# Permalife Of The Archive: Archaeogaming As Queergaming

Florence Smith Nicholls  Queen Mary University of LondonLondonUK
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
(2024; 2024)

###### Abstract.

Archaeogaming and queer games studies have both grown as paradigms in the last
decade. The former broadly refers to the archaeological study of games, while
the latter concerns the application of queer theory to the medium. To date,
there has been limited engagement of archaeogamers with queer games
scholarship, and vice versa. This article argues that there are
epistemological parallels between the two; they are both concerned with the
limits and ethics of representation, the personal and political contexts of
game development and engagement with video games through transgressive play.

The paper is structured around an extended literature review and three
vignettes that reflect on the author’s personal experience of conducting
archaeogaming research; an ethnographic study of Wurm Online, an
archaeological survey of Elden Ring and a player study of the generative
archaeology game Nothing Beside Remains. While archaeogaming can learn from
the centring of subjective lived experience and labour in the queer games
sphere, archaeogaming as a form of game preservation can also benefit queer
games studies.

archaeogaming, queer game studies, game preservation

††journalyear: 2024††copyright: acmlicensed††conference: Proceedings of the
19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games; May 21–24,
2024; Worcester, MA, USA††booktitle: Proceedings of the 19th International
Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2024), May 21–24, 2024,
Worcester, MA, USA††doi: 10.1145/3649921.3659843††isbn:
979-8-4007-0955-5/24/05††journalyear: 2024††copyright:
acmlicensed††conference: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on
the Foundations of Digital Games; May 21–24, 2024; Worcester, MA,
USA††booktitle: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the
Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2024), May 21–24, 2024, Worcester, MA,
USA††doi: 10.1145/3649921.3659843††isbn: 979-8-4007-0955-5/24/05††conference:
; May 21–24, 2024; Worcester, USA

##  1\. Introduction

As the portmanteau would suggest, archaeogaming is the archaeological study of
video games. The term was first coined in 2013 by Andrew Reinhard (Reinhard,
2013), who was influenced by Emily Johnson’s work (Johnson, 2013b) (Johnson,
2013a) on ethnographies of player engagement with the past in Skyrim. Earlier
work had also explored the representation of heritage in video games, however
Johnson’s work is notable not just for considering the archaeological
implications of a game with a fictional fantasy setting, but also engaging
with the nascent flourishing of archaeogaming discussions on social media.
This mantel was taken up a decade later with Politopoulos et al’s survey of
playful approaches to archaeology, in which they identify grassroots blogging
in the 2010s as being a key conduit through which archaeogaming developed
(Politopoulos et al., 2023). One example is Dennis’ blog Gingerygamer (sadly
no longer accessible), which provided a particularly succinct definition of
the emerging field:

> … the utilization and treatment of immaterial space to study created
> culture, specifically through video games (Dennis, nd)

As will be elaborated on below, very broadly, archaeogaming can be defined as
the study of how heritage is represented in games, the creation of
archaeological games, and the application of archaeological theory and method
in recording games as archaeological sites. Histories of the field can also be
found in (Rassalle, 2021) and more recently (Reinhard, 2024).

Queergaming, and queer games studies, are also resistant to discrete
categorisation. Again, broadly speaking, queer games studies can be understood
as the intersection of queerness and games. The term ”queergaming” was coined
by Edmond Y. Chang (Chang, 2017b), a provocation for queer games beyond
representation but also in terms of design, play and remediation. Like
archaeogaming, it has antecedents in earlier scholarship (Cassell and Jenkins,
2000), but really started to emerge as a paradigm in the last decade. Ruberg
(Ruberg, 2019), one of the most prolific queergaming scholars, points out
that, like Chang, that the paradigm draws from two major definitions of
‘queer’: as an umbrella term for LGBTQA+ identities, and as a concept
referring to a different way of being in the world. Also like archaeogaming,
queergaming, then, refers to various different ways to approach games beyond
representation:

> It refigures games as systems of pleasure, power, and possibility,
> excavating the queer potential that can be found in all games (Ruberg and
> Shaw, 2017)

There has been limited archaeogaming scholarship that draws from queer theory.
In 2018 I presented a paper on ”Archaeogaming as Queergaming” at the Computer
Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (Smith
Nicholls, 2018), which laid the ground work for this paper. There are a
handful of pieces that discuss the representation of queer characters and
archaeology in games (Meier, 2022) (Smith Nicholls, 2022). There is more work
that considers the queerness of digital archaeology more broadly. Morgan
(Morgan, 2019) has explored the potential of a cyborg archaeology that engages
with the complications of digital practice and embodiment, with reference to
the subversive potential of queerness beyond singular narratives. Cook (Cook,
2019) advocates for a digital archaeology that destabilises traditional
hierarchies of knowledge, citing the archaeology dating game C 14 Dating as a
rare example of queer archaeologist representation. This article aims to build
on this foundational work in drawing parallels between archaeogaming and
queergaming in the hope of demonstrating that not only have games always been
queer, archaeologies of games have always been queer.

