 It gives me great pleasure to welcome everybody to the second lecture in this year's Our Brown Bay Series. And we are delighted to have our own Ruth Trinope, who is giving a talk that I know is the PowerPoint Point-of-Port that's the alternative title, promising the past, considering the audience, which Ruth herself, kindly noted, would probably not get us the people from campus, at least put it on the poster. I don't have to visualize it, visualisation of me on the phone, you can do that, something dull. But Ruth is never dull and I am absolutely looking forward to hearing about the context. Thank you. Well, thank you. That's a question that you all have just heard. Because of its musical intricacy and we have fun performing it, but it has the reputation of being very hard or difficult to listen to as perhaps you would agree from that excerpt if you were in fact listening. The subtext behind this talk is that we get more enjoyment, i.e., more joy, in creating something than in consuming or watching or using the product of someone else's creativity. You might disagree with me and be offended or write off, but bear with me just a little. This rule is bent a little when we remediate an original creation, that is, create something new out of an existing creation, as in performing a piece of music or play or playing a game. The rule is cracked entirely when we consume a good book or article or attend a sports event or a musical event or watch a good film. So how is it that some music and some books and films and events can evoke such an emotional outpouring by their audiences that we weep and will read, watch, listen, visit again and again? Can we find that heightened outpouring in experiencing 3D models and virtual reality about archaeology and cultural heritage? That's the question we're going to think about today. I'm focusing here on what has been called the rock star aspect of archaeology, 3D visualisations and modelling. It supposedly has such high entertainment value that it has been adopted in hundreds of museums if they can afford it worldwide. This is my focus because the original of this presentation was given in April at the UCSC conference on modelling the past, 3D archaeology and the future of the past. There is no doubt that it is fun to create the 3D models, getting the accuracy right, creating the illusion of reality, creating visualisations of landscapes, the GIS maps and the snazzy websites. I have never created a 3D model or a GIS map, but I have had great fun creating other kinds of visual presentations of archaeological research and I, like many other people, have been not only a creator of visualisations but also a user, audience member, consumer of other people's creations as well as my own. In this presentation I'm bringing the focus on to the users of the many examples of technological prowess that are on the web, the cloud and museum installations. Who are the actual users and audience of their different kinds of created products? What are their expectations and preconceptions? How do they use the different products? And how will they be changed by them and inspired towards their own creativity? And what are the intentions and aims of the creators? Who are the intended and expected audience and users of the products of their prowess? Are the actual users the same as the expected users of the products? And do the evaluations of use and visits, especially reuse and revisit, actually mesh with these intentions and expectations? And if not, does it matter? And if it does, what can we do to change that? At the UCSC conference I asked rhetorically only the model creators, that is the creators of models, sorry, as a user do you have so much fun with your own or other models that you want to keep coming back to visit or play time and again? Do you revisit the virtual places you have created? I'm not going to ask you a lot here because I'm not sure how many of you do this thing, this stuff, but those of you who do just have a think about that while I'm talking. So what am I talking about? The civil principles that you see here in the middle of virtual archaeology were created in 2011 and usefully categorized the different kinds of 3D applications with increasing distance from the empirical source of information. Virtual archaeology itself is this kind of umbrella scientific discipline that seeks to research and develop ways of using computer-based visualization for the comprehensive management of archaeological heritage. Archaeological heritage is the tangible or are the tangible assets that comprise the source of knowledge on the history of humankind and that are studied using archaeological methodology. And comprehensive management is paperless or paperful, documentation, preservation, presentation, access and public use of the material remains of the past. Virtual restoration is using a virtual model to reorder and reconstitute available material remains in order to visually recreate something that existed in the past. Virtual anaestilosis, which I love that word, but it doesn't mean much more than virtual restoration except the parts are dismembered and dispersed and so are more difficult to reconstruct or to restore, I should say. Virtual reconstruction is a virtual model that visually recovers a building or object made by humans at a given moment in the past from their physical evidence along with scientifically reasonable comparative inferences carried out by archaeologists and other experts. Virtual recreation as we see here in the game of Fort Ross goes a little further beyond the empirical data and a virtual model that visually recovers an archaeological site, not just the buildings, it includes the buildings and the movable and immovable heritage of the material culture but it also includes the environment, the landscape, customs and general cultural significance as in a computer game as Fort Ross. So in order to understand the different intentions and audience expectations of these different formats defined by the Seville principles, I look in a slightly different way at the same thing. I make a distinction between on the one hand documentation and documentation here, the data, media, GIS, et cetera that is the result of fieldwork and lab work and that involves constructing both surrogates and representations of reality. The same as the first three categories of the Seville principles and on the other hand what I like to call the afterlives of here the afterlives of documentation work mostly involving visualizations in various formats that are representations and not surrogates that is you cannot work with them in any way except as representations. In considering documentation in the field and lab I make a distinction between the documenter's assumptions