Broken Picture Telephone at ECCC 2015

Last Year at ECCC I was having trouble interacting interacting with the artists and I had the idea to play a game with them. It worked, I ended up meeting and talking to a bunch people and it was a lot of fun. So this year I did it again.

Picture Telephone is a game that has been around for a long time, no idea how long. It's been known by many names, Drawception, Telestrations, Exquisite Corpse, and Eat Poop You Cat are just the ones I know, there may be more names I've never heard. The way you play is one person starts by writing a description (you can start with a drawing too, if you like, it works the same way.) It could be a description of anything, doesn't matter what. Then the next player reads the description and makes a drawing of it. The player after that only sees the drawing, and writes a description of it. Play continues like that, with each player only seeing the work of the player who went before them. At the end the whole game is revealed to all the players and it's usually pretty hilarious.

There are two websites that I know about where you can play this game online, one is broken picture telephone.com and the other is drawception.com. There is also a boxed version I've never played called Telestrations, but you can easily play it yourself with some scraps of paper and pencils and a decent sized group of people.

Most of the people who played this year were people in the artist alley, and I brought back a couple artists who played before but most of them were people who hadn't played last year. Aaron Diaz started it off and I had Jeph Jacques (who started last year's game) draw the extra last panel for the game that started with a drawing. I ran two games simultaneously so each artist could draw for one game and describe for the other one.  It took me over 6 hours to get all the drawings finished. I planned to do 20 artists but the hall was closing after I got 18, so I ran off to get Jeph to finish it.

A big thanks to all the artists who played, I just do this for a fun, as a way to meet the artists, and my hope is that they have fun and feel like they made a connection with the other artists they played with, even if just in a small way. Everyone who played this year and even the people I talked to who didn't want to play or couldn't were wonderful to talk to and made it a blast for me.

So anyways, here's the games! This time I posted them in multiple versions so people could more easily view them on different devices. The first is a composite image of all the turns from each game in one big image, best for viewing on a computer. There are high res and lower res versions of each, but even the low res version is pretty big. The high res versions are mostly there in case someone wanted to print one out as a poster or something crazy like that.

The other galleries have all the turns as separate images, so you can download them individually or scroll through them more easily on a phone or other device with a small screen, instead of dragging around on the big image. Cool right? Also that way the artists or anyone else can download copies of their own drawings or just their favorites. I always hope someone gets a tattoo of one of these... If you don't like those galleries it's also embedded below the break, but the link versions are much bigger and nicer. Anyways, here's the links!

Big Composite images  

Separate Images Game 1   ------   Separate Images Game 2

Broken Picture Telephone at ECCC 2015