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows: in Background and Related
Work I provide an extended literature review of relevant archaeogaming and
queergaming scholarship; Motivation provides further context for the work; in
Vignettes I reflect on my personal experience of conducting three
archaeogaming projects; and in Discussion I tease out the themes of these
vignettes and how they relate to queergaming.

##  2\. Background and Related Work

###  2.1. Representation and ethics

> …adventure games are tainted by the ‘Indiana Jones’ quandary. Archaeology is
> glorified via popular culture, but not for preservation, only for
> exploration of novelty and the demonisation and destruction of other
> cultural perspectives. (Champion, 2004)

This quote from a 2004 article by Champion succinctly encapsulates some of the
main concerns that archaeogaming grapples with in terms of how archaeology,
heritage and archaeologists themselves are represented in video games.
Hageneuer (Hageneuer, 2021) identifies three main themes that continue to be
perpetuated through problematic depictions of archaeologists: imperialism,
racism and sexism. Lara Croft, probably the most famous video game
archaeologist, is a symbol of female objectification, while also perpetuating
the white saviour trope. Concerns over ethical representations of archaeology
also extend to looting mechanics that proceduralise an extractivist and
imperialist approach to the past (Dennis, 2016). Meghan Dennis has been one of
the strongest proponents of taking the ethical implications of archaeological
misrepresentations in games seriously. In her doctoral thesis she presents the
results of a survey into player perceptions of archaeologists based on their
depictions in games, finding that players will be more impressionable if they
have no experience of archaeology outside of that context (Dennis, 2019).

Other archaeogaming scholarship relating to representation focuses on period-
specific settings in the medium. The Assassin’s Creed franchise is
particularly well-represented in this work (Casey, 2021; Poiron, 2021). Bowman
et al explore how perceived realism affects enjoyment of titles in the
franchise (Bowman et al., 2023). Other work also reflects on the pedagogical
potential of archaeogaming, and particularly the Assassin’s Creed games, in
the classroom (Martino, 2023). Politopoulos et al (Politopoulos et al., 2019)
make the point that its important to engage with these AAA titles in
particular, as they are likely to be a common entry point to the study of the
past for many students. Hanussek (Hanussek, 2019) raises concerns over Ubisoft
holding private ownership of a Notre Dame cathedral model; studios and
franchises having a cultural monopoly in this space is a topic that deserves
much further consideration.

Mol et al conducted a survey (Politopoulos and Mol, 2021) of games on Steam
with the “historical” tag, finding that strategy games were over-represented.
This quantification of games containing historical representation is not
dissimilar to the quantification of games with queer representation by Utsch
et al (Utsch et al., 2017). Among their other findings, they found that
LGBTQA+ representation is concentrated in RPGs, adventure and action games.
Shaw et al have also conducted a survey of more than 300 games spanning 30
years, stressing the importance of looking at queer diversity in
relationships, gender, and even location and artefacts, as well as sexuality
(Shaw and Friesem, 2016). They also make the point that, as upsetting as it is
to encounter, it is important to document incidents of homophobia and
transphobia in games:

> Casual homophobia and transphobia in game texts demonstrate that it is not
> difficult for game makers to see the relevance of LGBTQ content in these
> texts. The challenge moving forward is to see if casual inclusivity is as
> possible as casual offensiveness. (Shaw and Friesem, 2016)

There is considerable scholarship on case studies of queer representation in
games; one of particular relevance to the above point is Adams’ (Adams, 2018)
work on heroic androgyny and gender variance in games: masculine-leaning
gender androgyny is celebrated as aesthetically pleasing in the case of Link’s
character in The Legend of Zelda franchise, while a trans woman was used as a
punchline in Breath of the Wild. Cole et al reference a survey, via the
charity Represent Me, of 1,237 participants in which 150 stated that “realism”
was important to them in terms of queer representation (Cole, 2017). Even when
queerness is represented or queer relationships are offered as an option,
presenting a uniformly tolerant world has been criticised on the basis that it
reflects a “liberal logic of sameness.” (Greer, 2013) Ruberg also identifies
the limits of pushing for more queer representation when there are cases of
the wider gaming community straight-washing queer characters in Undertale, for
example (Ruberg, 2018).

While comparisons can be drawn between the concerns and limits of
representations with regards to archaeology and queerness in video games, it
would clearly not be fair to equate these too. Being an archaeologist is a
professional identity, being queer is a marginalised one.

