drawings

🕹️🎨 What Are Paper Computer Games?

A drawing of a retro sci-fi computer screen with a cheery clown on a stick displayed. The clown's spikey hair is green, and is a robot.

When I was a kid I came up with something called Paper Computer Games, which are role-playing, puzzle solving games drawn on paper that emulated point-and-click adventure games. They are meant to be played with a single other person, and were usually tailor made for that player.

Paper Computer Games, or PCGs for short, also established a rich in-game universe that friends freely added to in their games. Over the years @Xaq kept PCGs alive, and fostered a supportive international community on Youtube, which continues to this day.

A colorful drawing of space, a glowing green planet taking up most of the frame. A purple space ship with kind of looks a bit like the Batman symbol streaks towards the planet.

The games encourage creativity, intellectual collectivism, improvisation, and a certain giddy embrace of sloppiness to get it done and played by your friends. Many games are created in five minutes before they’re played!

It’s a small, weird niche, and it’s a lot of fun.

I recently finished a game I had been working on and playing with Xaq for 3 years. I drew all these “screens” (pages) on an iPad, instead of paper, and most sessions were held online instead of in person, but otherwise the concept is the same.

Every PCG maker’s style is different, both in art and story. Here’s a taste of my visual style, taken from some of my favorite images I made for this last game.

There's a lot going on here. Let's start with that it's a drawing of a bedroom. Over the bed a scared looking head is suspended in a green liquid, which in turn hangs from a chain. On the other side of the room, a scowling skeleton smokes a pipe. A window shows a suburban neighborhood, with someone lounging on a deck chair under an umbella across the street. A green ooze creeps across the room towards the skeleton and the bed.

A colorful drawing of an anthropomorphic pizza slice and a alien mosquito-looking thing. The word 'v.s.' hangs in the air between the two.

A macadam street, that starts out normal, then twists and swirls impossibly. Speeding down the 'normal' section towards the swirls are two cars, one beeing driven by a scared-looking white man with shaggy black hair, and the other being driven by a happy dog. A two-headed scaly blue alien with big teeth and laser guns meneces from a small flying-saucer in front of the two cars. Further in the background, twisted in the road swirls, is a mad scientist using a machine to crank out henchmen.

A drawing of a disembodied blue head with a long purple beard and a swirling hat and a mean expression. This is The Wizard Sluiceface, and he is zapping a white man (Xaq) with his nose. Xaq's shaggy black hair stands on end, his teeth bared. A comic-style diagram shows that Xaq is being turned into a snail.

A drawing in a spattered, watercolor style. Xaq, a white man with shaggy black hair, is planted flat on a round green surface, sky all around him. He looks worriedly at a grinning pink man with blue hair and two laser guns and jet boots who flies in the air ahead. Antennas bristle with electrical energy beyond both Xaq and the man with jet boots.

A drawing of earth from orbit, the planet taking up the lower frame. A robot made up of one large square for the body, and smaller squares for each limb, gasps with terror into camera.

Cluck Fluckman has entered the consciousness.

Colored pencil doodle looking off the page.

A purple lined bean shape with a big eye and stick arms and legs. It stares off the page. There’s a pink swirl around it.

A drawing of an extreme close up of a man's face. The eyes take up most of the frame. They bug out, with dilated pupils and exaggerated vains. The man has a long pink nose and a purple mustache. The mouth is open in an expression of fear, with thick, yellow block teeth. A single drop of sweat rolling down the face.

🎨 This one speaks for itself.

A drawing of a junk heap, with a maniacal-looking robot with tractor treads and a pincer arm driving over it

🎨 It’s WALL-E, but twitchy.

A drawing of a sea with a tiny island in the middle. A castle occupies the majority of the island. Two creatures heads take up the foreground, their bodies implied to be flying, looking down menecingly at the castle.

🎨 A study in bright menece. Or something.

A distorted and exaggerated line drawing of a sad male aristocrat, eyes drooping, wearing froofy victorian garb.

🎨 This one is called, “The despondant upper class” and it’s making a statement. That statement may be, “I can’t draw fingers.”

A black and white doodle of a flying saucer

🎨 A black and white study of some of our nation’s top military imaginations.

A drawing of a dreamy landscape, no people, a path winding between distant mossy mountains below a night sky, a large purple moon hanging overhead.

🎨 Tolkien-inspired doodle-scape.

Another silly #doodle I draw using an MS Paint-like program. 🎨

A black and white squiggly line drawing of a smiling man with stars in his eyes and a neck beard.

#doodle 🎨

A drawing of a mutant mouth opened wide with big square teeth and a red tongue. The mouth is connected to painted metal, maybe, angular shapes, odd lines, maybe a server tower or newfangled smoke stack. Feet sprout from the sides of the mass, resting on rockets flairing fire. There are yellow triangles around the whole thing for emphasis. Or something.

🎨 Yes I drew this, but I don’t know what this is, and I won’t know what this is. The product of drawing lines by feel and then putting a mouth and rockets on it.

#art #drawing