Hype: when a person is excited about something, or the prospect of something.
And boy, are we hyped! Not only are we organizing a new Interactive Pasts Conference, but we are launching it on our new shiny website!

Papers Please

The time has come! The Call for Contributions for The Interactive Pasts Conference 2 is now up (insert sound of party honk here)!!! TIPC is a conference about video games and archaeology, history, heritage – or anything that ties gaming and the past together. It’s been two years since our first conference which remains a fond memory in our minds. We need you to help us make TIPC2 just as fun, interesting, valuable – and of course, equally memorable. 

What will be new for #TIPC2? We are co-organizing it with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision who will also be hosting the conference in their superb venue. You may remember Jesse de Vos from the first TIPC and from his chapter in The Interactive Past book. Together we will work to fill their awesome space with equally awesome papers and other things to see and do!

This edition of TIPC will also be 3 days long (October 8-10), with two days of talks and one day of workshops. A new addition will be the Pitch the Past session: researchers can pitch the past and why it may make for a cool game to developers. Want to contribute? Follow the link above to the Call and send us your submission (by May 15th). 

Is this the location of #TIPC2? Yes it is!

A Site to Behold

As if the TIPC announcement wasn’t exciting enough: we are also introducing our new shiny website! I think you will agree that our resident designer Megalithic has done a beautiful job! As the VALUE Foundation continues to grow, we want to incorporate more and more aspects of academia into our projects. However, as archaeologists, we cannot abandon our passion: we just can’t leave the past alone!

So what does this mean? All of our content that you used to find on valueproject.nl will be here: our field reports, game reviews, blogs, videos, information about conferences and workshops, as well as anything we’ve published in terms of articles and books about heritage, history, archaeology and games. Basically, all our work related to interactive pasts – makes sense, right! We’re still migrating some of our content, so don’t be alarmed if you can’t find your favorite blog here just yet.

We’ll also update our social media in terms of names/descriptions to fit us as a Foundation and continue to share with you everything we do around Interactive Pasts and our other projects.

We are thrilled to look forward to a new TIPC and this brand new website! We will do our best to continue to work according to our values of playfulness and accessibility while creating a platform where researchers, game developers, and anyone with a passion about the past or video games, can come together, talk, have fun, gather knowledge and be inspired. Welcome!

When Ymir was a kid he wanted to become a writer. The grown-ups around him kept telling him that he wouldn’t make money as a writer so he became an archaeologist – which from a financial point of view wasn’t really an improvement. He is co-founder of the VALUE Foundation, a metal music reviewer, a PhD on the archaeology of the Ancient Near East at Leiden University and a photography enthusiast.