###  2.2. Game development

Within the existing archaeogaming literature, there is considerable discussion
of developing games as pedagogical tools, and game development itself as a
learning exercise. Champion (Champion, 2020) reflects on his PhD project in
which he evaluated 80 students playing a browser-based recreation of the Mayan
city Palenque. He reports that those participants who completed tasks more
quickly in the game also scored lower in terms of memory recall when asked
about Mayan history, which is a good indication of the brittleness of these
kinds of applied game metrics. Hiriart (Hiriart, 2020) asked primary school
children to draw how they imagined Anglo-Saxon life before and after playing a
game set in the period, reflecting that a deeper understanding of history can
only be accessed through empathising with people in the past. McKinney et al
created a multi-component digital kit for young people learning in both formal
and informal environments, with an emphasis on the importance of fostering
emotional experiences, in that:

> “The evidence suggests that it is through personal, emotional connections
> that humans are more likely to be primed to acquire knowledge about, protect
> and promote the archaeological record” (McKinney et al., 2020).

Archaeogaming can be understood as a form of public archaeology, or public
engagement (Ezzeldin, 2017). This can be in the form of game development, and
teaching others how to make games as a pedagogical process in of itself. The
affordances of Twine as an open source game-making tool for archaeologists
that favours non-linear storytelling has been discussed by Tara Copplestone
(Copplestone, 2017), and as a challenge for scholars and students to engage
with their work in a form of non-traditional dissemination (Boom et al.,
2020). Archaeogamers have also reflected on their own creative and
interpretive process in making games and digital reconstructions. Kingsland
(Kingsland, 2023) explicitly refers to her own work as generating serious
games, emphasising how narrative and environment design were core to her work
on re-using digital archaeological datasets of the Roman Villa del Casale.
Morgan (Morgan, 2009) contends that the process of reconstructing the site of
Çatalhöyük in Second Life “has increased my engagement with the materiality of
the objects and how they might have related to each other during their use-
lives.”

In some cases, archaeologists have used existing tools or mods as part of
their development process. Majewski (Majewski, 2017) contends that there are
four types of cultural heritage games; commercial games, serious games,
culture-centric games and mods. Regardless of the limitations of this model,
Majewski’s point about mods being an accessible entry point to game
development to a wider audience of creatives and archaeologists is important.
This also chimes with Graham’s (Graham, 2020) provocations on mods as a form
of resistance against hegemonic structures, as we must consider the labour
ethics of game development. This tracks with Ashlee Bird’s ROM hack of Super
Mario Bros. which replaced Mario with the figure of Gluskabe, an Abenaki hero,
as:

> “Indigenous authors of digital games push back against the narrative of the
> people trapped in time.” (Bird et al., 2021)

Archaeological games can be about the recent past, and also personal
histories, as was the case with the short narrative game Fragments of Him.
Mata Haggis-Burridge describes the game, which was discussed at the
Interactive Pasts conference (Haggis-Burridge, 2021), as a recent-history
period drama based on many real life conversations that he had when coming out
as bisexual in the 1990s. This focus on personal lived experience and creative
projects is also a key concern in writing on queer game development. As Anna
Anthropy puts it in Rise of the Videogame Zinesters when she dreams of a
future in which game development is accessible to a wider remit of people:

> “…even if a game isn’t original, it’s personal, in the way a game designed
> to appeal to target demographics can’t be. And that’s a cultural artefact
> our world is a little richer for having” (Anthropy, 2012)

Anthropy is passionate about tools, like the aforementioned open source Twine,
that have been taken up by developers from non-traditional coding backgrounds,
especially queer people. Furthermore, in discussing the so-called ‘Twine
revolution,’ Harvey (Harvey, 2014) references ”personal games” of the early
2010s which were often made by one person and depicted autobiographical
experience. However, Harvey also cautions that the innovative work produced by
marginalised groups may be co-opted by the mainstream games industry,
depoliticising it outside of the original context of production. Furthermore,
Freedman (Freedman, 2018) warns against a binary opposition between tools like
Twine and proprietary engines, arguably advocating for a media archaeology
approach that traces the potential representational politics of code beyond
simple output, considering more fundamental logics that underpin software
architecture. More broadly, Aceae and Brewster have recognised the potential
of queer games to destabilise the liberal, capitalist logics of both academia
and the games industry (Aceae and Brewster, 2022). Bo Ruberg’s The Queer Games
Avante-Garde (Ruberg, 2020a) is a collection of interviews with queer game
developers from different backgrounds, thus an essential resource for
understanding different perspectives on queer game making. Several interviews
counter the focus on concepts of gamification and empathy in the archaeogaming
literature. For example, Andi McClure (McClure, 2020) believes that
“gamification misses the point. Games are a large number of things, not just
their incentive structures.” Liz Ryerson also rejects the pressure to perform
her identity through the games she makes, and laments that:

> “It’s those “empathy games” that get noticed. My work isn’t like that so it
> doesn’t get noticed in the same way” (Ryerson, 2020)

In looking at how the archaeogaming and queergaming communities have been
represented in the academic literature, it is interesting to note that
although archaeogamers write from a position of professional identity, they do
not tend to engage with the labour politics of the games industry to the
extent that the queer games community does. Perhaps as a result of lived
experience and personal subjectivity being so core to the queer game-making
space, the conversation seems to have moved beyond empathy, while the
archaeogaming literature values empathy with past peoples.

