Umarangi Generation, released just this year, is a post-apocalyptic photography game created almost entirely by Māori developer Naphtali Faulkner, who currently lives in Australia. She is a photojournalist who uses photograph to gather evidence against military dictatorship-it’s an overtly political game. In the sci-fi action adventure game, protagonist Jade takes pictures of animals or a science museum. Susan Sontag may as well have been talking about Pokémon Snap when she wrote that “To collect photographs is to collect the world.” There is definitely a kind of colonial reading to be had from gameplay which is about capturing information and cataloguing through photography, a process that is also part of the gameplay in Beyond Good and Evil. One of the best known photography games is Pokémon Snap, a first person game in which you try to take pictures of Pokémon, rather than catch them as you do in the main series of games. First, I’m going to explore the different forms that photography takes in video games, starting with gameplay. The last few months I’ve even found myself watching the world from out of my kitchen window, judging the pigeons on the building opposite that don’t social distance.īut back to video game photography. One of my main arguments in this presentation will be that as digital archaeologists we should record the context of our own labour, and not just screenshots. 2020 has been a difficult year for everyone and I’m no exception. This presentation won’t be like others that I’ve done, and not just because its online. This time I’m looking at photography as a form of archaeological recording for video games. In the last conference that VALUE hosted in the Netherlands in 2018, I discussed how archaeogamers used maps as a means of recording video games. I’m an archaeogaming researcher and heritage consultant, and as you can probably tell I’m very British. PlayStation 2, Microsoft Windows, Xbox, GameCube, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3. Microsoft Windows, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS. Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One. PlayStation 4, Nintendo switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh. Android, iOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, iOS,, Macintosh. “The History of Games Could Be a History of What Play Felt Like.” ROMchip 1, no.1 (July 2019). “Back When Screenshots Really Were Screen Shots.” USgamer, February 1 st 2017. “Analog to Digital: Transitions in Theory and Practice in Archaeological Photography at Çatalhöyük.” Internet Archaeology 42. McFayden, Lesley and Hicks, Dan (eds.) Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive. “The Year Selfies Came to Video Games.” Vice, December 20 th 2013. “We Made Our Own Myths in 2017’s Photo Modes.” Vice, January 2nd 2018. “The visual in archaeology: photographic representation of archaeological practice in British India’, Antiquity 76, 93-100. The Invisible Diggers: A study of British commercial archaeology. “Visions of discipline: Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the archaeological method in India (1944-1948).” Journal of Social Archaeology 2, no. “The Development of the Scientific Aesthetic in Archaeological Site Photography?” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 25, no.2. Once my talk is uploaded to YouTube I will post the link here.īarthes, Roland. I would like to keep researching video games photography in some form, especially players’ personal screenshot archives. Thanks to VALUE for once again putting on a wonderful conference! This is an incredibly interesting and complex topic that I didn’t really have the time to do justice, but I hope my talk was still interesting nonetheless. As promised, here’s the full transcript and bibliography for my Interactive Pasts presentation on archaeogaming and photography.
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