{"id":1807,"date":"2009-09-24T14:12:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-24T19:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=1807"},"modified":"2009-09-24T14:12:15","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T19:12:15","slug":"treasure-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/09\/24\/treasure-hunter\/","title":{"rendered":"Treasure Hunter"},"content":{"rendered":"

An English farmer with metal detector recently stumbled upon one of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found.<\/a> The find is being compared to uncovering another Book of Kells insofar as its importance in understanding Anglo-Saxon art and culture.<\/p>\n

I love the idea of archaeology and treasure hunting. As my colleague Brett Todd – a man with real dig experience – would surely inform me, most archaeology is pretty unglamorous stuff. You carefully excavate a few dozen yards at a time, keeping every shard of pottery and looking for changes in coloration in the soil. I find this sort of thing exciting, but I’m super weird.<\/p>\n

But I think that an archaeology sim would be a great way to teach ancient or medieval history to middle or high school students. There’s an old Microplay game called Sea Rogue<\/em><\/a> that let you salvage historic wrecks. Why not take a model like that and build a strategy\/educational\/business sim that dealt with digging for buried treasures (historical and jewel-encrusted) or discovering lost cities?<\/p>\n

The educational side would mean that the player would have to do research to know where to dig or explore. They would have to hire experts in a variety of fields to get the most out of their dig. There could be metal detecting stuff at the very beginning as sort of a tutorial level – how to know where to explore and how to assess the value of goods. It could teach the art of dating materials, assessing how various cities or civilizations were related, even how populations moved or evolved.<\/p>\n

I’ve often thought about this design idea, but I have no game design skills beyond the usual “wouldn’t it be great if…” stuff you can find on any blog. But if anyone can tell me why this is a terrible idea, I’d be happy to hear it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An English farmer with metal detector recently stumbled upon one of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found. The find is being compared to uncovering another Book of Kells insofar as its importance in understanding Anglo-Saxon art and culture. I love the idea of archaeology and treasure hunting. As my colleague Brett […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10,21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-t9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1808,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions\/1808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}