###  2.3. Methodologies and mechanics

A third core strand under the archaeogaming umbrella is the application of
archaeological methodologies to games in order to better understand and record
human (and non-human) activity within them. Andrew Reinhard has been a strong
advocate for this approach, in his thesis (Reinhard, 2019) arguing

> At the core of my research is the fundamental argument that human-occupied
> digital spaces can be studied archaeologically with existing and modified
> theory, tools, and methods to reveal that human occupation and use of
> synthetic worlds is similar to how people behave in the natural world.

There have been limited examples of archaeological surveys in games, with
Reinhard’s work on No Man’s Sky (Reinhard, 2021) perhaps being the best known.
Hansen’s recent work on the abandoned MMO Star Wars Galaxies(Hansen, 2022), in
which he uses a multi-modal approach of archaeological site mapping and
anthropological semi-structured interviews, also stands out. Graham’s
autoethnography of a Minecraft playthrough is also notable for being self-
reflexive, in which he poses that in order to be ethical digital
archaeologists we must challenge the perceived norms of intended gameplay
(Graham, 2020). There has been some meta-analysis of the specific
methodologies that archaeogamers have applied to digital space, such as the
use of plans and maps (Nicholls, 2018). An archaeological survey of player
messages and blood stains in Elden Ring (discussed as one of the vignettes
below) grappled with what constitutes archaeological context in a mingleplayer
games in which player created content is largely ephemeral (Smith Nicholls and
Cook, 2022). More recently, Reinhard and Zaia have published on using GIS and
photogrammetry to record human-occupied game environments, stressing the
importance of this methodology given the rapid pace at which these landscapes
change (Reinhard and Zaia, 2023). This arguably represents a shift in thinking
from Reinhard’s earlier statement that people behave similarly in analogue and
digital worlds, also reflecting Morgan’s thoughts that purely skeuomorphic
emulation of analogue archaeological methods in a digital context “may inhibit
truly transformative uses of these technologies.” (Morgan, 2022)

Related to the topic of the rapid accumulation of human activity in digital
games, Aycock calls for a paradigm shift in archaeology to adequately engage
with the vast amount of digital artefacts in the contemporary era (Aycock,
2014). Building on earlier work into archaeologies of flash drives (Moshenska,
2014) and hard drives (Perry and Morgan, 2015), Aycock and Biittner have
spearheaded work on reverse-engineering games such as Mystery House (Aycock
and Biittner, 2019), and worked with Ganesh on a framework that uses AI to
reverse engineer historical video games at scale (Ganesh et al., 2023). This
work has some echoes in the Digital Ludeme Project, which uses AI to play
ancient board games, attempting to fill in the gaps of missing rulesets(Crist
and Soemers, 2023).

The subject of play has not historically been central to archaeology, which
Politopoulos et al would like to change (Politopoulos et al., 2023). Their
work on contextualising fun in the archaeological record is laudable, and also
presents an interesting foil to queer game studies that make frustrating and
uncomfortable play central to their work. In a 2015 article (Ruberg, 2015),
Ruberg makes the point that games being “just for fun” was a rallying cry of
the GamerGate harassment campaign in 2014, with Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest
being a target of vitriol. This point remains relevant in the current games
discourse, as a self-styled “GamerGate 2” has been incited over Sweet Baby
Inc, a narrative development and consultation studio which specialises in
cultural consultation and sensitivity reading (Mercante, 2024). In later work
Ruberg points out the both “fun” and “empathy” have been employed as buzzwords
to legitimise games, however critiquing them both

> Is founded on the urge to resist hegemonic beliefs about the value of affect
> - whether those hegemonies dictate how a player should feel, what social
> uses a game should have, or who has a right to lay claim to queer feeling
> (Ruberg, 2019)

The embracing of discomfort and failing in queer games studies can be traced
back to the work of queer theorists like Jack Halberstam (Halberstam, 2011)
and José Esteban Muñoz (Muñoz, 2019), who call for imagining queer futures,
even and especially as they do not adhere to heterosexual, capitalist models
of success. The embracing of failure is also a key component of Edmund Chang’s
definition of queergaming, which includes queer representation, but also

> Queergaming engages different grammars of play, radical play, not grounded
> in normative ideologies like competition, exploitation, colonisation, speed,
> violence, rugged individualism, leveling up, and win states (Chang, 2017b)

