La parola all'immagine: facciamo il nostro gioco

Many board games deal with art, art history, famous painters and art images: they can be strategy games where players participate in auctions, negotiate to trade works of art and deal works through galleries; they can also be quiz games, where players have to answer questions or guess the names of artists by interpreting visual clues. Art images are involved also in games where description and story-telling are required. In every case, the “translations” of images in words is a pivotal activity. This article analyses two examples of recently released games, where the relationship between images and words is fundamental. The first one is Guess the Artist. The Art Quiz Game (Laurence King Publishing 2017) where the players have to guess 60 artists, “reading” and interpreting three visual clues sketched on cards by Craig Redman and Karl Maier. The second example is the French board game Dixit (Libellud 2008), designed by Jean-Louis Roubira. In this game, based on a set of visionary cards drawn by illustrator Marie Cardouat, the player acting as the storyteller gives a word or a sentence to describe one of the images. In order to succeed, the description has to be clear to most of the other players, but not to all of them, leaving a degree of uncertainty between the realm of the image and the realm of words.

L'articolo analizza due tipologie di board-game (Guess the artist, 2017 e Dixit, 2010) in cu il rapporto fra immagini e traduzione verbale delle stesse è il perno del meccanismo di gioco. In un caso la decifrazione delle immagini proposte deve condurre i partecipanti all'individuazione univoca di un artista, nell'altro la descrizione deve mantenere un margine di ambiguità. Le diverse strategie ecfrastiche rivelano interessanti aspetti del nesso parola e immagine, stile e conoscenza.