About

The Archaeoludic Archive is a curated database documenting video games that engage with archaeology, cultural heritage, and the ancient past. From iconic adventurers like Lara Croft to strategy games set in ancient civilizations, these games shape how millions of players perceive and interact with history.

The primary goal of this project is to create a comprehensive database of archaeogames that is backed by scholarly literature. This means that users can not only find information about a game itself, but more importantly discover academic references that examine the game from an archaeogaming perspective – analyzing historical representations, gameplay mechanics, cultural impact, and more.

Each entry is enriched with linked open data connections to Wikidata, IGDB, Steam, and GOG, ensuring interoperability with other digital humanities projects. Scholarly references are managed through Zotero, linking games directly to academic literature. By applying a controlled vocabulary for archaeological and historical content, the archive enables systematic analysis of player roles, time periods, and cultural contexts across the gaming landscape.

Currently, this is a private project and serves as a proof of concept. The vision is to expand it into a larger research project in the future, potentially in collaboration with academic institutions. This resource is intended to serve researchers studying digital heritage, educators seeking to incorporate games into teaching, and anyone interested in how interactive media represent and interpret the past.

Archaeogaming is, in the most widely used definition, the archaeology in and of video games. Andrew Reinhard coined the term on his blog in 2013. Since then it has grown into a small but international field where archaeology, heritage studies and game studies meet. Archaeologists had written about games before: about the public image of the discipline, ancient worlds in strategy games, and virtual heritage. But these were mostly isolated studies. In the 2010s a community formed around them. It grew through blogs, social media and live streams, the excavation of the Atari landfill in Alamogordo in 2014, the Interactive Pasts conferences in the Netherlands, and the first edited volumes, monographs and dissertations.

The field covers a wide range of questions. It asks how archaeology, archaeologists and the past are shown in games, and which images, stereotypes and tropes these games pass on to a very large audience. Examples range from the treasure-hunting adventurer to colonial stories of discovery. It treats games as archaeological objects in their own right: as artefacts with a material and technical history, and as virtual worlds that can be surveyed and documented with archaeological methods. It also uses games as tools for research, teaching and public outreach, up to developing new games together with students.

There is no single agreed definition. Some describe archaeogaming as a sub-discipline with its own methods and standards. Others see it as a movement of scholars, game makers and players who share an interest in the past at play. The field overlaps closely with historical game studies and classical reception studies. Questions of ethics, access and long-term sustainability are still being discussed.

The Archaeoludic Archive aims to give this field a shared foundation. It documents games that engage with archaeology, describes them with a common vocabulary, and links them to the scholarly literature about them. An overview of that research is available in the Bibliography.