Chang’s definition is not intended to be static or prescriptive, and for sure
there are examples of queer play that lean into the conventions mentioned
above, such as speedrunning (Ruberg, 2020b). There is a diverse range of rich
scholarship on queering games in terms of alternate play styles and mechanics.
There are two strands that are particularly relevant to the present
discussion; power dynamics in queer games and archival play. Mattie Brice
takes a different tack on the matter of empathy:

> If we understand play as the exercising of empathy through engaging
> contexts, and kink as a type of play design that deeply confronts life
> contexts, then kink practises stand as a stronger model for engaging with
> meaningful play (Brice, 2014)

Sihvonen and Harviainen (Sihvonen and Tuomas Harviainen, 2023) also draw
parallels between kink, BDSM, play and queer gaming communities, especially
the performative and ritualistic aspects of each. Lander (Lander, 2019) has
also done work on the political and embodied context of game-making that
“exploit the boundary of the magic circle.” This work provides a different
perspective on empathy, pleasure and games, and also centres conversations
over personal and societal power dynamics.

Melissa Kagen’s term “archival adventuring,” refers to games which afford
players to act in ways akin to an archival researcher (Kagen, 2020). This is
relevant not only for the link with how some archaeogamers occupy and study
video games, but also for the queer archival potential of games such as What
Remains of Edith Finch which constantly disorients the player by asking them
to occupy the memories of different people across the game, along with
remapped controls. Conversely, Pavlounis discusses how although Gone Home also
encourages an “archaeological understanding of history,” but only allows for a
gated “straightening” of the game as archive, despite the queer subject matter
(Pavlounis, 2016).

Both archaeogaming and queer games studies have contended with the archival
potential of games, just on different terms. Furthermore, both arguably
involve engaging with forms of transgressive play that were not originally
intended or foreseen by designers.

##  3\. Motivation

The above background section is certainly not an exhaustive review of all
literature relating to archaeogaming and queer game studies, and any such
curation of sources will have gaps. Furthermore, to taxonomize these fields
inevitably limits them, but it is hoped that by tracing potential parallels
between them we can see how they are indirectly in conversation with each
other. One motivation of this work was to demonstrate that both archaeogaming
and queer games studies have been the result of community labour, in the case
of the former this was a “grassroots initiative from people committed to two
aspects of their lives in which they saw a valuable connection,” (Politopoulos
et al., 2023) and for queer game studies that is “founded on a commitment to
building bridges between theoretical analysis and the LGBTQ people who make,
play and study games.” (Ruberg, 2019)

The remainder of this paper examines vignettes from the author’s own
archaeogaming work, the motivation being to demonstrate the queer potential to
be found through a close reading of each. Reflecting on this work allows for
personal subjectivity and my lived experience as a queer researcher to be
foregrounded. Stang (Stang, 2022) has discussed how close reading is a
feminist and queer practice that is intimate, vulnerable, and pushes back
against the reactionary critique that games should be ‘just for fun.’

##  4\. Vignettes

###  4.1. Wurm Online

We conducted a “go-along” study in the MMO Wurm Online (Smith Nicholls and
Cook, 2024). The go-along is a combination of participant observation and
interview, typically involving joining a participant on an everyday walk as a
qualitative research method. Notably, Sam Stiegler’s work on the embodied
experience of go-alongs with trans, queer and non-binary youth (Stiegler,
2021) was a major influence on this work. While there are some limited
examples of digital go-alongs (Jørgensen, 2016), to date the method has not
been explored in a video game context. We wanted to conduct a go-along in Wurm
because of the game’s particular affordances; Wurm Online is a fantasy open-
world sandbox MMO which allows players to have a permanent impact on the
landscape, however structures will slowly decay over time unless they are
regularly maintained or kept on a paid ‘deed.’ Wurm was originally released in
2006 and its oldest intact server, Independence, dates to 2009. Some
structures are at least a decade old and still persist in the game. One such
infrastructure project is Dragon Fang Pass, a tunnel through the largest
mountain on the Independence server that represents a huge amount of player
time invested. We chose Dragon Fang Pass as the initial focus on our go-alongs
as its is designated a heritage site by the Wurm community, and thus would
potentially be particularly well-suited to a methodology informed by personal
memories of place. The full results of this study, with the thematic analysis
of the go along transcripts, are published separately(Smith Nicholls and Cook,
2024), for the purpose of this discussion a few relevant threads will be
teased out. The very nature of the go-along as mediated around walking links
with discussions around queer wanderings in games. Both Pelurson (Pelurson,
2019) and Kagen (Kagen, 2020) have made the link between walking simulators
and the figure of the flâneur, popularised in the 19th century as a
cosmopolitan figure detached from society and able to reconfigure the space of
the city according to their perambulations. Ruberg (Ruberg, 2020b) also points
out that:

> The observation that gamers find walking simulators “boring” is linked to
> the basic premise on which calling a game a walking simulator is considered
> an insult: That the pace of walking is itself somehow bad or unacceptable.