in their interpretations and their aims as the basis of their intentions. Their interpretations are based here that the media and data are surrogates for or precise or accurate representations of objective reality and on this basis their intentions are that media and data should be archived for the long term and should preserve and even replace the physical record of cultural heritage both tangible and intangible and should be accessible and shareable and should be added as empirical support for visualization models. I make the same distinction for the creators of visualization or afterlives between the assumptions behind their interpretations and the aims behind their intentions. Dennis Watterson who you'll be hearing a little more about in 2012 has characterized archaeological visualization as a complex area of research which exists at the convergence of evidence, interpretation, scientific data collection and storytelling. Visualizing the whole from fragments found by archaeologists is challenging because it involves interpretation of what is missing and that involves ambiguity and moving away from the prized authenticity which is fine as long as it is made transparent. That being said, many creators of afterlives interpret their visualizations as truthfully and unambiguously representing real-world authentic original objects, sites and events. Their intentions and expectations are that their visualizations precisely visualize, visually reconstitute, simulate and reconstruct buildings and sites. They enable immersive experience of living and moving in the past. They enable the interaction whereby users actively engage with the experience and many projects are not planned or archived for the long term. They're not interested in longevity. There are other forms of diversity of creators than the ones I've listed here according to Worldview, their experience, archaeological epistemology and digital literacy. And here archaeological epistemology is an especially interesting background to the diversity of the creators. I've adapted here an interesting chart from Laya Pujol-Tost's recent presentation at the University of York showing how archaeological epistemology affects different aspects of the diversity of intentions and design of 3D applications and visualizations. I'm not going to go into the details. There are all sorts of cautionary tales about this chart but if we have time, which we probably won't, I'll come back to this. You can discuss it in Anthro 1.229A. It's perfect for that. Turning to the audience, the users and the visitors, their experiences are also very diverse and I've attempted in this simplified chart to make sense of this diversity by making a distinction between those that the grey ones here that involve using and rarely reusing digital documentation and information mostly online via the internet and cloud-based services and then those down here, the navy blue that involve visiting or watching 3D installations either by physical visitation or by sitting in front of a computer or mobile device. These tend to be relatively passive experiences for the user. That's in contrast to down here which are the action-active experiences that involve active participation by the user either by a physical experience such as reenactment or digitally a simulated action in a video game, for example. And then finally, the mixed ones that are partly active and partly not are those that involve both especially mobile devices such as social media games, alternate reality games, augmented reality and so on. The audience of 3D visualizations and virtual applications themselves are diverse ranging from consumers, users, children, visitors professionals from archaeology and cultural heritage and museums. They are diverse according to their pre-knowledge, their digital and media literacy levels their experience, education and the opportunities they've had to in life really and their imagination, their thirst for knowledge, their empathy and especially their critical awareness. So, Waterston has noted that however diverse there is still a pervasive expectation that a virtual visualization will present an unambiguous truth about the past and enable the user to experience the past in an accessible way with scientific accuracy. Both creators and audiences expect that 3D models and computer-generated visualizations will help to disseminate knowledge about cultural heritage sites and what the past was like and raise public awareness of the need for preservation of cultural heritage and archaeological sites. The audience of 3D visualized, oh sorry, got this, systematic evaluations of the extent to which these expectations of virtual archaeology and heritage have been met have been based largely on the responses of museum visitors and more rarely heritage sites to in place virtual reality installations. Rarely, if ever, are questions posed about revisiting an installation and almost never about access, reuse and recontextualization of heritage content or archaeological content. Three significant international standards for digital cultural heritage have been established in the last 10 years and have really raised the standard of 3D visualizations. They were all in response to both recommendations by both creators and users. In 2006, the London Charter for Computer-Based Visualization of Cultural Heritage was conceived as a means of an, I quote, ensuring the methodological rigor of computer-based visualization essentially promoting a framework of intellectual transparency supported by paradata that document the intellectual process behind the creation of the visualization. Then came the IKAMOS Ename Charter in 2008 that broadened the London Charter with inclusiveness of non-expert stakeholders and multiple interpretations and a focus on intangible heritage, storytelling and communities. You can see here the critical theorists are beginning to show their metal here. Then the principles of Seville brought it back to an academic basis and established a need for an academic theoretical debate on the practice of virtual archeology and virtual heritage in which to implement both the London and Ename Charters. Evaluators of virtual heritage and 3D installations in museums note that the viewers are still mostly passive observers and recipients of information. It's a perennial question for educators as well as museum and cultural heritage professionals. How can we get users to participate more actively and make it their own? That is, turn information into knowledge. At the bottom of this slide here are just some phrases that I collected from both evaluators and evaluees of recommendations for virtual archeology and virtual heritage that I'm going to follow up in the rest of this presentation. These