Archaeogaming

An Introduction to Archaeology in (and of) Video Games

Andrew Reinhard

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785338748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces.

"[T]he author's clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading."— Antiquity

Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record.

From the introduction:
Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games… As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites, landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture… Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as "historical games, " nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.

Chapter 1

Real-World Archaeogaming

Exhuming Atari

Archaeology shows us things we are not normally supposed to see.

—Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time

Alamogordo, New Mexico, with a population of just over thirty thousand, is famous because of what it is near: White Sands National Monument, the Trinity atomic bomb testing site, and Roswell. It is also home to the New Mexico Museum of Space History with its marker honoring Ham the space chimp, whose toe is buried there. Alamogordo, an otherwise typical New Mexico town, is in the epicenter of weirdness, contributing to the aura by the grace of a video game legend that should not have been a legend at all.

In April 2014, a documentary film crew helmed by Zak Penn, director of Incident at Loch Ness and screenwriter for Ready Player One, joined forces with an amateur historian, a group of city workers, and a team of archaeologists to excavate the so-called “Atari Burial Ground” in front of an audience of hundreds of nostalgic gamers, video game media journalists, and industry professionals.¹ The urban legend stated that in 1983, Atari, Inc. trucked millions of copies of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, the “worst game ever made,” to the Alamogordo city landfill, dumping them, crushing them by driving over the cartridges, and then covering them with a slab of concrete followed by backfill, making it impossible for the games to be recovered. Penn’s team, Lightbox, the entertainment division for Microsoft’s Xbox, secured exclusive rights to dig, finding a partner in Joe Lewandowski, a waste management expert for the city who was present at the initial dumping and who later spent years trying to pinpoint the location of the cell (landfill pit) in which the games were buried. The archaeologists (including myself) were invited almost as an afterthought, but we became instrumental in helping to plan and execute the dig.

This would be the first-ever video-game-only archaeological excavation in history (see Figure 1.1). On the surface, the main reason given for the dig was either to prove or disprove the urban legend of the burial. Did Atari really bury the games? Was it just E.T.? How many games were buried? Would the games still be playable? The archaeologists had deeper questions (pun intended) that went beyond the myth into understanding mass-produced entertainment, e-waste, and the current culture driven by nostalgia for what was unequivocally discarded as trash.

It should not have been a legend at all. Both the New York Times² and the Alamogordo Daily News³ ran stories when the dump happened, but this was pre-internet, and the articles were largely lost to time. The story eventually circulated through Usenet groups and chatrooms with the articles resurfacing online as scans to be debated as real or fake, and if real, how to locate the exact spot to dig, knowing full well that the games were possibly thirty feet down and perhaps under a layer of cement of unknown thickness.

The Atari excavation marked a convergence of nearly every pop culture trope associated with how the general public perceives archaeology: a legend (possibly apocryphal), a ragtag team in the desert, a local informant who knows where to dig, treasure (the games), and a curse: over the course of two days of digging, two of the six archaeologists were hospitalized, and the dig was effectively shut down by a late afternoon sandstorm, the worst the town’s residents had seen that year. Spielberg could not have scripted it better.

Figure 1.1. Excavation photo from the Atari Burial Ground, Alamogordo, New Mexico. Photo by the author.

The games were found, with over thirteen hundred recovered (out of approximately eight hundred thousand total games dumped, or roughly 0.002 percent). E.T. only accounted for roughly 10 percent of the recovered cartridges, with over forty other separate titles catalogued. The myth of the concrete cap was dispelled, but the team did find evidence of cement slurry attached to some of the games. The team was also able to answer a number of other questions: What happens to video game cartridges (and other consumer electronics) when buried in a desert landfill for thirty years? Answer: not much. Many of the cartridges were unbroken and looked playable (but none were). What can the assemblage of games tell us about corporate culture, the video game crash of 1983, of postconsumer waste and how people treated their entertainment commodities? Answer: new inventory always takes precedent over old, and dumping was, for Atari at the time, the cheapest way to make space in their warehouse.

