Conference Agenda

The Dream Game is an experimental framework intersecting cultural anthropology, depth psychology, gamification, and dream studies to explore how collective dream-sharing functions as a structured yet emergent cultural practice. Drawing on Turner’s concept of liminality, it provides a temporary communitas where participants engage in dream-related activities—recording, illustrating, and interpreting dreams—within a gamified environment. This ritualized engagement parallels the social structures of play and performance found in indigenous dreaming traditions and digital subcultures.

Methodologically, this study applies digital ethnographic frameworks to symbolic dream interactions. Pre- and post-session surveys, alongside qualitative interviews, assess how structured play affects dream frequency, thematic convergence, and transpersonal experiences. Shared dream motifs—such as white castles, bridges over frozen water, and giants—function as mythemes, echoing Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist approach. Findings suggest that gamified dream-sharing reconstructs meaning-making and transforms competition through emergent narratives, expanding the anthropological study of play, ritual, and the social dimensions of unconscious life.

Like dreams, modern board games create a social environment that combines a simulated reality (the theme) with strategic elements (a product of the rules). These games may also have a link to, and sometimes an origin in, the dreaming mind. In this presentation, I will describe a very detailed dream of mine which led to the creation of a new board game: 500 Cities. This game is useful for teaching students the ways in which urban civilizations emerge.

I will demonstrate how dreams can contribute to the final game design, detailing the steps which were needed to turn the dream into reality, including the amplification of the rules and patterns laid down in the dream, as well as the mechanics of game design, which involved finding sources for the physical objects and artwork used in the games, and the crafting and testing of the final product.

Carefully managing your resources; planning strategies for success; negotiating with those around you; observing and responding to your environment - these are all key elements of gaming. These are also key elements in the subsistence strategies and resource management of past cultures, from the Neolithic Revolution to the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and beyond. In this presentation, I will review ANTH-311: The Emergence of Cities, a course at Bridgewater State University which uses games and gameplay to instruct students on how early civilizations managed their resources, the rise of agriculture, state formation, how urban centers first emerged in the ancient Near East as well as cross-culturally, and what past civilizations can teach us about living more sustainably in the present. Both board games and video games in archaeology will be discussed, and their roles in exploring the themes of urbanism and sustainability in the archaeology classroom.