 Okay, so if you observed the schedule and you see what I presented on, you see I switched topics a little bit. My paper was one of these papers where you write an abstract and you're super proud of it. And then during the work, actually work on it, you discover it's not as I want it to be. So I will present on a little bit different topic, but you will enjoy it nonetheless. It's about learn the lines, games as tools of research. So I'm doing a lot of agent-based modeling. And for all of you who are so familiar with agent-based modeling, let's give you a very quick way to introduce the Wikipedia way. An agent-based model, ABM, is one class of computational models for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. So agent-based models are basically computer-based simulations, little computer-based laboratories where we can explore human behavior. And here we see a basic agent-based model written in that logo for determining the action radius of hunter-gatherer groups. So we have a lot of parameters. You see them all to the left and we can play around with them and we can change them and we can see how the emerging pattern of behavior has changed due to our different data sets. And emergence is a very important term in agent-based models because models should not be deterministic. We should not have an outcome programmed into them, but we should allow them to emerge to see patterns of behavior coming from the code that we as an archeologist or the programmer or observer and all did not expect in this way or maybe expect in this way, but then we see how we can manipulate it through a certain goal. So emergent behavior can appear when a number of simple entities, agents in our case, operate in an environment forming more complex behaviors. That's agent-based models. So what makes a game because we're talking about games today? Games are made of goals, rules, challenges and interactions and this is pretty much the same to an agent-based model where I give my agents a goal, where I give them rules and where I have interactions from the agent with the virtual reality I create, which I can observe. So the case I want to argue is that games and agent-based models are not that far away and we might use games as tools of research by observing the behavior of the player and try to collect the data and analyze the data and see how they tackle archaeological questions in a playable way because games are a rule-based emergent system in which players have an agenda and I'm catering to an archaeological audience today so most of you might have played D&D or something else in the day so there is random behavior but there's also emergence and there's also a lot of fun so why not have fun while doing research? If we look into board games it becomes more clear to draw the comprehension between games and agent-based models If you see the agent-based models before we have this patch-based world if you look at Settles of Catan one of the most, what do you say, like the most-knowing Euro games so to say we also have this patch-based world and these patches have values and the values relate to how certain resources could be gathered from the patches so it doesn't take much to flip an agent-based model into a video game and this is what I try to do to use games as tools of research and I will just give you a quick example of Folded this was a very popular and used as a game for a tool of research it was about the DNA connectivity chains in some special virus thing I forgot about what it was exactly but they gave the model to the players and the players could rearrange it and at some point players actually solved this very complex folding structure of these mitochondrial DNA thing and so actually players having fun with something, gathering a puzzle, produced a scientific outcome just use Google search for Folded and you will see all the papers here's another one, Evolving Planets this is a game you can freely download to your iPad and even Android device it originated here in Barcelona at the Super Computing Center and you play a spaceship mission where you put people on, what you call them, away teams on planets and you have to give them a strategy to solve your puzzles so using agent-based model techniques to solve these puzzles and you learn a lot about agent-based modeling on the way give it a try, just download it for free so a player is interested in reactions to his actions a scientist wants data formed from interactions so why don't we let players become the agent and here's one example of a game I really like it's called Don't Starve and your basic mission is to Don't Starve and as you see in the picture above there are a lot of different biomes where you can interact with there are a lot of different strategies you can choose to survive you always have to build a fire to survive at night but from this very basic camp setup you see down there with a tent and a fire you can become very elaborate things this player uses bees to harvest honey he has different machines, he produces food on a very high level or you can even see players like this building a whole base with a lot of organizational features to it chests, different cooking pots and having a very extravagant economy running there so here's another example where people flooring the boards with stones but all of this is not necessary the only thing you need is a fire at night so what drives players to build this in big bases to put so much time into it and to find all these different strategies that you can apply to one game to winning it so what game would you make? I would make a game about neolithicization and while we're loading this multiplayer mock-up experience you will enjoy with me now and I give you a very very short rundown I want to have a game where players can set agents so there is not a player as an entity as a whole you just have a bunch of agents and you can only label zones to them from the real world we pause the game here and you see we have like game running around the wilds we have fishing