Conducting the go-alongs rendered Wurm into a walking simulator, as we went on
meandering paths dictated by our participants. Linking back with the topic of
discomfort mentioned previously, there were multiple times where I found it
difficult just to perform basic actions in the game, like climbing a ladder,
due to my unfamiliarity with the controls on the Steam Deck. These moments
were embarrassing but also led me to reflect on my role as a player-researcher
and further underlined that the participants were the experts. One
participant, Nirav, is the curator of the in-game Rockcliff Museum. In Wurm,
certain items will carry the signature of their creator, but this can degrade
over time and only be recovered through the improvement mechanic, which takes
a considerable amount of time and resources:

> Nirav: So many hours, and, and, and really most of the hours have been in
> improving items to get signatures, because to find the signature, you get
> another letter every ten [points]

Improving signatures is a core part of Nirav’s curatorial practise, and it
also an important part of community events, as was stressed by another
participant:

> P3: And impalongs, impalongs also will have some lag, because of all the
> players gathered together with uh, the game needing to keep track of light
> sources and animals and you know, things like that. Those give you more of
> an indica- more of a, I dunno, a feel, a sense for how it used to be in
> terms of when players used to be gathered together in a community.

Imping has a kind of ritualistic aspect. In her book Wandering Games (Kagen,
2022) Kagen reflects on the potential for rituals and wanderings to provide an
outlet for those under societal constraints. This also chimes with an
observation made by Nirav:

> Nirav: I’ve put a lot of time into it, but it’s been a lot of fun, and I
> mean, to be honest, I, I really believe that most of the hardcore players in
> this game are older and disabled…And I fall into that category, I’m 55. And
> I’ve had some medical life issues that have… enabled me to play this much,
> you know…And pour myself into something that, you know, is is pretty… pretty
> exciting and cool.

Kara Stone (Stone, 2018) has written on her artistic practise as a queer
disabled developer, specifically the potential for a reparative game design
that:

> …situated in the everyday. It is connected to repetition, mundanity, and
> urgency, rather than event, catastrophe, and emergency. I see it as a daily
> ritual, something that needs to be tended to everyday

Imping items in Wurm can be seen as a form of reparative curatorial design in
the context of Rockcliff Museum, and reparative play more broadly. The go-
along method itself has queer potential in its focus on the apparently mundane
act of walking and meandering through a familiar space, but also reconfiguring
that space as a site of personal reflection with no specific goals or need for
efficiency.

###  4.2. Elden Ring

In 2022, we conducted an archaeological survey of the action-adventure game
Elden Ring (Smith Nicholls and Cook, 2022). Like other games in the
Soulsbourne genre, Elden Ring has an asynchronous multiplayer which allows a
player to interact with messages left in the landscape, as well as bloodstains
denoting where another player died. We focused on recording player messages
and bloodstains at two locations, with the intention of testing if elements of
the metagame and player experience could be inferred from them. More recent
work directly contends with the queerness of Elden Ring (Leiter, 2023), in
which Leiter suggests that it may be more productive to find evidence of the
queer community through looking at fan archives and wikis then an
archaeological survey of this kind. While we agree that those sources are
invaluable, we would also like to demonstrate the queer potential of this
methodology in Elden Ring.

Soulsborne games are notorious for being difficult, and Elden Ring is no
different, however we encountered a different kind of friction when conducting
the survey than simply dieing multiple times. We adapted existing
archaeological recording techniques traditionally used in analogue space, such
as photography and plan-making. In the case of the latter, in order to create
scale base plans, I used my player character’s foot as a unit of measurement.
This meant walking at tiny incremental steps around the periphery of the game
locations that we surveyed. This process was incredibly laborious, but also
allowed for a deeper understanding of how the space was designed. To reference
the earlier discussion of power dynamics in games, on the one hand to
archaeologically survey Elden Ring is to engage with the game and its
landscape in an unconventional way, on the other hand, we were still
constrained by the algorithmic tendencies of the game’s server and what (and
when) it would reveal more player-created content. Furthermore, because using
mods carries a risk of being banned from the game’s multiplayer mode, we
didn’t explore this as an option. That being said, as Chang puts it:

> …imagine play, exploration, even failure that resists the check box, the
> Boolean, that rewrites protocol and refuses the posthuman fantasies of power
> and control (Chang, 2017a)

In archaeology, the concept of ‘context’ is incredibly important; it relates
to the position and associations of an artefact or feature, which helps
determine its chronological relationship relative to other finds and features.
For example, if a pottery sherd is found in dark soil that is distinct from a
layer of lighter soil below it in which another sherd was deposited, the two
sherds are found in different archaeological contexts and the darker soil is
likely later. We attempted to record the spatial and temporal context of each
message and bloodstain by drawing plans and making note of what day and at
what observable number of server refreshes a particular asset first appeared.
The concept of ‘context’ is also incredibly important in kink:

