In our new, game-based dissemination experiment, you can enter a mysterious Stone Age world with megalithic graves where life and death are more fluent concepts than today. But whatever you do, don’t go into the woods! You can hold a button and speak freely with an archaeologist, a Neolithic priestess and midwife, and get a tour of Stone Age cave paintings from a shaman. The conversations are based on the newest archaeological research (using RAG technology). You can ask and say anything, and learn through deeper conversation. And guess what, no game developers were involved.

A revolution in research communication?

Museums are always looking for new ways of engaging the public. While we’re at an early stage, our preliminary user experiments hint that this new format could be successful, because visitors directly engage the past through in-game conversation and exploration.

Everything can now come alive, without big museum spending (only a decent gaming computer).

Everyone can now make games

Archaeologists and 3D specialists have long produced 3D assets (nature, buildings, artefacts, clothes, etc.). Game engines like Unreal Engine or Unity are free, powerful, and platforms such as Convai (and soon local open-source options) enable in-game AI speech. Virtual experimental archaeology research could also employ light, gravity, fire, water, etc. This makes it much easier for heritage workers to leverage their own (or other) 3D models, and explore storytelling where each play-session is unique, but guided, and conversations have depth and flexibility.

The real game changer is that archaeologists and heritage specialists control the narrative by feeding curated knowledge to the characters, which they can update as new insights appear. They can interactively customize the looks of each character (using free services like “Metahuman”). The characters can also relate to places and objects, and researchers can adjust their behavior based on specific events. Museums don’t have to wait for commercial game companies to produce stereotypical content, but can create their own small games with their version of prehistory.

What’s next?

We also created an autonomously moving “Ötzi-inspired” 3D character in our game, entirely from text. While still without lip-synced speech, this is the next technological step. Imagine researchers generating any 3D character with an AI “brain” purely from text.

AI-powered characters can already learn through imitation and interact through conversation, and soon also through actions. Researchers could soon simulate prehistoric social mechanisms, and engage in the simulation. First, perhaps group dynamics in a village, but potentially also social phenomena in larger groups, where realistic AI characters learn, develop, survive, thrive, and compete for power or love, like in a prehistoric “Matrix”. The tools are there already. They just need combining and refining.

We have only dipped our toes in the vast sea of possibilities for this format, and there is still plenty room for improvement and ethical discussions. But the technical barriers are crumbling, and I believe this will drastically change heritage dissemination. Practitioners can now maintain historical accuracy and creatively tell captivating conversational stories, perhaps about otherwise forgotten individuals.

What would you ask our Neolithic priestess, our shaman, maybe a Bronze Age warrior, or a historically accurate Viking Age thrall?

‘Gamifying the Past: Embodied LLMs in DIY Archaeological Video Games’ (by Mikkel Nørtoft, Daniela Hofmann and Rune Iversen) is out now, open access, in the SAA journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.

Image captions:
_{Header: “In one level, the player can enter a mysterious cave in a mountain, that we built by manually putting 3D assets of rocks together, and get a guided tour of selected European cave paintings from a “shaman” giving the player a contrasting hunter-gatherer perspective of the past. We gave the shaman specific knowledge about each of the cave paintings, general knowledge about major European hunter-gatherer cultures, and more detailed knowledge about the Danish Ertebølle culture, and some specific sites and individuals taken both from archaeology and ancient DNA research.”}

_{Second image: “A free plugin with customizable day/night cycle (latitude, length, etc.) was used for our game allowing for catching beautiful sunsets and sunrises while playing the game, but could also be used for virtual light experiments, such as a winter solstice beam of light inside Neolithic stone chambers.”}

_{Final image: “For the Neolithic megaliths we integrated our own 3D photogrammetry models in the scene, and freely available 3D assets of artefacts from the Funnel Beaker culture as grave goods to collect. The player can converse freely (in speech or text) with the LLM-powered Metahuman “Dolmen Guy”, an archaeologist with special knowledge about the site, practical dolmen building, and more.”}