are some of the focus words I've garnered from reading the critical and evaluation accounts of 3D applications and visualizations. Some of the authors of those accounts are listed here with others in a bibliography at the end of a PDF version of the original publication. Returning to my question at the beginning of this presentation what is it that engages or might engage users in the virtual reality model or other digital visualization products? What in a virtual reality installation might evoke an emotional response of the kind that's evoked by a good book or a film or music? Why do we frequently revisit an amusement park or the zoo? But very rarely a virtual reality installation. What is it that might motivate revisitation and reuse of in-place and online installations? This is important because actually without it we don't see any future or long-term preservation or sustainability of these models. I'll consider in the next part of this presentation what are some of the most important factors, most of which have popped up on this wordle which I was very proud to create, my first wordle, actually my second. This next part of the presentation has been very hard to organize and in taking the many recommendations and principles for installations and models that involve 3D visualizations of the past I've tried to isolate certain major aspects that would certainly for me lead to greater engagement including revisits and reuse. But no sooner do I isolate them than I realize they are all interconnected. I've tried to express this here and it's no accident of course that it kind of resembles or reminds you of the Olympic Games. It's that year, isn't it? These are tangled aspects of making virtual reality more meaningful to diverse audiences and academic fields. For the rest of this presentation I'm going to focus mostly on exploring each of these circles in greater depth. As I approach each specific focus you will see a number of even more specific foci. Please don't be disappointed if I don't address each of these. We would never get through half of this presentation if I attempted to do that. They are guides for my own future creative process or yours if you like. Angela Labrador and Elizabeth Chilton in 2009 remarked with reference to digital heritage databases but they might as well have been talking about visualizations and I quote, they do little to engage end users in the interpretive process. In doing so they limit authority and access for non-expert users. They presume a single knowable community or heritage audience. They presume a single consensual interpretation of content. Eric Champion suggested that optimally a user engages with virtual cultural environments as an interactive process of observation, instruction and active participation. I end quote there. This remark is true of an engagement with any kind of cultural environment including that of the world of archeological interpretation. Here at Chattel Huyuk for example you can see three degrees of active participation in the archeological process. Up here is doing it and then in the middle is doing it vicariously as you watch someone else doing it. And then down here is the archeological site with no people, nobody working and it's empty of any devoid of any stories or life saved for those on the signage. All of the published evaluation studies point to the need for active participation through the incorporation of social networking and communities of practice into museum and heritage projects. Interestingly mixed reality formats such as augmented reality using mobile devices have an enormous advantage in this respect in that input as well as output is in the hands as well as the eyes and ears of the visitor as I'll show you later in for example in the chess project. In spite of the criticisms that have been addressed about 3D visualizations and the creator's use of phrases such as this is the artist's impression and what the site might have looked like in the past still there is something enchanting and seductive about them that entices viewers to think perhaps through a message that is transmitted subliminally to the audience and it's purely my own theory that the model authentically reconstructs and reconstitutes the original from its remains. Thus the ambiguity of interpretation the fact that many models could be constructed from the same remains is not grasped by viewers or is hidden from them. Either way they are not given the opportunity to participate in the interpretive process. Exploration is at the heart of what a visitor to a virtual reality world does and the continuing challenge for a museum designer as well as virtual reality modeler is how to make exploration interesting and meaningful. Tim Ingold in 2007 made a distinction between transporting oneself from point to point where the destinations are the main point of travel and wavering with no destination but with an endless unfolding of a path as you move where the process of movement itself is the main point of travel. Exploration in a virtual world can be carried out in either of these modes. The creator has the ability to enable, encourage or restrict exploration through their design. Movement may be structured around a series of fixed intended destinations perhaps with information provided at each but what do we look at as we fly or race or if you're lucky walk navigating from point to point usually not a lot except looking for the next destination. The alternative is to design a virtual environment as a labyrinth in which the aim is not to reach the destination i.e. its exit but to enjoy walking and wavering along its many paths that are enhanced by meaningful interaction provided by interesting features dead ends, mysterious doors surprising discoveries an unfamiliar sight or a movement in the corner that your eye will light on or a story snippet that resonates or reminds you of a past experience. You can see where I'm favouring here, I know I have an agenda. It is questionable what meaningful interaction can be provided by the soul-sickening fly-through fly-through pace much favoured in the past by virtual reality modelers and still is as evidenced by this recent reconstruction of Pompeii it was certainly meaningful to the creator but digital media can now express movement of the first person through space at a human wandering exploratory pace. The lower example on the slide is a virtual reality exploration of the Roman Forum on plan and model which provides a slower pace and it will be a dehumanised navigation. So why is such a pace still so rare? Is the expectation that the audience will lose interest if exploration takes too long? The chess project and that's a marvellous acronym you know the Europeans love acronyms cultural heritage