Olivier notes that archaeological time does not stop when sites are abandoned. Time continues to work away at the component matter, which is then assimilated into another environment where, imperceptibly, it holds the memory of other eras (Olivier 2015: 58). This is as true with ancient sites as it is with modern ones. For the myth underlying the dig (or any dig for that matter), it is almost as if archaeological excavation is a Schrödinger’s Cat problem: there could be anything down there. Archaeologists might have a pretty good idea about what to expect through research, guidance from primary sources, speaking to local residents, conducting archaeological surveys, and remote sensing. As Olivier writes, “Everything in the earth is floating in uncertainty, in a realm of maybe. Every dig is a necessarily false proposition, for the act of extraction is the act of amputation, of simplistic elimination” (Olivier 2015: 181). To dig is to discover, both to confirm and deny, creating data from the very destruction of the source. And still, exploring the myth was a heroic act (in the Classical sense), delving into the Underworld, a descent, searching for perceived “hidden treasures” (Holtorf 2005: 16–38).

Apart from the fantasy of archaeology that was filmed for the documentary Atari: Game Over, the Atari archaeologists were in reality dealing with garbage. The Atari assemblage, buried in a landfill, marked the cartridges’ entrance into suspended animation as they waited to be recovered. Garbologist Josh Reno calls this a “reactivation” of the items, regaining meaning (albeit different from the original intent of an artifact’s makers) through excavation (Reno 2013: 267). Because burial happens in a landfill, whatever is dumped becomes collectively labeled “trash.” Each dumping is an assemblage of artifacts from one place at one point in time. As such, Reno notes that a landfill becomes an ideal archaeological setting, representing almost an entire cultural formation process (how a site is created by human action) with the trash being a behavioral outcome (Reno 2013: 263–64). There is almost order in the dumping, and in Atari’s case there was, with a specific cell dug solely for the warehouse goods brought by the truckload over a few days. Everything was dumped from one place into a single pit then covered with cement slurry, a layer of earth, and then gradually with other non-Atari household waste.

Traditional landfills can tell the social and environmental story of a municipality and its people, but with the Atari dump the landfill now tells a crucial part of corporate history (Atari’s) as well as adding content to the history of the so-called video game crash of 1983. It confirmed and also disproved parts of the Atari dumping myth. Holtorf recalls Rathje’s Garbage Project, which convincingly showed how material evidence can correct other kinds of evidence such as interview surveys (Piccini and Holtorf 2011: 11). Memory is imperfect, and as the Garbage Project proved, people will say what is socially acceptable when talking about what they throw away. Gaining access to the landfill was crucial for the Atari story for this reason. Atari had at first denied the dumping outright; it then later stated that it had only dumped defective merchandise. But by digging through their garbage, we proved that this was not the case at all. There were hundreds of unsold, unopened games. If we had not been given access to the site, these facts would literally have remained buried, possibly forever. Reno states that garbage reveals the “hidden self” ownership of waste and that control of access to waste sites can be highly contested (Reno 2013: 266–67).

In this instance the archaeologists became garbologists, who, as Reno says, “offer unique contributions to a future-oriented archaeology as well as opportunities to reflect on the role of archaeological practice in shaping and living in that world” (Reno 2013: 271). The archaeologists also gained experience with how to interface with a genuinely interested public, balancing archaeology with nostalgia while explaining digging methods, what was found, what was happening. The Atari dig marked a turning point in public archaeology, not just with digging in front of a live audience and on camera (both of which are rare, if not unique occurrences for any field archaeologist) but also in performing a kind of archaeological theater on the world stage via social media where the story of the games’ recovery trended globally and literally affected the market, specifically eBay, with prices of the 1980s games going up by a factor of ten (and these were not even the games that were recovered during the salvage).

The 2014 Atari excavation was the first dig that solely featured video games, and as such it drew attention to what archaeology could mean when digging artifacts from the recent past in front of a global, public, connected audience. As Piccini and Holtorf spoke about in 2011, “Contemporary archaeologies marry archaeology in the modern world with the archaeology of the modern world” (Piccini and Holtorf 2011: 14). With Atari’s 1983 burial happening in the lifetimes of many of the people who came to watch the dig, as well as those who obsessed over its mythology online since the 1990s, we should have predicted the interest in what we were doing at the landfill. “The empathy of events still moist in recent memory should attract a high level of public interest. . . . It awakens conflicts between professional and amateur as to who should be excavating this past” (Brittain and Clack 2007: 39). This conflict was avoided early on by asking the production company how they would handle the archaeology. They didn’t know, and they decided to invite us into the narrative they were creating. What would have otherwise been a treasure hunt instead became a way for archaeologists, the media, and the public to work together on a pop culture project.

