I’ve decided to continue the self-indulgent ritual I started last year of posting a round-up of all the stuff I can remember doing in the past 12 months.
January
- I went to the chamber LARP festival The Smoke for the first time!
- Younès Rabii and I started work on The Phaistos Discussions, a game about guiding a conversation between an archaeologist and a designer tasked with devising a game based an archaeological artefact, the Phaistos Disc. It’s very meta.
- I also took part in a LARP on a boat, and wrote about the experience here.
February
- I have no memory of what happened in February. I suppose it probably rained a lot.
March
- I was invited to give a talk at the first Italian conference on in-game photography as part of the Milan Machinima Festival. It was titled “Memory full: Video game photography as digital archaeology”- I hope to return to the topic of games photography as archaeological recording in my postdoc.
- I also made my first Downpour, using the app made by V Buckenham, about my trip to the conference!
April
- I went to the A MAZE festival for the first time and had some really nice conversations with cool people. Saltsea Chronicles, the game I was Story Tech on, was exhibited there.
May
- The Phaistos Discussions was selected to take part in the Ultimate IndieMash Playful Competition, held by Sickhouse.
- I went to the FDG conference in Worcester, MA! I presented two papers at the conference:
- “Permalife Of The Archive: Archaeogaming As Queergaming” for the Queer Play workshop.
- “How To Save A World: The Go-Along Interview as Game Preservation Methodology in Wurm Online,” co-authored with my supervisor Mike Cook.
June
- I went to the EMF Festival for the first time!
- I ran a game design workshop for Chester Heritage Festival.
- I gave a talk on Archaeological Storytelling and Games for the Now Play This Game Design Lab.
- Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree came out and I started a new recording project…more on that next year.
July
- I was commissioned to write an article for Eurogamer about the queer cosy escape room Memoirscape, that I was lucky enough to experience at the FDG conference!
August
- I was very lucky to go to Chania in Crete with a bunch of very lovely people who all do work in creative computing in some form.
- This was also when I started to get really into Polaroid photography.
September
- I took part in the truly incredible 97 Poets of Revachol LARP based on Disco Elysium (more on that, hopefully, in the new year!)
October
- I was invited to present “How to Archaeologically Record a Video Game” at Next Level, hosted by the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence. This is a good summary of my PhD research to date.
November
- I got my first tattoo! This might be one of the things I’m most proud of this year, weirdly enough. It was a very personal statement of how my body is my own and I get to decide what I do with it.
- I wrote my first LARP, Funeral For An AI God, and ran it at Stockholm Scenario Festival! This is the other thing I’m most proud of this year. A few months ago I never thought I would be able to run something like that. Oh, I also blogged about it.
- I was invited to take part in the “Playing in the museum: experiments in decolonialism” workshop at the CIVIS conference in Malaga.
December
- I presented “Lifeless Things? Archaeological Roleplay in Nothing Beside Remains” at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference. It was really lovely to present my work to the community there (the last time I attended was when I ran an archaeogaming session in 2019!)
- I was commissioned to write a piece on generative AI as a black box archive for Red Pepper magazine.
Oh, also, I completed the biggest project of my PhD so far-hope to say more about that in 2025. Until then, here’s a screenshot of Nothing Beside Remains, that I worked on with Mike Cook.
Florence Smith Nicholls 