Cavemen!

I must admit that the first thing I noticed about the Playmobil Stone Age set is the blatant lack of women.  While most images of archaeology have women predominately in the background, this game goes a step further and provides only cavemen.  I wonder if kids using this game ever wonder about the other half of the human race in this prehistoric era…

To me, it feels like Playmobil is utilizing children’s fascination with the past to sell a toy.  I suppose that almost all the toys we’ve examined in this blog are at least partially guilty of this as well.  Still, at least the toy includes distinctive features of this historical time period—even of those aspects are rather generalized and stereotypical.  

One of the stranger aspects included in the play-set is a plastic plant.  I can understand the fire pit and primitive weapons.  Although I’m not sure when wolves were domesticated, the wolf pet seems at least plausible to me.  However, I am far from sold on the addition of a potted fern.  I thought mammoths and caveman existed during the ice age?  Wouldn't a mountain of snow be more appropriate next to the giant mammoth tent then a convenient houseplant?  

But I’m just harping on the authenticity of this toy’s details—as a kid, I would have loved a game like this.   The toy has lots of complex parts, detailed figurines (well…almost) and a tent you can build from a mammoth skeleton!  

Archaeology in a Box

Notably, archaeological games have been rather, well, Old World. There's a fairly strong focus on Egypt, naturally, with a spread to Peloponnesian themes and Middle Eastern adventures. When the New World is seen, it happens to be the Aztecs, or maybe the Mayans or the Incas. But as far as archaeological entertainment goes, apparently North America doesn't actually exist.

Until now.

For instant archaeology, just add child.

That's right. Behold, Dig! Discover's Archaeology USA. Because a big giant block is exactly what every child wants. Except that in this case they actually do. Because within this block are a dozen "relics", cast from actual artifacts that were found in sites across the United States. With special tools (provided with purchase), kids get to excavate these treasures, paint them, and display them proudly. The relics are a bit of a mishmash – everything from Indian arrowheads to colonial coins to Civil War goods. And frankly, we're not going to get too picky about this. This toy is what is known as a successful archaeological endeavor. For one, it's focusing on an archaeologically ignored area, because, believe it or not, it does not have to be a thousand years old and from Egypt to be considered archaeology. For another, it's about as close to real archaeology as you're going to get without getting a pick and digging a giant hole in your back yard. (Parents get to appreciate this much smaller scale mess.) Maybe it still lacks a great deal of the initial paperwork (although it does come complete with a "How to Become an Archaeologist" booklet), and maybe it's a little weak on the exact facts that are unearthed by these artifacts (although without playing it, this may be a little difficult to ascertain exactly), but it's hard to find a computer game that gives you the same experience of getting your hands a little dirty. So maybe this game is still about the treasure rather than the people who had it. It still teaches it a lot better than most other games out there.

Archaeology In Space!

The Dig sounds very much like a stereotypical archaeology video game, right?  You might think your character goes around to different sites and digs for treasure to sell for a tidy sum later on, but you would be wrong.  There is no glorified theme of treasure-hunting and the setting takes place in outer space!  Considering that the game was developed by LucasArts, it's not that surprising that archaeology is given a sci-fi spin.

The story starts out non-archaeologically related.  A decently-sized asteroid is headed towards Earth and a team consisting of an astronaut, a journalist, and a geologist (a weird combination, in my opinion) are dispatched to set explosives on the asteroid's surface to change its trajectory.  After the task is completed, the team explores around the asteroid and finds out that it is actually a spacecraft.  They are then carried away to a desolate planet far, far away.  The planet contains remnants of architecture and technology that suggest an advanced civilization, but there is nobody around.  The team has to dig for clues to try to get home.

This game doesn't reflect archaeological principles.  The characters decipher the civilization's language and seem to solve every mystery on the planet.  In real-life archaeology, you wouldn't be able to solve the entire history of a civilization in a week or even one lifetime.  A positive is that the game doesn't feature digging for treasure and selling it.  However, archaeology is only seen as a means to the end and not as a process in and of itself.  The Dig is primarily a science-fiction game tinged with themes of archaeology.

Herod's Lost Tomb: Adventurous, Educational, or Boring?

National Geographic’s online game, Herod’s Lost Tomb, has stunning visuals and graphics and offers a variety of historical sites for players to explore in during their quests for this lost tomb.  The game is marketed as slightly instructive entertainment where players discover artifacts and work to uncover the lost secrets.  In reality, I found the game overly educational, rather uninspiring, and a poor representation of archaeology.  

