I was particularly intrigued by the idea of “landscape as palimpsest” outlined in the “Augmenting Archaeology” blog entry. However (and maybe I took it the wrong way), the blog’s author seemed to make light of how historians go about reading landscapes as palimpsests, suggesting that “playing” landscapes would help tell a better story of the history of the landscape than merely “reading some aspect of past activity in the landscape.”
Telling stories about the history of landscapes is what historians do already as landscape readers—whether it be through analysis of geographical landscapes, architectural landscapes, or even intellectual “landscapes.” Good historians are constantly “annotating and crafting competing visions” of these landscapes, and rarely stop at stating pure facts as the author seems to imply. The art of history is interpretation—analyzing not just how, but why, physical or intellectual/cultural changes have occurred from past to present—and I think the profession is pursuing this purpose successfully.
That said, there is no reason why interpreting (or “playing”) landscapes could not be done through games as well as scholarship, and augmented reality is a compelling way to do this. The whole “Play the Past” concept and blog reminded me of my childhood forays into the Oregon Trail computer game, which was perhaps the inception of my interest in American western history. While my ten-year-old self probably focused primarily on trying to get my oxen to survive perilous river fordings, I do recall being able to empathize with the plights of the pioneers and learning—albeit superficially—about the landscapes of the nineteenth-century American west.