“Italian-style game design”, five meetings on video games made in Italy

“Italian-style game design”: five meetings to discover if there is an Italian way to video games, between market, art and research. This is the objective of the new series of events organized by Ex Machina an association committed to the diffusion of gaming culture as a social and political tool and “mirror of the world”, not only as it is but also as it could be.

The program, in the form of dialogue and open discussion, focuses on the “DNA” of video games made in Italy: from satire to language, from dissemination to the production chain. The meetings, free and open to all, are not conferences or traditional talks, but spaces without entry barriers to discuss video games and, through them, politics, society and culture.

And part on February 12th al Arci Sparwasser club (via del Pigneto 215, Rome) with Painful Gamesa Perugian studio that has built its identity on satire and kitsch, with references to an “all-Italian” 80s aesthetic, in the event entitled “Aesthetic anarchy between kitsch and subversion”.

April 14th will be the turn of IVIPROthe largest Italian association dedicated to gaming culture, with the dialogue “Tradition and myth, a unique origin for Italian design”: at the center, the issue of whether the uniqueness of “made in Italy” in gaming is necessarily linked to the national cultural heritage.

On May 12, at Sparwasser, the focus shifts to languages ​​and adaptation with members of translation studies Porcaloc e Wabbit in the comparison “Language as a barrier, translation and adaptation as part of the game”, also to understand why fewer and fewer titles are translated into Italian.

Closing in June with RomaGameDeva reference community for developers from Lazio, hosted at the Di Vittorio Foundation (via Donizetti 7B, Rome), to delve into the complexities of those who today try to “make video games” in the Bel Paese, in the meeting “What does Italian development mean?”.

The entire cycle aims to answer a fundamental question: is there really a recognizable figure of the Italian video game, a model capable of combining language, imagery and industry, as happened with Neorealism for cinema? Ex Machina tries to do this by putting authors, popularizers, associations and supply chain professionals around the same table.