New Fruition of Aegean Archaeology: A Board Game on Minoan Crete CHNT Reference. 22nd International Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies held in Vienna, Austria November 2017 (original) (raw)
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New Fruition of Aegean Archaeology : A Board Game on Minoan Crete
2019
MUSINT and MUSINT II are part of a long-term project on Aegean and Cypriot collections from Italian Museums. MUSINT contains findings from the Archaeological Museum of Florence and other institutions in Tuscany. MUSINT II concerns the cretulae i.e. small clay objects with the impression of a seal (sealing) from Haghia Triada (Crete) stored in the Museum of Florence and in the Luigi Pigorini National Museum in Rome. One of the main aims of the project is to reach a wider audience; in MUSINT a small section was devoted to children and MUSINT II has been rcently implemented with a special section entirely dedicated to games.
New Fruition of Aegean Archaeology : A Board Game on Mi oan Crete
2019
MUSINT and MUSINT II are part of a long-term projec t on Aegean and Cypriot collections from Italian Mu se ms. MUSINT contains findings from the Archaeological Mu seum of Florence and other institutions in Tuscany. MUSINT II concerns the cretulaei.e. small clay objects with the impression of a seal (sealing) from Haghia T r da (Crete) stored in the Museum of Florence and in the "Luigi Pigorin i" National Museum in Rome. One of the main aims of the project is to reach a wider audience: in MUSINT a small sec tion was devoted to children and MUSINT II has been r cently implemented with a special section entirely dedicat ed to games.
2018
In this paper I present the opportunity to use game-based activities and gamification in the field of Minoan Archaeology. I examine a possible way that students (or general public) can approach ancient past, thanks to informal learning, based on principles of gamification. These values can be leveraged to attract interest and develop awareness about Cretan heritage. In particular I focus on the implications of gamification to teach archaeology in both Primary and Secondary schools and talk about the potential of using games to integrate educational activities for digital or virtual museums. Finally, I discuss the importance of users-whose identity cannot be defined, if not roughly-and the achievement of an ever wider public, which require Museums to find forms of communication that combine general needs, including education, entertainment, happiness with effective identity actions. A possible response could be provided by those tools that, on the one hand, guarantee simple, easy to understand and decipherable communication methods, and on the other allow the transformation of technological complexity into opportunities of knowledge, in response to the increasingly digital nature of scholarship and intellectual culture. I'll try to demonstrate thanks to the experiment Minoans how archaeology in and off museums may profit from games and gamification.
Archeologia e Calcolatori, 2020
The article presents the results of a wider research carried out by a multidisciplinary group (archaeologists and engineers) of the University and the CNR-ISPC of Catania in the South-Western Quarter of the Minoan Palace of Phaistos (Crete). The article focuses on two digital survey campaigns carried out respectively in 2014, laser scanning, and 2019, Structure from Motion. Starting from the point cloud by laser scanner, the most recent, low cost and user-friendly photogrammetric tools (GoPro camera and software Agisoft Metashape) have been used during the 2019 campaign in order to update and to improve the previous dataset, which was used as a grid for georeferencing and scaling the new virtual model. Special attention was addressed to the comparison of the two datasets and to the reuse of the first one for georeferencing and scaling the second one. Furthermore, the research has been focused on the opportunity to exploit the obtained virtual model both for scientific purposes and for the outreach. The lack of accessibility of the South-Western Quarter of Phaistos Palace to the visitors attributes a special interest to this output. The virtual environment thus realized constituted an ideal starting point for the development of an educational fruition project based on a Serious Game approach. The cooperation of archaeologists and engineers in the development of the Phaistos game ensures a gaming experience not only pleasant but also provided with a strong educational profile.
