Friday, January 05, 2007

Catching up

Now that the holidays are over, I'm starting to catch up on a lot of things; hopefully I can get back to designing things soon.

One of the things that has slowed me down is the "art game" known as Exquisite Corpse. Basically, someone draws a 460X200 pixel image, sends it in, and then the Corpse Engine sends out the bottom 15 pixels of that image to the next artist, who must continue the picture only with the information provided in that little 15 pixel strip. And then, he turns in his 200 pixel high image, and the process repeats.

It plays very much like an online party game. Which, makes sense since it pretty much is an old party game.

Aside from the occasionally amusing and/or shocking reveal of the entire image at the end when all the absurdities come to light, it is a rather simple exploration of the collective unconscious. This basically states that there is a shared psychology amongst all humans in all cultures. A part of the game is trying to understand what the previous artist was doing given only that 15 pixel sliver of information, as the best Corpses seem to be the ones that carry a similiar theme through each artists' panels. Therefore, there is some sense that all of the artists shared a common psychology on a particular piece. Recent examples that seemed to fall into place like this would be this one (regarding theme) and this one (regarding color usage).

Of course, you get the opposite results more frequently. Especially with some artists who don't quite get the concept of trying to match the seams with the previous players. And even still, this image comes across as a sort of cool, movie poster image.

And looking at a group of these pictures in an archive format is pretty dazzling, with all the crazy uses of color and images and just general looniness.

Anyway, my most pressing game design goals right now are to get the updated PocketCiv rules and Event cards done, followed by finishing a prototype of the newly-named Lumina Dark (I've got a half-baked rule set stsuck in my head). Finally, I really, REALLY want to work on a Leviathan themed solo game next, spurred on by this BGDF discussion.

Man, that's a lot of links up there. YAY! for hypertext.

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