Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The growing subdiscipline of archaeogaming addresses the intersection of archaeology and gaming in its broadest sense, via tabletop/board games, video games, card games, and myriad other types. It is primarily construed as the archaeology in and of games—this may include how archaeology is represented within gaming worlds, exploring the built landscape within a game, and examining material culture within a game, to list a few perspectives. Gaming remains an especially popular form of child and adult media, and it is particularly informative for us as archaeologists to understand how our discipline is presented in media forms that are engaged with by so many members of the public. The posters in this session highlight the educational and outreach-based impacts of archaeology in gaming. They explore a variety of game types in which the archaeological components receive varying levels of attention by the games themselves, exposing the need for archaeological insight into these portrayals of the field and its practitioners. The perspectives presented in this session represent a burgeoning subfield of critical media studies with a focus on archaeological content.