Forget Tomb Raider and Uncharted, there's a new generation of games about archaeology sort of

"When games use environmental storytelling in their design from the positioning of objects to audio recordings or graffiti they invite players to role play as archaeologists. Game designer Ben Esposito infamously joked back in 2016 that environmental storytelling is the art of placing skulls near a toilet which might have been a jab at the tropes of games like the Fallout series, but his quip demonstrates how archaeological gaming narratives can be."

"I used to work as an archaeologist in the analogue world, where my work consisted of excavations, fieldworks and assessment of potential development sites across the UK. Now I'm doing a computer science PhD focusing in video game archaeology, where I get to come up with novel ways to record gameplay experiences, like doing in-game walking interviews with players in the MMO Wurm Online, or recording the location of player messages in Elden Ring."

Big Walk presents cooperative open-world exploration that could foster emergent, communal archaeology through player interactions and environmental cues. Environmental storytelling uses object placement, audio logs, and graffiti to prompt interpretation and role play as archaeologists. Ben Esposito framed the concept with a quip about placing skulls near a toilet, showing how incongruous artifacts provoke questions about past worlds. The narrator moved from analogue archaeological fieldwork across the UK to a computer science PhD in video game archaeology, developing methods such as in-game walking interviews and mapping player messages to record gameplay as cultural material. Walking sims invite interpretive exploration of abandoned spaces and objects.

Read at www.theguardian.com