'We're kind of making it up as we go along' — What it's like to be a video game archaeologist

Archaeologist Andrew Reinhard has dug in Greece, Italy, and the United States. But for the past few years, he's become fascinated by archaeogaming -- the study of archaeology within video games:

Archaeogaming is the application of archaeological methods to conducting archaeology in virtual space. This is where we do our in-game fieldwalking, our artifact-collecting, our typologies, our understanding of context, even aerial/satellite photography. Instead of studying the material culture (and non-tangible heritage) of cultures and civilizations that exist in "meatspace", we instead study those in the immaterial world.

For example, Archaeosoup Productions explored an archaeological dig within the game Skyrim:

Andrew has also been involved in physical video game archaeology. He was part of a team that unearthed hundreds of Atari game cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill.

• Atari's E.T. the Extraterrestrial cartridges found in landfill

A 2014 documentary called "Atari: Game Over" centred around the burial and discovery of the games.