TIPC1

TIPC2 months ago226 Views

The Original Archaeology, History and Games Conference.

TIPC1 was the first conference to bring together a global community of archaeologists, historians, museologists, heritage scholars, game developers and many others with an interest in the past and games. TIPC promised to be the kick-off for a decade full of Interactive Pasts.

TIPC1 was held from 4-5 April 2016 at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University. It was organized by VALUE, which at the time consisted of Csilla ‘Caeda’ Ariese, Krijn ‘Megalithic’ Boom, Angus ‘Doc Random’ Mol, Aris ‘Ymir’ Politopoulos and Vincent ‘Jaromirr’ Vandemeulebroucke. TIPC was funded by ARCHON and the Graduate School of Archaeology.

You can watch most of the papers that were presented at TIPC1 on VALUE’s YouTube channel. You can read and download The Interactive Past, the book that came out of TIPC1, here.

Read on if you like to know more about how the actual conference came to be and how it went.

Blogs, Unconferences and Other TIPC Prehistories

In 2015, when this conference was first being planned, archaeogaming was still very young, more of a twinkle in the eye of a few archaeological nerds than anything resembling the vibrant and interdisciplinary field it is today. The same applied to similar fields like historical game studies. It’s been a rollercoaster decade since then and seeing the huge success (and misses) of archaeogaming, historical game studies and similar fields only a few years later, you would be forgiven for thinking that organizing the first TIPC was a no-brainer, rather than a crazy idea come true.

At the time VALUE was part of a group of mostly (but not exclusively) early career scholars that had just started talking to each other, mostly on Twitter (under the #archaeogaming) and via blogs, such as Tara Copplestone’s gamingarchaeo Andrew Reinhard’s archaeogaming, VALUE’s original blog, and the foundational Play the Past blog. Yet it was already clear there were a lot of new ideas kicking around in this community. A lot of these ideas were about games, but not only: one of the things all of us were excited about was how to invigorate the study of archaeology, and the past more generally, by studying games. Seriously, if you have some time to spare, go read those ‘early’ blogs and see how widly creative, smart and visionary they were, and still are.

One of the very cool initiatives, thought up by the even more very cool Shawn Graham and Tara Copplestone, was the idea to hold an archaeogaming unconference. Unconferincing now mostly means attending a meeting that is driven by its participants, which is a smart but still wild idea for most academic meetings. Back in 2015 it also meant that it was the opposite of a conference in most other ways, which meant that it was a fully online (and short) affair and that anyone could attend and speak.

The Archaeogaming Unconference took place on June 1 2015 in the‘Unhangout’ platform, a somewhat jury-rigged feeling but marvelously functional video chatroom solution, developed by MIT and hosted (if memory serves us) by Shawn Graham. Aside from the unconferencing format being very new, exciting and accessible — online conferencing was not really a thing before the corona pandemic —, the fact that this brought so ‘many’ (there were two good handfuls of participants) of us together was the real milestone. The first Archaeogaming Unconference (there would be one more in 2017) cemented something that the VALUE collective was already feeling: not only was there a ton to think and talk about when it came to games and archaeology, these were also a bunch of friendly and fun folks to think and talk with. How could we bring these people together for something that felt like an unconference, but would actually take place in person?

Interactive Pasts beyond and at Archaeology

Most archaeogaming enthusiasts were only directly talking with and about archaeology and games — which, as this map of archaeogaming showed, was plenty already. Still, we also felt there were a lot of other people out there that would not consider themselves archaeologists per se or at all that it would be great to bring into the conversation. We already knew from books like Playing with the Past (2013) that historians and game studies scholar had already been taken an interest in the past in games, so we knew we wanted to get representatives from those fields in. This is also the reason we did not feature archaeogaming or archaeology (or even gaming) centrally in the title of the conference or, to this day, this website: we felt and feel to understand and make past and play, it is best undertaken as an interdisciplinary venture.

Erik Champion is a good example of someone we really wanted to invite as a speaker. As a Heritage Studies and Digital Humanities scholar, he had already been trailblazing with his very originally titled (because it was published in 2011, before the 2013 book) Playing with the Past book. Now out for its second edition, by the way!

