About me
I feel like I would not really be where I am today without a plethora of passions keeping my stress levels low and my brain spinning.
Videogames
Videogames have been with me since forever ago. I still remember when I went to get our first PC (an Intel 486) with my dad. It’s like a memory from a Guy Ritchie movie more than a child memory: I was 6 and we went together to get it into what I remember being a dark alley from a guy coming out of a door illuminated just by an industrial light on it.
I don’t really know if this is very accurate, but I remember being interested in PCs and videogames since then.
They allowed me to go through years where I couldn’t really make friends, thanks to the stories they narrated. I remember with fondness the time spent to finish adventure games such as “Monkey Island”, “Day of the Tentacle” or “Gobliiins”.
In middle school I got my first home console (my parents were against consoles for some reasons, even though they spent years playing at arcades or with their Commodore 64), a PS1. That allowed me to have access to a lot of classics and that’s when I encountered the first game of one of my favourite game series: “Metal Gear Solid”. I didn’t quite played it the way I think should be played, but I went back to it in the future, so no worries.
During high school I worked on a couple games. It was the time of FLASH, Game Maker and RPGMaker, however my friends really wanted to write a 3D engine from scratch. It didn’t go too well, but I worked with another friend on the design and on retrieving data for it. With the same friend I made a very silly RPGMaker game. It was a blast. We would meet once or twice a week to work on it: a lot of silly stuff, very litte testing, but we got to the end of it.
I also played a ton of bad games. I think I did that until I found a group of friends that shared my passion for videogames. Thanks to them I started being more selective with games. However too much time and too little focus span made me start one game after another without finishing a single one. The PS2/XBOX360 era has been a blur of unfinished games.
There are some exceptions to this issue, which are some of the games that are some of my favourites of all times: “REZ”, “Ikaruga”, “Resident Evil 4”, “Zone Of The Enders: Anubis”, “Vagrant Story”, and “Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater”. The last two games, especially, lit the fire of passion for videogames and made me start looking at games in a more critical way (also put a bug in my ear: “I want to make games in the future”).
Once I started the last year of the Bachelor’s I swore that I would finish one game before starting another. And that’s when I started appreciate more the time with games, along with taking way more time to decide what to play next each time.
My plans for game making didn’t really go that well: I have been suffering from ADD since high school, but it was left undetected and untreated since I was 33 years old. This was because I used all my energies and efforts to actually do what was required of me by school and all the times I tried to work on a project I would not be able to complete it. To make things worse Italian universities and industry are not really known for their acceptance of Videogame development as a serious activity so virtually no courses are available in university. To fix this I decided to go for a semester to study in Denmark, leaving all of my friends behind.
It was lonely. Very lonely. Crushingly so. However I managed to find two people that I connected with, followed some extremely interesting courses and had some of the fun I needed.
At the end of the Master’s I tried to pursue a path that would lead me into game design and development: a PhD in game design. I studied and learned a lot about behaviour change, nudging theories, cognitive sciences, and I also managed to work on a game prototype with a new type of physical controller with some PhD colleagues which won a prize in 2014; but, alas, the environment wasn’t really good to work on games and so, not without any difficulty, I decided to abandon the PhD and move on.
Now my connection with games is as strong as ever. Ok, mayber my tastes have changed since the times of trashy PS1 games rented at Blockbuster.
Favourite videogames
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“Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater”
“Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker”
“Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”
This, in my opinion, is the best trilogy in the game industry. Each game builds on top of the previous, expanding it in uninmaginable ways, but remaining faithful to the precedent. This is one of the games that made me say “I want to be able to make games like this”. The narrative is deep without becoming stuffy, the gameplay is slick, and the music is in my playlists even now. MGS3 is the game is the one that made me start playing the non-lethal route in every game that has that option. -
“Vagrant Story”
I played “Vagrant Story” on the PS1 when I was 17. It was a break from all the other JRPGs I played up till that moment: no random encounters, only one character, weapon customization, extreme non-linear exploration (a-la Metroidvania), body-part targeting, no grid movements, per-weapon range, rhythm-based combo system. And on the non-mechanics side there’s a gripping story, believable characters, and a world that had impact on future Squaresoft productions (e.g. “Final Fantasy XII” and “Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn”). Every time I play a JRPG I cannot compare it to “Vagrant Story”. -
REZ
“REZ” (and its successor “Child of Eden”) is the game that showed me what could be done when game designers succeed in creating a new genre. “REZ” shows that rail shooters can be good rhythm games. I still have the goosebumps while playing it now. -
Nier: Automata
“Nier: Automata” is the culmination of its creators’ skills. I like how an Action JRPG can have so many different play styles, not to mention that usually what this sort of games has is a properly designed combat system (I am looking at you “YS” or “Tokyo Xanadu: eX+”). The story, thanks to Yoko Taro, is a blast, the action, thanks to Platinm Games, never gets old, and all of this is kept together by the slick character design by Akihiko Yoshida (who worked at “Vagrant Story”, “Final Fantasy XII”, and “Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn”; just to connect everything). -
Disco Elysium
This is a gem I found by chance on my Steam queue. I was completely taken by surprise by it. “Disco Elysium” is a graphical adventure masked as a Western RPG, with a retro-sci-fi setting and a charismatic main character that, thanks to the interactions and the player’s choices, can trasform into anything between an alcoholic superstar-cop or a corrupted capitalist with a soft spot for art by the end of the game. This game not only reminds me of some of the best tabletop RPG campaigns I have played, but has one of the best skills I have ever met: “shivers”.