Our House vs Your House: We make stories not war. Trial Run #1.

We’re having a drawing and writing party at Indyish central (ie Our House) next weekend, and we’d like to invite you to join us, either in person or from the comfort of your very own home.

The basic idea behind the game is that writers and drawers take turns making the pages of a story. The pages go up on the wall where you’re playing, and up online where others can choose to continue the story in their own ways, either by adding writing or by drawing what happens next.

How it works:

players get numbered then take turns being the Head Author.
some drawers volunteer to go first to get the story started. their drawings become the possible starting points. then the person who is #1 becomes Head Author.

When it’s your turn as Head Author you can
- choose which page you want to follow from, and then make and add the next official page. or,

- choose which page to follow from, and have everyone draw possible extentions and then pick which one becomes the official next page or,

- choose which page you want to follow from and then choose a page from someone playing online (Your House?) to be the next page at Our House. or,

- make an edit. Change which pages are the official pages of the story. If you do this, you don’t get to add a page. (we’ll make edits onthe wall by moving masking tape, and we’ll put the final story up online, and on lulu, a little while after we’re done. everything drawn during the game will be licenced creative commons attribution.)

The Head author makes the official story, while everyone else makes alternate versions and possible forks which may become part of the official story durning the next Head Authors turn. This position (Head Author) rotates after each turn so you’re always on both sides of the powerful Authoring position. Use masking tape to draw the lines from official page to official next page.

Whenever a writer or drawer adds a piece to the story, they also add their number- making it easy to credit people after, and also making it possible to see who, at the end, ends up with the most pages in the final version of the Official story.

If you want to come over to Our House and play with us, come by Saturday September 23, early eve (like eight). If you want to play with us online, that’s super sexy and can happen at any time. Once the story is open sourced, the act of writing and forking it can go on endlessly (just like code! and life!).

As images get drawn at our house we’ll scan them and put them up on Flickr and Kollabor8, and up on our own site. You can play the game with us using the images on either of these websites as your starting points.

Flickr: Upload your images to the group called Indyish- Our House vs Your House.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ourhousevsyourhouse/

You can add alternate text or extend the text that’s already there, by using the comments. You can also put links in the comment area of Flickr. So if you draw the next panel, and upload it to flickr, (and add it to the Our House vs Your House group,) you can link the pages of the story together in the way you think they should go. And we can use the group forum to talk about the stories, and make alternate orders for the pages.

Kollabor8: When the game starts at our house we’ll also upload the drawings to Kollabor8.

Kollabor8 is a perpetual collaborative online art making game. Users take images from Kollabor8, save them to their computer, and alter them, and then upload it back into kollabor8. In other words, Kollabor8 is about editing the original image rather then drawing a next image to further the story.

In other other words, there are many different ways to play. This is the first trial run - we are playing to see what happens, and to see if we need more rules, or if these few loose frameworks are enough to make for fun parties or a cool stories.

Our Trial Run 1 of House vs Your House will start at 8pm (ish and eastern standard time) on Saturday September 23. If you want to draw or write, or just kick back and have a beer with us and catch up (it’s been a while!) please join us! online or live, we’d love to have you around.