Printed Bones
Creators
Overview
“Printed Bones” is a video game which takes a novel approach to the “bones of our past” theme. In the game the player is presented with a book of paper cutouts which they can interact with to form the bones of a new narrative. Drawing on famous poetry and imagery this interactive experience allows you to play with the bones of the past in a truly novel way.
This fabulous piece was awarded the runner up prize in our online, team category. Read on below to find out more about this project. Be sure to play it yourself and also to read the judges feedback to unpick the fantastic technical, artistic and creative aspects of this project.
Visualisation
Printed Bones is a videogame – to play it yourself you will need to either:
Below are a series of images taken from the game to give you a taste of what it is like!
Instructions
- Download, Unzip, and Open the folder “PrintedBones(ver1.0) – HeritageJam2017”.
- Open the file “PrintedBones(ver1.0).exe”. A new window will appear.
- If necessary, you can change the display and input settings on this window. We recommend playing on the default settings.
- Hit the “Play!” button on the lower right corner and the game should start.
Paradata
Judges’ Comments
The technical and artistic merit of this piece was highly commended by our panel of judges, with Paul Backhouse stating that it was “beautifully created and lovingly illustrated.
Matthew Tyler-Jones added that he “could see this being an activity in a museum gallery”.
Izzy Bartley and Zsolt Sándor added that it was a visually pleasing piece that drew the player in, with Zsolt adding that he “liked the convergence of archaeology and poetry. It makes one think about history and archaeology from a different perspective.”
For constructive critique the judges noted that this would be a fabulous application on a iPad and hoped that it could be rolled out onto this platform.
Izzy added that at times the layering of the images meant you missed out on some of the poetry.
This piece was a pleasure to play and engage with – our judging panel and #THJ2017 team are greatly looking forward to seeing what Almudena and Manuel create next!
Acknowledgements
This video game is free, and it cannot be commercially distributed.
All images used are available online as Public Domain Marked images.
The poems are included under fair use as part of a re-mixed artistic piece and as educational material (serious game).