The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring

Archaeology can be broadly defined as the study and interpretation of the past through material remains. Video game worlds, though immaterial in nature, can also afford opportunities to study the people who existed within them based on what they leave behind. In this paper we present one of the first formal archaeological surveys of a predominantly single-player game, by recording the player-generated content that is asynchronously distributed to players in Elden Ring. We report on the methodology and results of the survey, before reflecting on what we could extrapolate from those results about Elden Ring’s player community, and the nature of archaeological surveying within video games more broadly.