Play Again: Combining Archaeological and AI Methods to Study Ancient Games

with

Walter Crist, PhD
Lecturer
Faculty of Humanities
Centre for the Arts in Society
New Media & Digital Culture
Leiden University

The archaeology of ancient play has recently undergone a renaissance, as researchers have couched previous culture-historical research on ancient games in anthropological and archaeological theory, demonstrating the importance of play in ancient life. Further advances in AI technology allow for new applications of this technology in the study of ancient games, and the possibilities of such methods are only beginning to be explored. This research explores two case studies where AI-simulated play, when combined with traditional archaeological methods, provide new insights about ancient games.

Biography
Walter Crist is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University. His PhD dissertation (Arizona State University, 2016) examined the archaeological context of Bronze Age game boards in Cyprus to explore the intersection between gaming activity and social complexity. He is the lead author on the book Ancient Egyptians at Play, and has researched ancient games in Cyprus, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Greece, Turkey, and the Netherlands. As a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Digital Ludeme Project, he constructed the Ludii Games Database, which documents the knowledge of the rules for traditional board games globally over the past 5000 years. Recent explorations on the ways that AI can inform archaeological research on games continue through his position as Vice Chair of the COST Action GameTable: Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage.

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