Caesar IV and the Empire Online

I’ve enjoyed playing Caesar IV, a Roman city-building game. I’ve always gotten a kick out of city builders, ever since playing the first Sim-City on my brother’s 286 in college. Having read Bogost’s ‘Persuasive Games’, I’ve been wondering about the procedural rhetoric of the game, its anachronisms v. its historicity , etc. I’ll probably post something to that effect, eventually.

I haven’t played the online version of the game yet, and today I came across the website for the online game. It’s quite interesting in that, for once, there is no MMO, no MMORPG… it seems in fact to be a series of challenges and downloadable scenarios. Play the scenario, upload your results, voila, bragging rights. There’s an ‘empire’ mode too, where you end up creating your own little province… and again, you get bragging rights depending on how large your population is, what kinds of structures you’ve built, how your economy is going, etc… Stats from the website: 4,109 cities by 1,742 governors. 17,021,836 population. 87,761,505 denarii. 32076 years, 7 months played (Clearly, time flows differently within the game). The site keeps track of who had updated which province, and what exactly they’ve done there.

What is neat is that new scenarios get added all the time, extending the game for you (the in-game editor looks like it needs an enormous manual to explain… which it doesn’t have, of course). What is particularly good is that all of this gets tied into some basic social networking type stuff, forums, and so on… so a game, that has quiet a lot of historical drapery on it, could become the locus for *real* historical discussion. A learning-through-doing situation. I wish I was better at the game though. I can only get through the first two scenarios.

GeoAnnotated Electric Archaeologist

Talk about recursive…

I’ve run this blog through the GeoAnnotated Reuters News pipe, and so now you may view this blog as it relates to geographic space…

Northwest Rebellion - early stages work of an Interactive Fiction approach to writing history

One of the neat things about the Great Canadian Mysteries series is how ‘doing history’ is constructed as ’solving’ a mystery, by examining the primary historical documents. In the interactive fiction (IF) below - which is only an early *early* draft - I am trying to accomplish the same thing. Here, the ‘game’ will be to explore and construct and interpretation of the Northwest Rebellion, by interacting with the historical characters who were there… and who speak to you in their own words. Just about anything Major Charles Boulton says come from his own published historical reminisces. Now, an interactive fiction requires plot, pacing, a story arc, etc… or can it simply be as simple as ‘talking’ with a simulated person…? Right now, this IF just shows how such a writing of history could be accomplished. I need to program the non-player character of Major Boulton with a bit of artificial intelligence so that he can respond to a wide variety of interactions with the player. My model is Emily Short’s Galatea, which won the 2006 IF prize. I don’t want this work to be a simple kind of chatterbot.

So, here’s an early version of the Major Charles Boulton and the Northwest Rebellion Interactive Historical Fiction, by Shawn Graham.

Archaeology: Reverse Engineering World Design

Throughout my years as a student, I learned to dread the scorn and sarcasm that would inevitably follow the question, ’so what are you studying?’

I’m by no means the first person - nor the last - to have to defend ‘archaeology’ to a wider public. I’m rather sick of having to defend it. Nowadays I just point out that my freelancing lets me set my own hours, live where I want to, and generally have a very nice life. Hell, my student debt only equals the price of a nice car (granted, a very nice car).

Anyway, the point of this post is to direct your attention to an interview on the Game Career Guide with game writers Sande Chen and Anne Tool, where they explain ‘how I became a game writer‘. Pay attention to Tool’s background, especially…

<snippet>

archaeology, as a subdiscipline of anthropology, is arguably the most liberal of the liberal arts majors. Through the department I was able to study science, history, art, mythology — just about anything I wanted, and it all counted toward my degree.
To my great delight, it also gave me the perfect excuse to study abroad. I attended the American University in Cairo for six months, where I studied under Egyptologist Kent Weeks with an eclectic group of American expatriates. My senior thesis focused on the economic aspects of ancient Egyptian settlements. In it, I analyzed the form and function of the few remaining settlement sites from ancient times to draw conclusions about the economy and culture of ancient Egypt. Essentially, I reverse engineered Egyptian world design.

I love that idea that making games is about designing worlds, and its corollary, that archaeology is reverse-engineering of past world designs. I taught a course once at Birkbeck College, University of London that essentially argued a similar point - the layout of towns and settlements is the cosmology of that culture writ in building materials. But that is a digression for another day.

In any event, just one more example of how archaeology opens doors you never imagined…

Doing History or, ‘Where is Vinland?’

“Thank goodness! Simply put, we need your help.A team of historians has been trying to solve some historical “cold cases” — old crimes in which the guilty ones walked, and even more insidious crimes where a whole village may have been complicit. There are other mysteries too, about unusual cases from the Viking age to the Klondike Gold Rush.The trouble is — it is not as easy as it looks. The evidence has not all survived and what clues remain often lead the historian-detectives down different paths. A fresh pair of eyes could really help.

Please check your preconceptions about “History” at the door. “Doing History” is not memorizing dates, politicians and wars. That is all just context. “Doing History” is the work of the detective, the gumshoe, the private eye — and we need you to take on this job. All we are left with are traces, artifacts, clues, hints and allegations. Putting those together, weighing the evidence, assessing the credibility of witness accounts, sorting out contradictions, and showing how your solution to the mysteries is the best of all the alternatives — that is “Doing History”.”

-the introduction, ‘Great Canadian Mysteries’

John Lutz and Ruth Sandwell have for some time been putting together fantastic packages of original materials, archival materials, video re-creations, and audio files that collectively explore some of the Great Canadian Mysteries of history (bet you didn’t think there were any?) Their latest, ‘Where is Vinland?‘, throws archaeological materials into the mix. At Anse-aux-Meadows, there is an undisputed Viking settlement - but Newfoundland is hardly a land of wine.

“This website will take you along Leif’s route to North America and Vinland. Where was this land? Many claim to have found it from northern Labrador all the way down to Virginia. Which is the real Vinland? Leif left only a few tantalizing clues as do medieval Icelandic manuscripts. Solving the mystery of Vinland requires putting these together with archaeological discoveries, a knowledge of what the Vikings were capable of, what their motivations might have been and an understanding of the people and environment of the land they encounterd. To understand the context of the Vinland voyages, this web site offers a tour through the Viking world, with brief stops in Europe, Iceland, and Greenland. To allow you to get a better grasp of Viking life, we have recreated the L’Anse Aux Meadows settlement and some of the Viking artifacts in a 3-D format. To understand their encounter with America you will also meet the people already in North America when the Norse arrived: the Aboriginal groups of the eastern seaboard.

There are many mysteries to solve here, and “Where was Vinland?” is just the start…”