> Video games are preoccupied with tech progressivism and late capitalistic
> practices that bank on ripping the sutures between reality and play. WE ARE
> ALWAYS PLAYING. WE ARE ALWAYS IN CONTEXTS. CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. (Brice,
> 2014)

The archaeological surveying of video games allows us to engage with their
context and the power dynamics involved on a personal level. Arguably, this
means the survey is actually a record of how we as researchers involved in the
project experienced the game, as much as it is a record of player activity. As
Graham puts it, “When I write about video games, I am the player-subject I
know best.” (Graham, 2020) This could seem limiting, but from a game
preservation point of you, it is invaluable to have a record of the experience
of play. Pow has written about the potential for a reparative video game
history:

> The act of writing video game history gives us the possibility of reading
> history as something alive that churns, sets in motion, breathes life into,
> and animates the documents that have been saved (and those that have been
> lost), displacing the records that have come to stand in for the people they
> are attached to. (Pow, 2019)

The queer potential of an archaeological survey of Elden Ring is to engage
with the personal context of its recording and the incidental traces that
players leave behind in the game’s landscape.

###  4.3. Nothing Beside Remains

Nothing Beside Remains (hereafter NBR) is a short exploration game which is
set in the ruins of a village, with no set goals or win states. The village is
procedurally generated through the process of an abstract simulation of a
population that has the possibility to reach one of three failure conditions,
such as ecosystem collapse, which effects the eventual algorithmic generation
of structures and material culture. Informed by Cook’s work on generative
forensic games (Cook, 2020), I have dubbed this a “generative archaeology
game” (Smith Nicholls and Cook, 2023) in that a player arguably is tasked with
archaeologically interpreting the output of the generator. In a 2022 GDC talk
(Rabii and Nicholls, 2022) I put forward the idea that environmental
storytelling in games requires the player to archaeologically interpret a game
environment, building on the work of Livingstone et al (Daniel et al., 2016)
who consider this to be a form of “archaeological storytelling.” Other
archaeogaming scholars have also taken up the idea of the “archaeological
mindset” (Caracciolo, 2022) and “archaeological fandom” (Bennett et al., 2023)
in games. I believe this to be a burgeoning new strand for archaeogaming that
moves beyond representation and provides the opportunity to engage more deeply
with level and narrative design in games and their archaeological
implications.

In 2023, we conducted a player study with NBR, providing a bespoke build of
the game and an online questionnaire. We asked to participants to interpret
what had happened to the village to see what reasons they gave for these
interpretations on the basis of the implicit environmental storytelling in
NBR. There were 187 participants in total, and the preliminary results of the
study and their implications for archaeological storytelling have been
published (Smith Nicholls and Cook, 2023). For the purpose of this discussion,
I am interested in the queer affordances of NBR as a game with a procedurally
generated setting.

In Anna Anthropy’s Queer’s In Love At The End Of The World, a player has 10
seconds to interact with their lover before the world inevitably ends. Ruberg
has argued that rather than this being a permadeath game, it can actually be
classified as a permalife game in which death is impossible because it can be
endlessly looped. They explain:

> At the most basic level, the mechanic of permalife could be seen as a
> powerful refusal of death – a symbolic performance of the will to live in
> the face of homophobic oppression and violence. Within the context of video
> games, permalife could also be read as a rebuttal, through design, to the
> masculinist ‘hardcore-ness’ of permadeath. (Ruberg, 2017)

NBR, as a game with procedurally generated content and an abstract ASCII
aesthetic, consciously borrows from the roguelike genre, which is also
characterised by the permadeath mechanic. However, it arguably is also a
permalife game for several reasons. Firstly, there is actually no way to die
in NBR, and secondly, because of its procedurally generated nature, it is
always possible to regenerate a new village. The concept of permalife has
interesting implications for how we might conceive of the archaeological
record. Perry (Perry, 2019) has argued that the narrative of archaeology being
a finite and non-renewable resources is damaging, cynical and inaccurate,
urging us to instead cultivate enchantment with the archaeological record. She
defines this as:

> ‘a state of wonder’ that typically entails surprise, pleasure, uncanniness
> (discomfiture), presence, or sensory agitation.

If archaeology is seen as a destructive process and the archaeological record
non-renewable, then this is akin to permadeath. An enchantment model of the
archaeological record leaves room for possibilities beyond models of resource
extraction and consumption, for permalife. This ties back in with NBR as a
game that allows for endless archaeological speculation. It is important to
state that enchantment, permalife and an endlessly regenerating ruined village
do have uncomfortable implications. As Ruberg puts it:

> …what it means to go on living in these games is far messier and less
> utopian than it may at first appear. The futurity found in this work is, in
> turns, exuberant, weary, mournful and defiant. In contrast to the neo-
> liberal, homonormative narrative of LGBTQ lives and histories ‘getting
> better’ (Ruberg, 2017)

The permalife of the archaeological record is arguably represented in NBR, and
though that provides endless opportunity for discovery, it also involves the
endless looping of ruination and all that implies for this fictional village.
Linking back with queer theory and Halberstam’s work, we can imagine the
infinite promise of failure in this cycle of permadeath-in-life. As Halberstam
puts it:

> Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing,
> unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative,
> more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do
> and have always done exceptionally well. (Halberstam, 2011)

The aesthetics of ruination in video games and the relationship between
archaeogaming and queergaming are beyond the scope of this paper, but should
be explored further in future work.

