The Ruin You Put Back Up

Games are generous with ancient buildings. They hand them over finished — climbable, lit, swept, standing at whatever moment in their history looks best on screen. Chaco Canyon has never had that treatment. The one piece of software that has taken Pueblo Bonito seriously does the opposite: it gives you the ruin, and a brush.

The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon was released on 8 December 2017 by Shadowplay Communications, written by Kyle Widner alongside his book of the same name — a paid download for Mac and PC, in four languages, with a promise on the sales page that there is no violence in it anywhere. What there is instead is virtual archaeology. You excavate the great houses with the correct tools for the job, a pick for the rough work at the edges and a brush for what comes next, and you turn up more than forty artefacts rebuilt in 3D from things actually pulled out of Chaco in the early days of the digs. Clear a great house and it is restored in front of you. There are fourteen of them, and Pueblo Bonito is one. Its title carries the old Navajo-derived word that Pueblo nations have long asked people to stop using; the site itself is Ancestral Puebloan, and the descendants are the Hopi, the Zuni and the Rio Grande Pueblos.

The restoration is the part that pays off, because Pueblo Bonito’s whole argument is its plan. Eight hundred rooms, four and five storeys, a D closed off by one long straight wall, kivas set into the plaza like coins pressed into clay — none of which resolves at eye level, standing among knee-high stubs of sandstone. The game closes the D and puts the roofs back on, then offers a free-fly mode it describes as soaring like a raven over the canyon. You can get above the real Pueblo Bonito easily enough; people do it from the rim every day. What you cannot do is get above it and find it whole.

And then the thing the game is proudest of turns out not to be a building at all. Up on Fajada Butte it models the Sun Dagger — three leaning slabs of sandstone and the spiral carved on the rock behind them — and makes it work. You type in a date and a time, any date, and watch where the blade of light lands. That is a better instinct than it might look. Chacoan architecture is itself an instrument, aligned to the sun and to a lunar cycle that takes 18.6 years to come round, which means the interesting question at Chaco was never what the buildings looked like but what they were pointed at, and when. A game that lets you set the date is asking the right question. It is just increasingly hard to play: the storefront is a dead link now, and shadowplay.com sells something else entirely. The most complete reconstruction of Chaco Canyon anyone has put in software is quietly becoming a ruin of its own.