Dr Florence Smith Nicholls

@florencesn.bsky.social

9359 Followers 2530 Following

Video game archaeologist + game dev// Postdoc @itu.dk on theorycraft + archaeogaming // Prev: Story Tech @gutefabrik.bsky.social, Planning Archaeologist at Museum of London Archaeology they/them đź’ľ florencesmithnicholls.com

Photograph of two framed prints, one featuring a dragon and another with a sword that says "trans people have always been here"
Mycenean stirrup jar
Merin DVD cover with Sam Neill
Archaeogaming is the archaeological study of video games, at the intersection of archaeology, game studies, computer science and HCI. This entry will chart the history of archaeogaming as a field that emerged in the 2010s but which has much longer antecedents in the form of cyber archaeology. It will present a taxonomy of archaeogaming, including reception studies, serious games, archaeology of digital artefacts and field studies. Brief case studies demonstrating the breadth of archaeogaming research will be presented. The question of the future of archaeogaming and its contributions to games research will be explored, and a case will be made for the unique contributions of archaeogaming as distinct from historical games studies in terms of archaeology’s specialisation in the study of material culture. The potential applications of archaeogaming to level design and play preservation will be presented.
Aren't you tired of being nice meme
Picture of a hunting party with the text "game is over"
A selfie of me with a plushie kirby bag
GAP workshop logo
Quote: "So-called AI 'romantic companion' chatbots...Will have to enforce a minimum age of 18. Similar intimate functionalities will be restricted for under-18s on AI chatbots more widely.
Slide of statue of a satyr having sex with a goat and the title "Keeping the Secret(um): Sensory Archaeologies, Porn Games and Paratexts
Selfie of me with short hair and a black too against a wall
Conclusion (from my book chapter "Androgynous Artefacts") “For well over a generation, stories of Link, hero of Hyrule, have been passed down in sacred text, cartridge, and disk.” Thus, Link, Zelda and even Sheik form part of the “triumphal procession” of games history, heirlooms that are handed down between commercial games and generations of players. It is precisely this legacy, indeed this “legend” that perpetuates the damsel role of Zelda, as it is legitimised by the commercial success of the franchise. Sheik is an androgynous artefact not based on the reading of their polygon body, but because they have ignited so much discussion about how that body can be rationalised. This is not to say that the gender binary is not real – just that it is not any more real than a polygon body. As Belcher understands the Halaf figurines through potential human interactions with them, it is not just the media they are made of that dictates their purpose, but the possibility space of gender as researchers have constructed it. We need to be self–reflexive about our own standpoints as scholars with lived experiences that inform our work. That means taking non-binary genders in both archaeology and video games seriously, not because they form part of the received wisdom of either but rather they can bypass the impossibility space of the gender binary, embracing ambiguity beyond androgyny."
Archaeological Game Design: Video Game Archaeology as Interpretive Play and Play Preservation Abstract: Video game archaeology is a relatively new field. This can involve studying players through the traces they leave in digital game worlds, though only limited work of this kind exists. Furthermore, the potential of these methods to record ephemeral play experiences for preservation purposes has not been widely explored. The first part of the thesis establishes the background literature on games archaeology and play preservation. The second part reports on the development of novel archaeological methodologies for preserving play. This includes three case studies; a go-along study in the massively multiplayer online game Wurm Online, an archaeological survey in Elden Ring, and a collaborative autoethnography in Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. The third part of this thesis reports on the results of a player study investigating how participants interpret environmental storytelling. We report on a study in which participants (N=202) played a game about exploring a procedurally generated ruined village and were then surveyed on their interpretations. We draw on methods and theory from archaeology, a field that specialises in the interpretation of material remains, to support a grounded theory analysis of the survey responses, from which we form the theory of an archaeological gameworld mental model. Finally, the fourth part of the thesis synthesises these case studies to argue that archaeological game design brings together both the archaeological recording of player traces, as well as player interpretations of a fictional gameworld that should also be preserved. This work contributes both novel methodologies for play preservation and a new theory for how players interpret gameworlds. This work has narrative design applications, and interdisciplinary contributions to game AI, games studies and HCI.