When playing the limited free online version, I was frustrated by the game’s main format and the archaeological views the system represented.  To solve the game, players visit various archaeological sites and must collect the artifacts from a list.  At each site, objects are piled around simply waiting to be picked up.  “Finding” these artifacts actually means clicking around the page until you identify the correct object.  This strategy represents such incorrect archaeological techniques that it’s hard to know where to start analyzing.  According to this game, archaeologists must go to sites and collect the artifacts they want most from a vast selection available from the site.  In the game, no artifacts are broken and there is no process of analyzing these findings.  

My other main complaint with this game is how boring I found it.  To me, it was more like an online I Spy game than an historical adventure.  The artifacts were often too small to see clearly and hard to distinguish from the bland color scheme of the game background.  Also, these objects were mostly generic (urns, safety pins, flowers, knives, barrels, etc.) and not fundamental to understanding the particular archaeological site under investigation. 

Overall, although this game does attempt to connect players to ancient cultures, the gameplay is fairly dry and incredibly boring.  Herod’s Lost Tomb doesn’t even possess the draw of correctly portraying archaeological techniques. To me, this game was neither educational nor entertaining, and has nothing to offer its players. 

Tetris Plus, or: Archaeology Could Really Use a Red Block Right Now (Like Right Now This Instant Oops I Died)

Tetris was invented in 1984 by a Soviet computer engineer, and involves dropping oddly-shaped blocks into rows, so the first thought is that it has little to do with archaeology. Of course, that's hardly something that will slow the ingenuity of developers, and so Tetris Plus was born. Tetris Plus, for Playstation, Sega, and other gaming consuls, includes a Classic Mode, but as this is irrelevant to our discussion we shall ignore and instead focus on the other two modes: Puzzle and Versus.

Archaeology: where you help the professor find his
glorious treasure before the Epic Spinning Ceiling
of Death grinds him into mincemeat.

In concept, both are similar to Classic Mode, except that they begin with blocks on the screen, and the object is to get a little professor down to the bottom before a spinning ceiling of spikes comes too low and kills him. The little professor just wants to find the treasure at the bottom (in Versus Mode getting there before the other player's professor, or at the very least staying alive longer, which apparently amounts to the same thing), and apparently he's willing to risk horrible evisceration at the hands of spinning spikes to get it. (Don't worry, all this carnage is very bloodless, but one could imagine the potential damage.)

Let's just think about the archaeological merits of these new modes. The game in fact begins with an introduction of our tireless professor and his faithful assistant, who, it proclaims, "are searching these ruins hoping to make great finds". Fantastic, you think. Great finds. That could mean, like, anything, not just treasure. And indeed, the next few images show our intrepid heroes looking through some rather unflashy rubble. It's nice to see that for once archaeology isn't all about the shiny stuff. That holds until you get to the actual game, where our professor starts locating gems and gold. So maybe it was just a nice thought.

Once you get to the gameplay, the plot kicks off (as much of a plot as Tetris can include, anyways). The professor dodges around falling bricks, hoping to stay alive until he can reach the next level. There are four locations to go through, which are at least archaeologically sound places to examine, those being Maya, Egypt, Knossos, and Angkor Wat, but the only thing these actually have to do with anything is dictate the background and the music. There's also a secret Atlantis location, but considering you have to complete all four of the others, which each include twenty levels, and you have to complete these in one sitting, the chances of actually getting to Atlantis are about as equal as, well, finding the real Atlantis, so factually, we can just go ahead and let this slide. In Versus Mode, you don't play any particular location, but you are pitted against another player, and both you and the other guy are trying to get to the treasure first – or just kill the other. Apparently, archaeology is a pretty cutthroat business.

(Just on a side note, the professor is a jerk in Versus Mode. If you get to the treasure first, he lounges back and throws gold happily in the air, rubbing it in that he's here and your opponent is not. If your opponent dies, he's quite eager to tell them that they "need to do better" or "need more practice". Yeah, he's totally in it for the money, not for the betterment of human knowledge, which makes you wonder if he's not actually a grave robber rather than an archaeologist.)

All in all, Tetris Plus is an entertaining game, but in terms of archaeology, it doesn't have much. Maybe there is a slight acknowledgment of the merits of non-shiny artifacts, but considering that the actual archaeology involves following a mysterious map and dodging around falling blocks in an old temple, the actual methodology might leave something to be desired.