experience through socio-personal interactions and storytelling that makes chess but it has a very interesting standpoint on all of the factors leading to engagement of visitors to museums and heritage sites. I introduce it here under meaningful exploration since the professed aim of the project is to stimulate and engage visitors while they explore museums and sites. One of its test sites is the archaeological heritage and heritage site of Chattel-Huyuk in Turkey and the project was there from 2011 to 2014 where I personally and with Steve Mills and Michael Ashley had several years before in 2004 to 2007 given birth to the Remediated Places project. Our project as in Ingol's labyrinth encouraged visitors to use their imaginations as they walked on the paths around the site making these the focus of their attention rather than the traditional destinations of excavation areas which is the focus of the chess project the excavation areas. While the Remediated Places project was designed for devices that the technology of that time could not possibly support the chess project takes advantage of all of the mobile communication technology available now including augmented reality. Through the chess project visitors receive a combination of rich media cues clues and stories and branching narratives I don't know if you can see it here here you've got these are different stories and here is a branching one going to two other branches and the visitors are provided with these on an iPad they are encouraged to visit in pairs or small groups and you can see here this small group has two each has a different iPad showing the same story the same object but they've each got different actual focuses stories and a different information so the aim is to facilitate discussion and critical reflexivity amongst group members about the content and interpretations that occur on different iPads in the group and as they together observe the physical remains as the site emerges during their tour it's a very interesting project since the beginning of virtual reality the delight for audience and aim of creators was to be able to create an authentic immersive experience the feeling of being present in the virtual environment thus to create presence which is defined as the perceptual illusion of immediacy acts in a mediated environment as if the mediation was not there so you're completely immersed with the new millennium the aim for creators of virtual reality representations of archaeological and heritage places was to expand presence into cultural or social presence so that the illusion of presence in a building was developed into an illusion of presence in a designed cultural and cultural context in other words, the virtual space or environment became a virtual place or a virtual world for the creator the situation is complex since each person experiences cultural presence differently depending on their own personal history and cultural experience Laia Pujol Tost pointed out that what is important for a visitor is not how real the world is but how you interact with the world and as creator how you enhance your user's world with affordances this is an important point in terms of evaluating the different engagement of the audience in cultural environments along the continuum of mixed reality several authors including Stuart Eve in 2012 and Laia Pujol in 2016 have recently suggested users in virtual reality as you see here in this particular game or many in virtual reality virtual reality worlds which one enters to the exclusion of physical reality might be less engaging the mixed reality environments using augmented reality and augmented virtuality these two where some you're looking at this virtual model while actually being in the real thing physically and here a real physical thing is going entering into the virtual space and in these the real physical world is not locked out but is combined with virtual elements without necessarily making the virtual elements the focus of activity such a viewpoint which I agree by the way allows for a rather different set of ways through which an engaging cultural and social presence may be articulated here the user is given space for their own creativity and imagination and participation in their own cultural world and that of the other simultaneously in this argument breaking the suspension of disbelief does not necessarily lead to disengagement of the audience that's quite the opposite effect by enhancing engagement it is book archaeology in the senses Yanis Hamilakis draws attention to some aspects of the expansion of multi-sensorial experience created for the audiences of cinematic productions that are highly relevant to the discussion of engagement of audiences of virtual archaeology installations he calls this synesthesia with a sea like sine reminding us of the power of synesthesia with an S and in both of these the visual cues can trigger sensation of other senses so if you're seeing somebody sweat it makes you feel hot or where visuals can support the illusion of expected sounds such as wind thunder and footsteps Frank Bialka who's written a lot about synesthesia notes that an in immersive virtual environment inputs from the visual, auditory and somatosensory systems contribute to a coherent spatial mental model we hypothesize that the richer the mental model of the virtual environment the greater the level of presence this is certainly the case of players of video games but is it true of museum and heritage in place or online installations I actually think not for a minute what we audiences are doing while we watch and experience these different forms of immersive environments in a movie theatre in the west we sit still with many others in a dark theatre but nevertheless feel excitement and empathy sometimes with our hearts racing as we watch the movie in many other cinema watching traditions think Bollywood the audience are less restricted in their bodily responses and they move around in watching video games the excitement by the competitive action the speed and much upper bodily movement and gesturing so how are we moving when we remember how those people with that audience was moving when they were watching another virtual reality presentation the only time that I have ever experienced anything close to a multi-sensorial experience in a virtual environment was in moving through my avatar around our model of Chateau Huyuk of a copy island in Second Life in the examples from a copy island in this slide you can see here my avatar is walking up the virtual path to a virtual model of our Bach shelter while holding a videographic representation of the same path seen physically and in here this same event is remediated one step further away from reality in the