Photograph of rock mascot and different wikilim site choices
Little rock mascot and an entry from the "WikiLim" for the fictional game Limerance
Photograph of Voidspace Live programme
Screen shot from Penguin Colony with the prompt on-screen to "Waddle"
Black and white photograph of a tiny adorable round baby penguin with the photo mode interface on screen
Picture of a rock with eyes on a red background
Football is the most important of the less important things
Selfie if me wearing a velvet waistcoat and a torc
Elle in front of a slide that says "environmental gameplay"
Photograph of the Thomas Dambo wooden sculpture troll Kaptajn Nalle pulling a boat on a rope
Its the cursed boat bed
Picture of antique bureau with stag decoration
Picture of a small shelf unit
Photograph of my tiny blahaj guarding the flat
Lit up sign that says why be racist, sexist, homophones or transphobic when you could just be quiet?
Mirror selfie of me in beige jacket with yellow walls
Collage of images for Voidspace Live 2026. The rock mascot from Ruin The Game is in the top left next to a photo of John Robertson
Photograph of a very important rock friend with two big eyes looking at you on a red background
Sign that says Brøndsteds Allé, Peter Oluf Brøndsted, Professor og akæolog, 1780-1842
Graffiti on the side of a building that reads "remove politicians now" and four foxes around a figure
PCG for Keepsake Games Florence Smith Nicholls (Queen Mary University of London, GB), June Bhartia (Télécom Paris, FR), Michael Cook (King’s College London, GB), Younès Rabii (Queen Mary Uni- versity of London, GB), Dipika Rajesh (University of California at Santa Cruz, US), Anne Sullivan (York University – Toronto, CA), Yuqian Sun (Royal College of Art – London, GB), Nicolaas Vas (Billund, DK), and Sabine Wieluch (Universität Ulm, DE) License Creative Commons BY 4.0 International license © Florence Smith Nicholls, June Bhartia, Michael Cook, Younès Rabii, Dipika Rajesh, Anne Sullivan, Yuqian Sun, Nicolaas Vas, and Sabine Wieluch The term “keepsake game” was coined by Shing Yin Khor in 2021 to refer to “games that produce beautiful, memorable artifacts, through the process of playing the game” [1]. Keepsake games involve creating or modifying an original artifact as part of the gameplay process, guided by prompts as part of the design.
man of culture meme
Page from my 2019 zine about my experience of playing Rayman 2 as a child
Photo of an interior courtyard of a hotel
Photograph of the word "relax" in wooden letters behind glass, above it a shelf with various paraphernalia including glass bottles and terrariums
Photo of two toilet doors, one with the character My Melody on and the other with Kuromi on it
Photo of a pair of diamond shaped earrings
Polaroid of me on my cool outfit
Polaroid of myself, Sebastian and Katie
Picture of a worried smoliv
Photograph of modulino components
Selfie of me wearing a shirt with a snail on it and a cap that days joie de livres on it
Slide with an orange diamond traffic sign that says "cruel optimism ahead"
Neon says "The future is queer"
Sign says: Razzmatazz 2026 Reception CHI Nordics
Both A1 and A2 (on June 21st 2024) saw the same message with the “Ring of Miquella” gesture on top of Miquella’s Cross which read “seek holy/but hole” with the maximum number of 9999 appraisals. This exemplifies the kind of messages that were seen at this site.
Slide: Player Discretion is Advised: Designing for Rule-Changing Play
Screenshot of the front page of the paper
Selfie of me wearing the GDQ trans rights shirt with a cool trans dragon on it
Photograph in which you can see the spires in the distance
Photograph of me having coffee with a book called Ghost Image by Hervé Guibert overlooking the Rådhuspladsen in Copenhagen
Photograph of a small zine about Video Game Archaeology as a Hauntological Practice
Gif of a player gesture placed so as to mimick touching the hand in the Mohgwyn Dynasty Mausoleum which provides initial access to the DLC
“I think these are [non] diegetic birds singing which makes me realise a) I haven’t put bird food out this year and b) there is no birdsong at the moment outside my window. “ (Memo 1 for file 2024-06-21 21-30-00, A2, Mohgwyn Dynasty Mausoleum). And “I can also hear people singing Happy Birthday in the background! I have absolutely no memory of this happening while I was doing the recording, its pretty incredible that I incidentally caught it.” (Memo 1 for file 2024-06-24 20-56-26, A1, Gravesite Plains).
Picture of many blĂĄhajs squashed together
Screenshot of Elden Ring of a message that says "first off, don't you dare" and the merchant Kale is hostile in the foreground. I accidentally hit the merchant during the survey and this transformed my survey experience
Overhead view of the Mohgwyn Dynasty Mausoleum, which is a boss fight location and the initial access point to the DLC