No Stone Left Unturned: Opening Archives for New Audiences through Archaeogaming
Louise Bedford, student, Department of Archaeology
Email: louise@louisebedford.com
Others involved in this project: Dr. Colleen Morgan, Department of Archaeology (dissertation supervisor)
Summary
Traditionally, archaeology has attracted an older demographic. Video games and social media provide an opportunity to communicate archaeology to new audiences.
No Stone Left Unturned is a game created for my undergraduate BA Archaeology dissertation project, set at Avebury Henge, Wiltshire and inspired by the archive currently being digitised by the UKRI-AHRC Funded Avebury Papers project. This project documented the process on social media to explore the effectiveness of creating games to explore archaeology through practice-based research and emphasises open research principles throughout.
The game’s premise is as follows: In 1938, the player arrives at Avebury. Drawn to the archaeological excavations, you are determined to uncover Avebury’s secrets, leaving no stone unturned. You play as an archaeological illustrator and have an adventure as you explore this prehistoric world through items from the Avebury Paper Project archive. Half the project entailed documenting and sharing the game development process on social media. In total, I created 33 videos, amassing over 145,000 views. These videos attracted a predominantly female audience aged 18-34, a demographic underrepresented in heritage but engaged with gaming.
 No Stone Left Unturned - game overview | Avebury Henge, Wiltshire (© MikPeach under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International licence; Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
Case Study
Research Context and Incorporation of Open Research Principles
This project aligns with and incorporates multiple open research principles.
One of the biggest of these principles is reusability. My game reuses archival materials from Avebury Henge as the core gameplay, with the player having to collect pieces from the archive. The only major excavations undertaken at Avebury ended abruptly due to the outbreak of World War II, and consequently, lots of material has been under-analysed. The Avebury Papers project is a four-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project to digitise, explore, and share the multimedia archive of Avebury’s Neolithic origins and subsequent life history. At the end of the project, the entire archive will be made available online and open access for anyone to use for research or creative purposes. This project highlights the effectiveness of incorporating archival materials into creative projects, therefore championing reusability in research.
Another of these principles is accessibility. The platforms I used - YouTube, Instagram and TikTok - are free to use, and current statistics suggest 79% of the UK population uses social media, meaning a larger audience can be reached. Furthermore, I ensured captions were added to all my videos to further ensure they were accessible to all.
Finally, collaboration and transparency were also incorporated. Viewers of the content could comment on the project as it developed, sharing their thoughts and suggestions. I achieved transparency by sharing as much as I possibly could about the project.
Challenges
Time was the biggest challenge. To grow on social media, you must be consistent, which involves posting regularly. However, creating a game is a large project in its own right, as is content creation, so together they resulted in a substantial workload. I would now advise future researchers against the multi-platform approach and instead focus on one platform or have a dedicated outreach phase of the project. These limitations are useful, as they provided insights that were explored and applied by other projects in the future.
There are also downsides to content creation, which can include negative comments by users. The vast majority of comments received during this project were lovely. However, one comment was received about my sexuality, which was never mentioned. This comment was immediately deleted and did not personally affect me. However, it is worth highlighting that public-facing engagement can have negative consequences.
Benefits
Nevertheless, open research was overwhelmingly beneficial in this project.
The comments received did not ultimately shape the final game. However, the encouragement received in the comments was motivating. Even if these comments of encouragement did not explicitly shape the game created, they assured me that the game development choices I had made were good and motivated me to continue.
Furthermore, the use of social media to document my research practice allowed me to connect with a larger scale of audience than I could have otherwise reached. In total, I created 33 videos, amassing over 145,000 views. These videos attracted a predominantly female audience aged 18-34, a demographic underrepresented in heritage but engaged with gaming and across the three platforms, my follower count increased by 12%.
Links
Avebury Papers project blog post
Licensing Information
Except where otherwise noted copyright in this work belongs to the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License