As I've played about with these game-based reconstructions of landscape and space it has increasingly struck me that the very mutability of the worlds so-created needs some codified explanation. It's true that all archaeological visualisation or reconstruction is open to interpretation, judgements over what partly known and understood things and places looked like in the past, even what Rumsfieldian unknown, suspected or unsuspected things may have been and where. It's axiomatic that things that we have accurately recorded (to the millimetre with GPS, laser scanning, lidar or whatever) are where we say they are, for the present at least (the now and real), but what of the part-known or suspected, the interpolated reconstructed past of scientific analysis (neolithic vegetation reconstructed from the pollen record - a faithful reconstruction of the past) or the imaginative past of the half-understood (the shell-keep of Totnes castle superimposed on the motte of Laxton because there may have been a shell-keep, but we don't know what it looked like) this is a richer, but more tentative landscape of the imagined past. And in the pervasive paradigm of games, what about an alternative now (Half-life perhaps) or the seductive quasi-mystical alternative present of numerous writers (Christoper Priest's
Dream of Wessex if you like, or indeed Hardy's own Wessex, "a partly-real, partly-dream country", a case of the present fantastic).
So here is an attempt to codify that variety in a theoretical nutshell, five-dimensional game space, assuming we know the where of our start point (the latitude, longitude and elevation) we travel off in other dimensions of then and imagined to end up who knows where. Just perhaps we should remember to think about how we have ended up here when we arrive, although perhaps only an archaeologist might consider that vector important, to the free avatar it isn't important at all...
As I've played about with these game-based reconstructions of landscape and space it has increasingly struck me that the very mutability of the worlds so-created needs some codified explanation. It's true that all archaeological visualisation or reconstruction is open to interpretation, judgements over what partly known and understood things and places looked like in the past, even what Rumsfieldian unknown, suspected or unsuspected things may have been and where. It's axiomatic that things that we have accurately recorded (to the millimetre with GPS, laser scanning, lidar or whatever) are where we say they are, for the present at least (the now and real), but what of the part-known or suspected, the interpolated reconstructed past of scientific analysis (neolithic vegetation reconstructed from the pollen record - a faithful reconstruction of the past) or the imaginative past of the half-understood (the shell-keep of Totnes castle superimposed on the motte of Laxton because there may have been a shell-keep, but we don't know what it looked like) this is a richer, but more tentative landscape of the imagined past. And in the pervasive paradigm of games, what about an alternative now (Half-life perhaps) or the seductive quasi-mystical alternative present of numerous writers (Christoper Priest's Dream of Wessex if you like, or indeed Hardy's own Wessex, "a partly-real, partly-dream country", a case of the present fantastic). 