zones, we have these little berry bushes and all we can do as a player is to set up zones where our agents you see the two still hunter-gatherer people up there in the corner to interact with the landscape so we choose a zone or a task we want to apply like ah the animations are very fast here I'm a little bit sorry it was a little bit more elaborate and a little bit more slow but you get it we can set for instance a hunting zone so the agents will now take up the task of hunting on their own go to the zone hunting the game that's in there you see the paw print and bring in some meat so they can survive and I can make more elaborate setup and give them a fishing zone and while the agents handling all these tasks we can observe where the player is placing zones what is the first thing he tackles does he want them to live off the river does he want the players to live off the woods does he want to clear the woods to have wood to build buildings and structures and you see a little bit more of it here are people going to the wood zone and start chopping down trees and what we can do is we can track the behavior of the player we can see what does he start with what's the first task a player assigns what are different groups of players planned to do with the environment and we can go on to this more elaborate setup that I have here you see now we have cleared some of the woods it's the same players than before we have now three agents running in the model they already start to harvest grain in the corner and we can have a manifold of tasks to choose from like making weapons it's a little bit weird to stand over here we can make necklaces so they can be happy we can set up a culting area so they can worship their gods and be more happy we could also plant different things and have very bushes so the main goal of this game would be to observe the players tackling the problem of bringing hunter gatherers to a neolithic settlement and see what strategy they actually choose by comparing the strategies and getting all these data we get from the interactions of the player with the static world we might be able to observe patterns of recurring strategies and compare them to the actually archaeological data we have to make such a game a really good game a really scientific game of course we would not just make up a map but we would digitalize a little bit part of the world think of an SRTM model load this into the game so we have all the elevations we might have the actually soil quality in there we might have the spawning rates or fish and whatever and so we can get data that's actually comparable to our archaeological outcome or archaeological recorded data so we can track a lot of players and we can see a lot of behaviors and you will see that different strategies lead to different outcomes and that different strategies will also show different what you call it like different favorite strategies by different players so if we look here we will see that some of the players and the game is a mock-up so I just put some of my colleagues there to say what strategy would you choose and I just like write it down but you see that a lot of people would not value religion very high in the beginning they would always start to get a subsistence economy to get people to be fat to be happy and then later on when they had like circles they were saying like now I would invest in religion now I would give them a temple now I would try to make my people happy so this is probably something we can compare to what we know from the archaeological record we first want people to have a surplus and then they would start to invest in more elaborate structures and to form a society which could also afford tasks that are not for subsistence or economy, economical survival so this is what the game could look like in a later state we see people like farming cattle we see they have built a house the woods are now cleared it's very open landscape we have a lot of grain producing and farming we still have the fishing area around we have a lot of agents running in the model and this could be a way to bring games and science together and use games as tools of research to create interactions, record data from interactions and in the end maybe get a gain and a surplus for our archaeological data for interpreting the material come out we collect in the fields one more we have the social settings I forgot about that so another thing that would be very interesting is that you could have these social tasks and you can see if you want to have a very strong leadership a 100% leadership would be like a dictator like person on top of it all the 0% leadership would mean that no agent would step up as a leader and give the others order we can say how important should religion be how important should accessibility to the society be so how easy should it be to come from a farmer to achieve them or something else and we could also say how high we want them to use violence to fight off other groups they might encounter so with playing around with the social settings we might see that some strategies will only work with a certain social setting so this could also give us some insight in how the social settings of a neolithic village or of a village in very early neolithic stages must have set up to actually function because a 100% leader that will not do any work might not be worse for also a 100% violence strategy to just go there and rob all the other players might fall flat at some point if there are no other players around so we have to play around with these sliders to see what happens and by identifying strategies to see our players tend to go for a more anarchic playing way are they aimed for chiefdoms which ones stay for a longer time so we can make a lot of years will the anarchistic or the farms that tends to be more anarchistic model or will the more evolved chiefdoms become the first to survive would be an interesting research question to ask the data we can gain from the game so thank you for your attention