Gamics: Experimenting with Comics and Games

This past weekend I have been playing with Comic Book Creator, a neat application that allows you to create gamics. Nathan Ciprick defines gamics as the "combination of comics and videogames". As he writes on his website:

"Simply put Gamics offers an opportunity to tell stories. With nothing but great admiration for the talented artists who create our games, Gamics seeks to tell new stories that treat the material with the respect they deserve. These vast and beautiful virtual worlds invite us into their reality every day. We become a part of them in our minds. Now, through Gamics, we can discover new stories in their world" (Nathan Ciprick)

I love the idea of gamics, but I'm not really interested in storytelling, so for my first experiments, I decided to cut-and-paste various popular artifacts. "F.E.A.R. I.K.E.A." (Download FearIkea.pdf) combines the fetish for IKEA's catalog with Monolith's awesome FPS. "CRASH" (Download crash.pdf) is what happens when you play too much Burnout while reading JG Ballard's stories; "WAR/GAMES" is about the ideology of games (Download WarAndGames.pdf), while "SIM-BAUDRILLARD" (Download SimBaudrillard.pdf) is about... well, you get the drift, right?

Nathan Ciprick's Gamics website; Plus: An interview on PC ZONE

Comic Book Creator