live stream to a copy island of a real time lecture about Second Life about this walk, this video walk same thing that is being watched by other avatars in the models of Neolithic houses of Chateau Huyuk the rhythm of movement and its repetition lies at the heart of what is called reality and a sense of place this means that the rhythm of the contact between human individual and material or other human humans, the gestures of storytelling and the daily repetitions of food sharing and seasonal rhythms and annual rhythms are all very important to creating reality and a sense of place thus an engaging sense of place whether as it exists now or as it existed in the past cannot be captured virtually through a static virtual construction of buildings and sites that are empty of other people and their multi-scaler lives a virtual 3D immersive environment very different from the sensorial experience and sense of place at the physical site of interest itself where you can feel wind and temperature moving clouds from this point of view again I would say that augmented reality and other mixed reality formats have a huge advantage over the completely immersive virtual reality projects and is an important reason why I think they hold greater promise for future visualizations and interpretive projects one of the aims of 3D visualization of archaeology is to convey something of the cultural meaning of what is being visualized to the viewer in 2000 Tim Ingold apparently inspired by James Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception made what to me is an inspiring or inspiring statement and I'll quote a little of it information in itself is not knowledge any more knowledgeable through its accumulation our knowledge ability consists rather in the capacity to situate such information and understand its meaning within the context of a direct perceptual engagement with our environments and we develop this capacity by having things shown to us the idea of showing is an important one to show something to somebody is to cause it to be seen and experienced by that other person it is to lift the veil of some aspect or component of the environment so that it can be apprehended directly in that way truths that are inherent in the world are bit by bit revealed or disclosed to the novice what each generation contributes to the next in this process is an education of attention placed in specific situations novices are instructed to use that or watch out for the other thing through this fine tuning of perceptual skills meanings that are built into the environment are not so much constructed as discovered Timingold never really applied what he writes to the digital world but a more careful listening and understanding of the concept of the education of attention I have come to realize that this statement is very relative to understanding what we might hope to achieve for audiences of virtual archeology there are many ideas and examples of how to encourage learning and understanding about other cultures including long dead ones through virtual environments Timingold's model of the education of attention focuses on knowledge acquisition and cultural reproduction aligned very clearly with practice based and apprentice based social models of education and inactive learning in Ingold's view knowledge and information cannot be transmitted separately from its practical enactment the good teacher or guide I'm not going to show you this little movie because you can imagine what it does the good teacher or guide will provide a scaffold of hints and stories and support to help move the novice along but for the most part the novice must watch, copy improvise and in the end creatively make the knowledge their own for the education of attention there is no straight line from information to practice only a crooked one that gradually fills out it starts with inactive knowledge which is not just for babies but rides with us throughout our lives he's referring to the idea that in a human's cognitive development we pass through phases of inactive in iconic and then symbolic learning that he believes they inactive is working throughout your life education of attention why it's important is that it demands revisiting a virtual model or world so the cumulative knowledge of the virtual world may be built up gradually thus putting the responsibility of knowledge on the user and that creates an engaging environment of exploration but it is also the responsibility of the creators of such environments or worlds to provide affordances in the equivalent of Ingold's labyrinth with scaffolded hints surprises mysteries hidden elements to which the wanderer or explorer can respond so what I've suggested to you from the overview of these themes that I believe will motivate and engage audiences can be summarized in this way one of the greatest assets that is claimed for 3D visualizations in archaeology and cultural heritage namely that they provide a quick and easy view of what a place was like in the past or what life was like or what's the experience of traveling to the past this will not make any difference to learning about or engagement with the past or even the visualizations themselves what will make a difference is slowing down what will make a difference is slowing down the process of learning I see it's got a little mind of its own slowing down the process of learning revisiting numerous times and long term makes scaffolding the main purpose of guiding rather than prescribed didactic knowledge transfer allow the audience to participate actively in the interpretive process and use their imaginations to fill in purposeful blanks and create meaning enable social interaction to be involved story based and personalized we might not seek to emulate the scale of interpretation I'm sorry we might seek to emulate the scale of interpretation at which novels and theater and film and TV soap operas that we love to revisit at the scale at which these are created it's not the scale of history writ large but the scale of the small intimate group that is the basis of our most engaging stories the archaeological record and heritage places are made from small stories if only we had the patience to use digital and virtual technologies to harness them many researchers and virtual world creators have begun to take up this challenge and Eric champion is especially in favor of what he calls hermeneutic virtual environments over the more numerous activity based virtual environments and very common inert explorative virtual environments in designing a hermeneutic environment he says the aim is to engage the visitor in another culture where a participant begins to use and develop the codes of other cultures in order to orient and solve tasks