emerges out of the simulation. I’ve done some city simulations with Netlogo (see the agent based modeling page) where I’ve built the interactions from scratch. William Urrichio argues that games embody different epistemologies, so I’ll be interested to see how the game designers envision ancient life… and to compare against my own simulations. Theirs of course is much more aesthetically pleasing than my wee netlogo creations, but all of them have value…

Material Culture…. in a virtual world?

Exploring Second Life is not unlike wandering around an enormous digital Pompeii. Here are rooms, and paintings, and buildings… and yet more often than not, they are completely empty. SL is billed as a social experience, but any time I’m in there (which tends to be during business hours, EST) there are no people. It’s one big archaeological site, without the need to dig.

It should be possible then to apply normal archaeological theories in this world and to deconstruct what these spaces mean. And of course the meaning that I glean might not necessarily be the same meaning as the person who created the space (whom I could presumably interrogate, if they happened to be online when I was there).

Whilst wandering around in Second Life (and in Active Worlds), you start to notice things. The first thing is of course the huge variety of things that people create. The second, upon reflection, is the way that - in these worlds where anything is possible - certain common themes keep repeating themselves in this material virtual culture. There would seem to be a common grammar of what to build, and how to build it. It is interesting to note how in three short years a cultural koine has emerged in this space.

I guess I’ll get started.

Postcard from Second Life

ROMA (SPQR) has a sim in Second life, at 185,54,26

(Here is Rome by night, decked out for Saturnalia)

Egyptian Temples in SL

Right. Here’s the slurl to those temples. The teleport takes you into the main temple; the colonized (by the skin merchants) temple structures are down the pathway a wee bit.

That’s me in the picture. Or rather, it’s Canadensis Yellowjacket.

Who I am, what this blog’ll be about… perhaps.

It is my intention here to keep track of my explorations in Second Life and other worlds: archaeologists are about material culture, but how many of us are interested in virtual material culture, or the possibilities of these worlds for teaching and research?

I freelance a bit, and am working right now with a new online liberal arts university called Robert Welch University. I’m developing some archaeology classes for them, and eventually I would like to use SL to teach excavation methods. That could be very difficult….

Right now, I’d be interested in finding out what accurate(-ish) reconstructions of ancient structures people have come across in SL? Traditional archaeological reconstructions are all very well, but I think experiencing the structures, of how movement creates a reading of the building, would be a great way to start incorporating SL into my classes - a 21st century virtual reconstruction of the 18th century Grand Tour. Class projects would be to reconstruct from excavation reports, perhaps.

I came across today what seemed to be a great reconstruction of some Egyptian temples (can see them in pathfinder linden’s flickr), but when I went there, it seems that some merchants had moved in with the usual sex paraphernalia. Not exactly the experience I’d want for this class.