What happens when you apply the "steely, assertive mind" of a professional archaeologist to the shifting digital landscapes of video games? In this episode, we sit down with Florence Smith Nicholls to discuss her transition from excavating Bronze Age Greece to conducting the first formal archaeological survey of Elden Ring.

We explore the concept of inside-out research —diving deep into the "innards" of a game's server to map player traces—and discuss why the ephemeral nature of digital play requires a new movement called anticipatory archaeology.

Key Discussion Points

• From Fieldwork to Digital Spaces: Florence describes her journey from working on London construction sites as a heritage consultant to discovering the "archaeogaming" community on the Internet.
• The Elden Ring Survey: A deep dive into Florence’s "laborious" process of mapping the Church of Elleh using the player’s foot as a unit of measurement.
• Deciphering Player Traces: How bloodstains and messages left by "people who play videogames" serve as digital artifacts of human activity and server algorithms.
• Generative Archaeology Games: An exploration of procedural generation and games like Blue Prince and Outer Wilds that encourage players to role-play as interpreters of material culture.
• The Ethics of Recording: Why we must treat the "assemblage of play" (the player, hardware, and software) as a significant cultural form before it disappears into the ether.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Elden Ring (FromSoftware)
• Nothing Beside Remains (Florence Smith Nicholls)
• Blue Prince (Dogubomb)
• Curse of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope)
• The Assemblage of Play by T.L. Taylor

Notable Quotes

Music by Nick Sylvester. Hosted by Jamin Warren.

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The same silica that powers your GPU fills the sand traps at Augusta National. Artist Sam Ghantous joins us to discuss "your golf course made my GPU," his three-channel video installation that traces the geological origins of our digital obsessions.

Ghantous admits he's afraid of hardware. Despite this—or because of it—he's spent the past year confronting the physical reality behind our screens. Using Unity and Unreal Engine not to make games but to interrogate them, he reveals how ultra-pure silica mined in North Carolina becomes both microchips and golf course sand. The work forces us to reckon with what he calls the "big sludge of media" that surrounds us—accessible on one hand, black-boxed on the other.

We discuss his childhood moving between Oman, the Middle East, and North America, and how this itinerant experience shaped his understanding of sand's perpetual movement. He describes printing UV images onto silicon wafers—the raw material of microchips—creating what he calls "portals" framed by rings of sand scanned in his studio. Behind the cleared dust, ethereal reimaginings of Botticelli paintings emerge.

The conversation toggles between pleasure and guilt, much like the two voices in his video work—a synthetic childlike inquisitor and the artist's own voice. We talk about Chinese sand dredgers "editing the map" at planetary scale, golfers trapped in bunkers, and future projects where "Hello World" might take millions of years to print in deep time computing.

"I'm not standing on some moral high ground," Ghantous tells us. "I'm struggling with the temptations, both for new things and for fascinating things, but also trying not to look at my phone more."

Currently teaching at ETH Zürich, Ghantous hints at future works: games affecting one another across distances, sculptures bringing earthliness and computation together, seeking new languages for the consequences of our actions on other parts of the planet.

This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen. Music by Nick Sylvester.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@killscreen.com.

Killscreen is an arts and culture organization committed to advancing the practice of interdisciplinary play. Founded in 2010, we seek to drive the intersection of design, culture, and impact through cross-disciplinary collaboration to show the world why play matters. We want to break down the barriers that have traditionally segregated play and games from other creative disciplines and foster a diverse community of creators with ambassadorial relationships to the world around us.

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Artist, jeweler, metalsmith, and art conservator Lauren Eckert shows us what it means to look at craftsmanship through a contemporary lens. Drawing from inspiration from the objects in video games, religious iconography, and classic science fiction VFX, Lauren’s work gives metals and jewelry a life on screen—and similarly, digital objects a physical life. Whether through wearable pieces or digital triptychs, Lauren’s projects make a space where past and future, alchemy and technology, collide.

We had a great conversation with Lauren back in 2021 and have featured more of her work here.

Photography by David Evan McDowell.

This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen. Music by Nick Sylvester.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@killscreen.com.

Killscreen is an arts and culture organization committed to advancing the practice of interdisciplinary play. Founded in 2010, we seek to drive the intersection of design, culture, and impact through cross-disciplinary collaboration to show the world why play matters. We want to break down the barriers that have traditionally segregated play and games from other creative disciplines and foster a diverse community of creators with ambassadorial relationships to the world around us.

Sign up for our newsletter.