and to communicate the value and significance of those tasks and goals to others I'm not going to there I had some examples of this place, Hampi digital songlines and the city of Uruk none of which are perfect but they are also trying to address these challenges because I want to go on to something a little different so in order to do this I just got to do some clicking here I personally think that ideally what we are looking for is the format to bring these elements together to engage with virtual archaeology and virtual heritage is not so much computer or video games but ways of applying the principles of gamification to a variety of formats for audio visualizing the past I'm referring more specifically to content gamification meaning the application of game elements the story, the challenge the curiosity, mystery, characters the learner becomes part of the story game mechanics and game thinking to alter the content to make it more game like the audience becomes part of the story and they can add to it we do this actually in our teaching for example by employing milestone goals in inquiry based teaching but it's not mainstream you will see how gamification relates to what I have been saying earlier in this presentation when we consider game thinking so Carl Cap, an expert on gamification notes that game thinking or game meta theories make gamification good for engagement and motivation and attention especially using these elements scaffolding, which is the guidance and support for the user to reach to the next level of skill and understanding provided by an avatar or other guide self-determination theory which is a meta theory that itself has three parts autonomy where people are motivated when they feel they have a sense of control and are able to determine the outcome of their actions learning where people are motivated when they feel skilled or at least competent, they get this sense of empowerment which itself is engaging and then relatedness people want to feel connected to other people finally distributed learning is very similar theory to the education of attention a little bit at a time revisit the same problem but each time with more experience and more knowledge as you proceed in the whatever it is this is I call this a zen of learning so finally there are many forms that such gamification can take there is of course a large literature on serious games in history and archaeology but some of the more interesting forms are those that focus on a rich content that are based in non-linear narratives they're relatively low tech modeling and reachable on the internet through streaming or downloading and some of these go by the names of you might have heard of the walking simulators anybody gone home interactive digital narratives like the king of dragon paths I actually looked at that I know that Rosemary has looked at all of these alternate reality games and my own take on Lev Manovich's database narratives there are some others too Mary Flanagan in her book critical play takes gamification into the realm of political and social activism to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent questions about aspects of human life characterized by a careful examination of social, cultural, political or even personal themes that function as alternates to popular play spaces this is the same genre of gamification created by Jane McGonagall's work for example in her crowd source game urgent to evoke to evoke aid to Africa another one is the game called Palestine global conflicts Palestine which apparently doesn't want to play talking about playing it's actually not that it's defunct anyway so there's no reason why you should watch it but you can see it on YouTube many of these games and these places and these models are defunct by the way and that's not something I can go into today unfortunately I personally have been drawn especially to an idea of how gamification of archeology and cultural heritage can provide a way of engaging broad audiences in serious issues such as who owns the past of the kind that Edward Gonzalez Tenant is proposing in his planned talking simulator called Rosewood about an African-American slave compound in Florida what if certain gamified formats provided not only outlets for visualizing and learning about the past but a medium for debating contested heritage places or as virtual environments and simulators to play with alternative interpretations of archeological content there are some interesting attempts to do this for history but none yet for archeology and cultural heritage but the possibilities seem endless so Jane McGonagall gave her 2010 TED talk a wonderful title that serves as my last sentence here which is that gaming can make a better world thank you but it seems to me that I'm sure, I mean I'm sure you have something to say about that and what you would like more politics well it seems to me that if part of the intentions of creating virtual worlds is to engage people in the same way that films and books do that there are challenges because the media's films and books are more integrated into our everyday life but that at their core they're using concepts for evoking feeling that virtual models don't yet understand or people can make virtual yeah that's a very good point that is exactly what perhaps I was implying but didn't say it specifically and I'm talking about a lot about the the kinds of more emotional and evocative things that can be can be added to the whole thing or can be the basis for it in terms of small stories and I think that the poetics come through in the small stories they should be very emotional, very very personal I'm very poetic but that's I mean that whole making it more providing more what I call affordances of affect I didn't show you the whole I took one of my slides out not for you guys you wouldn't understand it but I couldn't explain it but one of them is that part of what's being suggested by a number of authors is this whole idea of bringing more of social affordances and affordances of affect which would bring in a lot of the emotional stuff I absolutely agree I would make something very poetic not that I would write but of course if you didn't ask Annie what she means by poetic spoon anyone else did you think I focused on the technology no but I think the terms the terminology that gets built around it are centered on the production like you pointed out finger fatigue it's all centered on the production not the experience the only one so that's what you do pistachio that was wonderful for your presentation I wonder what you think given your standpoint here about tours to sites because you're alluding that that's more evocative there's a lot of allusion to actually visiting whether you're enacting or