ProQuest, 2023
With 10 million copies sold and 500 million dollars of revenue, the 11th installment of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018), showed how a videogame based on ancient Greek history and archaeology can make a splash in popular culture and that the distant past can become an extinguishable source of infinite engaging gaming narratives. As pedagogic and research counterparts to videogames of this kind, serious games and archaeogames focusing on Greek and Roman civilizations move from different premises, though aspiring to the same level of success. Serious games, created for a primary purpose other than sole entertainment, have found their way into classrooms and museums to educate students in a variety of disciplines mostly relying on digital storytelling strategies. Archaeogaming, on the other hand, encompasses, among other things, the creation of video games by archaeologists, who create 3D representations of the ancient material culture subject of their study, initially for the purpose of testing hypotheses in simulated environment and later to popularize archaeology and cultural heritage studies, finding a more ‘serious’ use in higher education. This dissertation deals with defining best practices in archaeogaming design and production focusing on two practical examples of re-use of digital archaeological data for the generation of game assets for teaching and public outreach. Both case studies explore the context of Late Roman Sicily on which I conducted most of the experimental work in the preparatory years of this research. The first case study will be the narrative game prototype for the Villa del Casale (Piazza Armerina) in Enna, Sicily, entitled In Ersilia’s Footsteps, featuring Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli (1840-1925), the first female archaeologist in Italian history. The game, developed in collaboration with the University of Arkansas’ Tesseract and directed by Dr. David Fredrick and Dr. Rhodora Vennarucci, narrative follows her in the exploration of the Late Roman Imperial countryside residence and UNESCO World Heritage site. The game revolves around the use of 3D digitized assets, created employing digital photogrammetry and 3D laser-scanning to capture the archaeological site, that significantly contributed to increase the realism of the game environment influencing the game creation process towards telling stories of real historic characters in real historic places. The second game, Building by the River, is an a building and experimental archaeogame, aimed at both contextualized elements from the archaeological site as well as the ability aid researchers in understanding the relationship between space and flow in the Late Roman villa of Caddeddi on the Tellaro river (Noto). More specifically, it seeks to explore how the Villa di Caddeddi may have looked and how the rooms functioned during its time as an operating rural villa in the late 4th Century CE. Giving players the ability to pick from a list of 3D digitized assets of actual archaeological materials found both on site and in similar Sicilian Roman villas, the game seeks to engage with playful building and experimentation as seen in other popular digital game titles, like Sims 4, Subnautica, and Minecraft. The on-going work at adding assets to use in the game as well as learn more about the nature and history of the Villa di Caddeddi is discussed in terms of the second-life of digital data, archaeological interpretation, and investigation of spatial use by ancient Romans in their elite rural homes. These assets, in both In Ersilia’s Footsteps and Building by the River, represent at the same time an example in best practices in reusing 3D data, since, once used to achieve research goals, they are repurposed and in combination with an original narrative and a user-friendly interface and mechanics they become the core of an engaging and exciting exploration game. Ultimately, the experimental work, the new data gathered and the production of two original media research tools have proven to be a strategic decision to advance the digital scholarship agenda on Roman archaeology of Sicily and to trace a path for incorporating archaeogaming as a methodological approach into a research framework. The ability to re-use scientific data for the purpose of public outreach, education, and research allows for archaeologists to address pseudoscience and dangerous representations of the field. As such, the need to provide assets for games can be served through the second life of 3D digital archaeological materials.
2013, Building Blocks of the Lost Past: Game Engines and Inaccessible Archaeological Sites
2014
This paper explores an idea for creating an informal and easily approachable media platform to promote archaeological sites that are inaccessible and lesser known to the public in the form of an educational game. This game will create an illusion of a real archaeological site visit, allowing players direct contact with its environment and surroundings as well as interaction with its ancient and contemporary inhabitants. In an era of international connectivity, globalization, and social networking, it seems appropriate to choose the online computer and mobile gaming industries as media for spreading the interest in heritage and archaeology. Kotarba-Morley AM, J Sarsfield, J Hastings, J Bradshaw and PN Fiske (2013). Building Blocks of the Lost Past: Game Engines and Inaccessible Archaeological Sites. In: Earl G, T Sly, A Chrysanthi, P Murrieta-Flores, C Papadopoulos, I Romanowska and D Wheatley (Eds.), Archaeology in the Digital Era, Vol. 2, Amsterdam University Press, 949-960.
magazén, 2021
In the last decades, digital technologies have pervaded every aspect of the production of archaeological knowledge and they have been massively used to communicate the past. This contribution analyses the potential and benefits of serious games as they appear a promising tool for engaging the users in active learning of cultural contents, for attracting new audiences and promoting knowledge and awareness around archaeological heritage. Moreover, the need for multidisciplinary collaborations between archaeologists and developers and the necessity of assessment studies on learning levels to implement their effectiveness will be highlighted.
ROLLING THE DICE: PUBLIC GAME BOARDS FROM SAGALASSOS
Herom, 2018
Both literary and archaeological evidence indicates that the playing of board games was a widespread and culturally significant phenomenon of the Roman world. In spite of their common presence, ancient board games have been paid little attention by the disciplines studying classical antiquity, and especially their material aspect has been neglected. In most studies, a game board is seen primarily as a particular disposition of places for the counters, in order to identify the types of games that were played on a given board; much less attention is paid to the materiality of the actual boards. Yet, in several cities of southwestern Asia Minor, game boards have been found carved on large stone blocks which must have been part of a more permanent setup or installation. Together with their formal attributes and their prominent locations in public spaces, they can be considered public installations. The focus of enquiry of this article is a series of such monumental boards that have been unearthed at the ancient Pisidian city of Sagalassos (southwestern Asia Minor). The analysis of these boards will not only identify the type of game these were used for but will also provide information on their materiality and location. The presentation of the boards will be used to address further questions. Although very popular, dicing was generally frowned upon by public authorities which makes public installations for these practices somewhat surprising. What caused such a different attitude in this and other cities of southwestern Asia Minor towards a popular practice that was generally condoned but never publicly supported? The paper will try to approach this aspect by looking at another type of public installations erected for dicing and restricted to this part of the Mediterranean, the astragalos oracle.
Video games have been productively used in education since at least the 1970s, and archaeology has been a favourite subject in entertainment for much longer. A recovering tourism industry, an expanding video game market, and a growing interest in 'popular' archaeology concur to create a promising environment for exploring new solutions in video game edutainment (educational entertainment) related to the human past. In the present paper, we suggest that the puzzle-game format in edutainment has not yet been exploited to its full potential, especially in relation to archaeology; we argue for a model centred on the gradual acquisition of new information through a 'virtual handbook', and the constant interaction with simulated ancient artefacts, punctuated by rewarding 'thrill of discovery' moments.