Part of our involvement was to help control the narrative—or at least introduce an archaeological one—into the story. Archaeologists, as Andrew Gardner writes in “The Past as Playground,” are rightly concerned that “responsible” interpretations win out in the battle for public attention and that seriously distorted visions of whatever historical realities on which we ourselves can agree do not contribute to social problems in the present (Gardner 2007: 256). This kind of work has been defined as “recreation archaeology,” something that “customizes archaeology to the public and maximizes public appeal” (Moore 2006).

Imbued by mythology and validated by “real” archaeologists trenchside, copies of E.T. that sell at retrogaming shops and online for less than ten dollars, boxed with a catalogue and a coupon for Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark game featuring Indiana Jones, would ultimately fetch over $1,000 at auction on eBay and are now being resold by previous buyers for up to $3,000.⁴ The games, artifacts by virtue of being non-natural creations of some cultural importance, became highly valued, almost ritual objects defining a generation of players, placing 1980s pop culture front and center. The excavated games became instant collectibles, extraordinarily rare, and valued for their rarity as part of the handful of games that managed to be extracted before the sandstorm closed the excavation. The irony is that there are at least eight hundred thousand other games buried in that location, which will likely remain underground forever because of expense, local and state politics, environmental restrictions and concerns, and other logistical issues.⁵ The sheer size of the assemblage makes it nearly impossible to revisit to excavate completely. Moshenska observed in 2014 that archaeologists of the recent past will be confronted by the problem of scale. “Hardware, software, and content are produced and consumed in mind-bogglingly huge quantities around the world. . . . The detritus of this accelerating process litter the material and digital worlds, and present archaeologists of the modern world with a set of distinct and unusual challenges” (Moshenska 2014: 255). The dig was a once-in-a-generation happening. “The greatest problem facing archaeologists of the digital era will be the incalculable, inhuman enormity of the available material” (Moshenska 2014: 256).

Artifacts have biographies. In the case of an E.T. cartridge, we see its creation through the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg in 1982, followed by a deal with Atari, the coding of the game by Howard Scott Warshaw, Atari’s Christmas marketing blitz, the resulting sales and then returns of stock, the burial, the excavation thirty-one years later, the dispersal of the assemblage to museums and private individuals worldwide, and even now the resale of some of those same excavated games on auction sites as the original buyers try to flip them for profit. The games are artifacts-as-commodities, but at first they were entertainment and then became trash.

The Atari dig merged history and nostalgia, the reality of a commercial decision, and the shared fantasy of what it was like to play Atari games over thirty years ago. Guins says that game historians “lessen the primacy of nostalgia . . . , resisting the urge to regard this past as hermetically sealed. . . . This allows us to examine the enduring material life-cycles of games that greatly exceed the retro-fascination with ageless games from a historic, idyllic, and more often than not, solipsistic and trivialised past” (Guins 2014: 3). S. C. Murphy recalls that “reading the Atari catalogue was an exercise in consumer anticipation and technological promise” (Murphy 2012: 105). The mystery that helped drive the interest in the excavation was, “How could a beloved company such as Atari ultimately fail?” The answers, as articulated by Atari staff interviewed in the documentary, included sacrificing quality for quantity, glutting the market with badly executed games, and overproducing for consumers and a market that no longer needed or wanted another home console. Atari CEO Ray Kassas destroyed Atari’s reputation for quality games, with Pac-Man and E.T. damaging relationships with retailers (Stanton 2015: 88–90). Ultimately the crash ended in 1985 with the North American release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) (Wolf 2012a: 2). With Nintendo, however, came quality, fun games; Nintendo also controlled the quality itself instead of farming out creative proj...