More importantly (sorry, Erik), we also felt that if we were to talk about the interactive past, it would be critically important that people who were actually making these pasts in games were also going to be part of our conversation. All of us at VALUE were really in love with Never Alone, an enchanting coop puzzle platformer set in the Alaskan Arctic and featuring, Nuna, a Iñupiaq girl and a fox. As the first game we had played together, Never Alone had blown us away with its fun and confident celebration in video game form of Iñupiat culture and values. (If you haven’t, we still recommend you play it, especially before the sequel comes out!) We knew we really wanted to invite members of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, who had co-developed this game with Upper One Games, as speakers. Spoiler: we did, although, due to planning issues, it ended up being a remote presentation, as you can see inthe image below.

So, by fall 2015 we had a core group of people we knew we wanted to bring together and the hope that we could bring together a lot more people from a wide range of professional backgrounds. At that time, all VALUE folks, bar the boundlessly enthusiastic and supportive Jaromirr, were early career scholars at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University. VALUE was not yet an own foundation — did you know VALUE originally stood for Videogames and Archaeology at Leiden UnivErsity? — and bar a lot of enthusiasm and some technical and logistical knowhow we had no resources available to organize anything like what we had envisioned.

Fortunately, we had already shown some of the powers that be at Leiden’s Faculty of Archaeology that gaming and archaeology was really a thing, starting with a presentation on Archaeology and Games at the Faculty Forum, by Ymir, followed by a succesful Minecraft reconstruction event in the main hall of the Faculty. Still, as an academic combination games at the past were mostly unproven and unknown. It still speaks for the openmindedness of the Faculty of Archaeology Graduate School and the National Archaeology Research School, ARCHON, that they provided the funds for our crazy idea.

As it turned out, they made the right call. 😉

A Crazy Idea Come True

Even with the support in place and a lot of interest from aspiring TIPC participants all over the world, it still took a lot of effort to pull the conference off. The logistics of organizing an international conference is already quite a thing. We had made life even less simple for ourselves by also livestreaming our conference on Twitch. I’ll step out of the ‘we’ mode especially to say that I, doc Random, cannot imagine how it would have worked without all the love, sweat, and gamer tears poured into it by my fellow co-organizers. Caeda, Ymir, Megalithic, and Jarro, really took on the vast majority of the work on the ground (I had by that time left Leiden for Stanford University). I am still very grateful for making it work as beautifully as they did.

And beautiful it was! As you can glean from the programme and infograph below.

TIPC really was a success, not only due to the hard work of the people mentioned above, but also because of the fun, knowledge, and friendliness all the participants brought.

Some further highlights:

TIPC had archaeogaming rockstar Andrew Reinhard as a key speaker.
TIPC had gamingarchaeo rockstar Tara Copplestone presenting a blowout paper, which later would become one of our favorite book chapters in The Interactive Past book.
About that book… TIPC led to THE FIRST SUCCESFULLY FUNDED ACADEMIC BOOK ON KICKSTARTER!
We had president Benjamin Franklin as a speaker…
but he was not our most watched presentation on Youtube, that honor goes to the Dwarf Fortress Archaeologists.
We had a Mortal Combat between retrograme archaeology and archaeogaming. Archaeogaming won, but afterwards, we gladly accepted computer scientist John Aycock into the fold.
We had a lot of academic disciplines represented: archaeology, history, indigenous studies, game curation, heritage studies, ethics and more.
We also had a lot of game developers attending, including the Wispfire devs, Mata Haggis-Burridge, Murphy’s Toast, and the Grotman game (by a student dev team from the Utrecht School of the Arts) presenting on the game development side of video game pasts.
We did not have a single technical issue during our livestream! Not that we ever have those…
Most importantly TIPC was…

A foundation and focal point where academics, players and creators working with archaeology and video-games can congregate. A much needed start to a solid foundation and a supportive, diverse community. This cumulated at TIPC, which provided a concrete space where this community could come together – in person – and interact.
Tara Copplestone, A Thank You Letter to VALUE