##  5\. Discussion and Conclusion

Several themes have coalesced through reflecting on the queer potential of the
three archaeogaming vignettes presented. Firstly, all three include some
aspect of wandering as Kagen (Kagen, 2022) would define it; the Wurm go-along
is explicitly characterised by walking and reflecting, the Elden Ring work
involved repeated wandering through the survey area and one of the main and
only mechanics of NBR is exploration of the village. The gaming archaeologist
perhaps, then, has some affinities with the flâneur and their reinscribing of
space through how they inhabit it. The queer phenomenology of archaeogaming is
definitely a fruitful avenue for further research.

Another theme is failure and frustration. In Wurm, I had to contend with my
own inability to successfully interact with objects like ladders, while Elden
Ring required repetitive and painstaking remediation of real-world surveying
techniques into an environment not suited for them. With NBR, it is perhaps
impossible to truly fail or die, but the uncanny existence of the procedural
ruined village brings up disquieting implications.

In the case of Wurm, reparative game design was relevant to the rituals that
players conduct to both tend to the game world and themselves. A personal
record can be an example of a reparative history with Elden Ring, especially
as it can account for the incidental traces that other players leave behind
and may not think to take note of. Grinblat et al (Grinblat et al., 2021) have
theorised that narrative sandboxes like NBR allow for reparative play. By
having deliberately incomplete narratives that invite a multiplicity of
interpretations:

> It’s more accurate to say these narratives arrive intact but buried… and
> that you’re given tools of revelation: a compass to find the relevant sites
> and a hammer and chisel to excavate them.

This archaeological metaphor is fitting given the reparative potential of
generative archaeology games like NBR. Furthermore, the idea that these games
“invite repair by arriving in disrepair” (Grinblat et al., 2021) rhymes with
Kagen’s sentiment that:

> To clean up the gap-filled messiness of the archive by giving it one, true
> narrative – as game designers often do in the interest of telling a
> compelling story – is to unqueer it. (Kagen, 2020)

Which should also be read alongside Perry’s thoughts on enchantment:

> In fact, archives themselves are premised on the notion that we can forever
> discover new and different things about their contents—hence the
> preservation of these contents, ripened for reinterpretation over time.

The permalife of the archive is in its ability to continually be remade,
reinterpreted, remediated. In the case of archaeogaming, embracing the
personal, uncomfortable and reparative potential of the records we make allows
us to see that, indeed, archaeogaming has always been queer.

##  6\. Postscript

This paper is itself an attempt at an archive of archaeogaming and queergaming
literature, and for that reason, it is a failure. No archive is ever complete.
However, through exploring these vignettes on my own personal experience of
archaeogaming research, I hope to have shown the queer potential of adapting
archaeological methodologies and concepts in the context of video games. I
follow Pow’s work on A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors:

> Re-centering the ephemeral, and the acts, erasure, and embodiment within
> computer and video game history, allows us to argue that what has been
> lost—the objects missing from archives, the trans histories that are left
> out of historical narra-tives, all things that have not been recorded—have a
> life and a history that we can still trace, and which is still
> meaningful(Pow, 2021)

This sentiment is in conversation with Aycock and Biittner’s work on
experimental archaeogaming, and their concerns about:

> …the invisibility of the production process in the (digital) archaeological
> record… although we may have the end product of the video game production
> sequence (i.e., the game), the tools used can be invisible or “lost” in the
> assemblages we are working with(Aycock and Biittner, 2024)

While archaeogaming can learn from the centring of the personal, embodied
experience, queergaming could benefit from experimental archaeogaming
techniques in the pursuit of tracing queer and trans media histories.

###### Acknowledgements.

Thanks to Mike Cook, who collaborated with me on the three projects referenced
as vignettes in this paper. I would like to thank organisers and attendees of
the 2023 Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies at the Sydney Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Centre who encouraged me to continue to
pursue queer studies of archaeogaming. My sincere thanks to the reviewers for
their insightful suggestions and feedback which I have done my best to include
here. I would also like to thank my past self for persevering with independent
research and presenting the original paper Archaeogaming as Queegaming at the
CAA conference in 2018 at a time when it felt very vulnerable for me to do
that work. This work was supported by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training
in Intelligent Games & Games Intelligence (IGGI) [EP/L015846/1].

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