Play, chance, and comics

@drmattfinch

A free international festival giving communities the chance to try their hands at participation in the arts and

sciences.

www.funpalaces.co.uk

https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/181726733723119616

comic.funpalaces.co.uk

Created by Talia Yat and Phil Gullberg, State Library of Queensland

The game is based on Comic Book Dice, first trialled at MCAD Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila.

But the comic book dice have their own ancestors…

Games Have Their Own Art History

Abel and Madden, Panel Lottery

Games Have Their Own Art History

McCloud, Five Card Nancy

The dice game focuses less on your drawing skill and more on sequential storytelling.

Kids at MCAD started combining the dice in unforeseen ways, telling stories as columns, pyramids, and walls.

People gradually started to use the Fun Palaces maker in their own way too.

Here’s our first non-English-language comic, in te reo Māori.

Just for kids? Hardly. Things started to get satisfyingly Lovecraftian.

The initial set of drag and drop images was rather restricted, but comics makers hit on the idea of using emoji via the

captioning function…another pleasing, unexpected innovation.

The State Library of Queensland will release the game and its code under a Creative Commons licence.

An alternate digital version of the dice game is being created at MCAD - we hope it’s the first of many.

Simple digital comics, created by communities across the world, open for tweaking, remixing, expanding, and reimagining at the level of code, speak

to the notion of a more participatory culture - part of the power of comics and our digital age.

More about the Fun Palaces Comic Maker and other digital games:

blog.comicsgrid.com/2015/10/fun-palaces-comic-maker-an-interview-with-matt-finch/

http://funpalaces.co.uk/fun-palaces-comic-maker/

http://matthewfinch.me/2015/07/24/holes-in-maps-look-through-to-nowhere-games-as-criticism/