The World's Largest Wargaming Table

Timothy Hutchings
The World's Largest Wargaming Table, 2006
29' x 28' x 4' MDF, wood, styrofoam, etc.

I'm a fan of Timothy Hutchings's work.

His The World's Largest Wargaming Table is very striking. I love how it starts as a blank landscape and becomes populated by gallery visitors playing with it.

His cardboard works, which range from formalist studies to large-scale models, are quite interesting, too.

Hutchings also runs PlaGMaDA (The Play Generated Map and Document Archive), which I blogged about earlier.

RPG outsider art

Yesterday Art Fag City posted about PlaGMaDA (the image above is from The Play Generated Map and Document Archive's homepage), an internet archive of art & documents done by roleplaying gamers.

Paddy Johnson (of Art Fag City) wrote:

Game nerds rejoice! The Internet brings you great tidings this time in the form of PlaGMaDA, an archive of play generated manuscripts and drawings depicting shared places. Notably, the project is more sophisticated than a database of Dungeon and Dragon collectible illustrations, the drawings resembling artifacts you might see at the Folk Art Museum. The site does however break from the art world tradition of labeling everything "Untitled" typically opting for purely descriptive titles.

I wanted to include a couple of my junior high school era (ok, ok... maybe early high school era) roleplaying documents. I dug around in my files and came up with what's below. Showing them to my girlfriend saying, "I couldn't find the really geeky stuff... just these." Based upon her expression, I could tell that the spaceship maps were plenty geeky enough.

Ayiti: The Cost of Life

Ayiti has been called the most depressing game ever... it's a surprisingly addictive "serious game" (i.e., socially relevant) in which the player tries to improve the life of a Haitian family of five. The best I've done so far is the keep the family relatively healthy and to get them slight improvements in education, material goods, and jobs.

The concept was developed in a workshop with Brooklyn high school students.