having questions whether tours or field schools are just the digging this obsession with digging people love to dig so we're all here I guess where those fit in in this system because I understand the virtual recreation aspect that's running throughout but this education the Angolian concept of kind of engagement where does that reality come in I guess in some ways I don't know how to see what you're saying that's not sitting in a museum I mean are you suggesting that this has got to be on the sites it's got to be in before we go to the sites no in fact I'm very inspired and admiring of the chess project because at least part of their project is not is not museum based it's based on on an archaeological site so people are going to the sites so they're in the site I don't know if you could tell from the photographs that they're in the site there and they've got their iPad so it's very mobile and that's what I'm saying with my work but I really am pushing towards as was as is um I understand Stuart Eve and others is for the use of mobile technologies and in creating things where you're not completely immersed in the other world in the virtual world so things like augmented reality I think has a huge future and that's what some of the chess stuff is based in that where you can you can actually see something with your augmenting your reality with a mobile device while you're in the physical place so that's what I was talking about physical place this is very important I think the the trouble is that not everybody can afford to go to the physical place so there's always going to be a place there's always going to be a place for museum installation and especially I think it should be online online things because you can't always go to a museum after the installations I can't see because I don't happen to pop over to Sydney, Australia or wherever they are showing them and so I think that for a proliferation of site oriented things is what they're beginning to see in a number of places the Greeks are very interested in this although it's a bit museum oriented but and Britain they're doing a lot of it and hopefully we'll be creating something like that I just weirdly following up on this it might not seem like it at first I kept thinking as we were talking about this triangulation of three other points one of which is the long ago experiencing museums where to get kids engaged they would do scavenger cuts so it seems to me that that was in fact making the museum a too negative site and what we've lost actually is that sort of idea the second thing though was coming out of my bowl I was just going to bring it up I had it this morning to bring up both mongos and that's the rewards part again one of the things that the museum scavenger companies had at the end was that it was a reward and a lot of the archaeological things assume that the archaeological knowledge is its own reward and I feel like that's something we have to get over and so maybe we're not collecting pokemonies but there needs to be something that happens and then the fourth thing the strangulation around your thing you mentioned the Madovician's notion of the databases narrative and you talked about the storytelling and you can very close to even saying your life of history and a lot of these experiential things again are confused about whose story they're telling so there's the stories of the past and there's the stories of the archaeological discovery and we as archaeologists tend to have those two things as sort of superimposed levels of experience and I really feel like this is again one of our challenges because we can't assume that the non-archaeologists doing these things is actually follow-ups but when we and I think Pompey is a really good example of this when we try and think about so what's the story that isn't the story of our discovery it's sort of like here's a big solid thought so we need to I think triangulate those other things towards the kind of the hunt so maybe pokemon go on the same thing that would be all part of gamification of this kind of thing which might be it might be digitally based or it might and that's the really interesting thing about alternate reality games in which it is a mix of physical and non-physical it might be very temporary something very temporary event where you've got like a hunt for a particular museum and there are examples of doing it in the I think it was in the Smithsonian Library or some one of those libraries where they actually had a three-day event where it would come in and there would be different books tagged and then they would create all these different stories about those books that were online so some of it was physical some of it was putting it online using social media as the engine and so that's there's a lot to be a lot to be learned a lot that we could harness for making things more interesting I mean it can start first of all in teaching you know you have a kind of captive audience and maybe I'll I don't know you have another two questions here okay I'm thinking of this thing too from an archaeological perspective I'm thinking about walking around on the Swarlingley side and how the magic people from England looking at the Swarlingley side and giving them some guidance saying there are shards that look like this and they're standing with all the niches and then trying to get them to that mean and from the British standpoint they would say well they were high value they were antiques and you go from ethno-archaeology I know that they absorbed people's spirits but you can't say well you know you're not right it's not just an antique it actually did something you're like how do you nudge them it sort of feels like telling them from the ethno-archaeology the experience that they played breaking made them not susceptible to illness for instance it's pretty darn interesting compared to well I don't know they're probably antiques that they really value so are you thinking of this for like a Swarlingley virtual world that's actually very similar to one of the games that was in existence in Australia which was one I didn't show it which was they made this 3D model of a game and its point was to get people to understand our original rituals and symbols and language and in relation to things so they had models of the things that you could turn around and then you would go people would talk to you talk to you about what they thought it was and then they didn't actually have what the archaeologists would have said or what other people it was only one person's viewpoint and it was an elder of the original tribe that had real problems that game got into real problems about having some things that they shouldn't have had on you know things and telling some details of