Abstract
Ruins are everywhere. But despite the association of ruins as depressing or dismaying, ruins are also places for play and self-discovery, and ruination allows us to tell narratives about change. Video games are virtual places to play with and tell stories about ruins, and their digital materiality allows us to play with their temporal and spatial dimension. How players interact with ruins in games can shape them. Through play, games allow players to explore the ruin as a concept. In this thesis, I engage with the concept of the ruin combined with acts of play in video games. To that end, I use the disciplines of game studies, archaeology, and ruinology (the study of ruins), and a combination of the three known as archaeogaming. I extend the idea of archaeogaming, however, by introducing the term “ludo-archaeology”, which refers to a broader kind of play among the ruins or with artefacts in-game. Ludo-archaeology encourages the perception of game space in which we document, categorize, and otherwise complete the world by discovering it. There are three main types of ruins I explore in this thesis: war ruins, ruins created by ecological disaster, and psychological ruin. Alongside these different kinds of ruins, I argue that video game ruins invite a spectrum of ludo-archaeological approaches. I study three games, Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment 2010), Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Climax Studios 2009), and Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital 2019), and articulate how each kind of ruin encourages a particular gameplay loop. All three games allow for ludo-archaeological play but depending on the presentation of the ruins, critical reflection could be obscured. Using these three examples of ludic ruins, I show how our perception of ruins in the game world changes through our experience of successive gameplay loops. Through ludo-archaeology, we can discover methods of play, learn ways of perceiving the world, and see how ruins are gamified. The ongoing gamification of ruins advances our cultural understanding of actual ruins and the stories we tell about them.