rituals that they shouldn't have done on this public game or site but I still have a question because if the interactions and the person's coming and you're wanting them to interact and then they go off and they're afraid that you happen to know do you just say that's engaging them and they're learning or they're not learning where they say that the rich person he's at this game and the rich person is at this game and the rich person he says you know those are anti-objects of great value and then they walk away so then how do you say that's wrong well that would be not to the designer I'm not going to say how you should do that you the designer you the designer how would you that's very confusing because if you guess wrong you don't get the points um that's trying to guess until they get to your thing that you happen to know or at least within the domain two to three or four design those what you're going to do is apply yourself to any city it's not insoluble if you can think about it as really interactive not just one exchange I think a lot of these things are a lot of his points change so it also depends on the content that you feed the system like anything else possibilities of the alternatives like the interpretations so this can be interpreted as this or this or that and the combination of these elements in the interaction with the game with either a higher score or a more interesting narrative or another way to do what that isn't a score is you make your guess and then you get then you get a narrative and the narrative should be more like a decent score but actually you have to do it and I'm again in a way where so I think it was worse but anyway I wanted to say that maybe like sorry maybe like the day of the open day for the and then I was going out with my boobs out it was new to me it was beautiful night it was something new to me it was something new to me I mean with that I was there it was completely new to me and I said I'm sorry I remember that day it was my first week game break I have actually made two great comments I did not face another player so it's an advocate I don't know I wouldn't say but I think it gets around a lot of these issues of creating a game for archaeology because you can easily replace it with a movement or a building at Shumpei and it creates a mystery that you have to solve or reward because if you get it wrong you don't get the reward and it's minimal text it's very immersive I think there's two versions out there that's like the one with the with the I mentioned it is so full considerate whereas it's a little has anyone else I'm going to the room gong gong gong gong is just quite a mystery that's the other thing you can make a mystery out of a lot it does take but that's what archaeology is I know that it's just a question of thinking it through thinking thinking that's what I'm saying is we are all designers because it's what we do but we don't realize the second comment I wanted to make was back to the Pokémon GO and then I think Pokémon GO seems to be a really good model for ways that we could do this in archaeology because one of the things we wanted to do at the beginning was this idea of well maybe a two-fold idea one is repeated use so how many people come back and do it again and again and the other is accessibility or you touched on it I think for example the people that I work with in Jordan who I actually want to understand but I do use it as an archaeologist they're not going to go to the museum they'll probably never go to the capital city by the national museum is so they have to sell phones so it's accessible to people who want any if many people are doing it they're interacting with each other so it seems like a good way to be accessible and to promote good Colleen Morgan somebody who found a Pokémon GO thing on my blog somebody who got the Pokémon GO thing on the stonehenge the Japanese and Caribbean campsite I was working at this past summer with Bonnie Clark right when Pokémon GO came out was a Pokestop which was really interesting because we were there before Pokémon it's like pre-Pokemon, post-Pokemon in the world but they were actually working there in the first place the map base so it was really interesting to see our high school interns for example who were executing with us on the site and engaging with the site in a particular way and who were locals and knew a lot about the place anyway suddenly transforming their engagement through this augmented reality that really didn't have anything to do with the history of the site at all and so then all the archeologists were like how do we make it ours how do we leverage this thing which is clearly pulling people off the highway to come to this site which is the middle of nowhere you know you can't stop before the Pokestop you first have to learn about it and so all the conversation then receded towards well we need to call Nintendo or the Pokémon people or whatever because there's such a huge opportunity to do exactly what you were saying and integrate the content of the site with the virtual aspect of it but I think there's also the reverse possibility of Pokémon because one of the problems is I haven't done piloting this particular place to go to this particular site and the same sort of model would work if the virtual world that was added onto was the site itself so even if I'm here at Cesar Chavez Park like on the weekend I'm actually at Chavez Alpea virtually at Chavez Alpea and you can use the same thing and it works I mean like the kids were there and then all of the adults were like well I have to download this thing and then suddenly they're exploring half of the site that nobody takes the time to walk out to or see the view from or whatever and all of that should possibly be able to visit that's what I'm saying, accessibility you can make those worlds 100 people in a second Very much back from stakeholders about the fact that something like the Japanese Internet Camp site is now a video game focus Yeah, I mean which I think is what prompts the conversation about well how do we make it ours instead of how do you take it out of the Pokemon let Lingo and into the Amashi Camp Lingo and the content she uses but we had you know former internees were working with us who are like 85 years old and downloaded the game onto their phones too you know so I think it depends on the site that the community are working with and the kind of information So if we have one more question or shall we thank for what we have got how this has been simulated to everybody we must make a design group and people believe there are many actual skills in this I think a story I can tell stories there you go The best solution for this is like the engine There's a new science major No way Yeah