Back in Milan, Italy
Ciao ragazzi. Here I am, back in Italy after twenty intense days in the US. I survived one whole week completely offline! Amazing. I was going insane at one point, but hey, addictions are dangerous so a drastic cure was needed (28 days style...). I am 'clean' now, although I found an unsettling number of messages in my mailbox... Apologies to everybody for my long silence. I promise I will reply within 48 hours. This year's Game Developers Conference was simply great. I met a flotilla of interesting GamePeople, saw all of my old/new friends, gave a lecture on game criticism (which will be soon online available). In short, a blast. I also fell in love with Portland, Oregon, my favorite US city after San Francisco. Yep, I like it even more than Seattle... More on this topic on the next issue of Ultratomato as I'm currently writing a Maffia Traveller report. No time for procrastination: there are just too many news. Let's start with Francesco Alinovi's Resident Evil. Sopravvivere all'orrore (Resident Evil. Surviving the horror). Volume 6 of Ludologica is available at Pergioco's gamestores and all the major Italian bookstores as I write this. The table of contents and my introduction are available right here. Next in line is the massive SimCity Readerwhich has grown bigger and bigger (à la Tetsuo in Otomo's Akira). It will be out in May. And here's something completely different. Massimo Maietti's monumental Semiotica dei Videogiochi is currently in print! The book, a dense but intriguing theoretical analysis of videogames using the most advanced semiotical tools, will be published in May 2004 by Edizioni Unicopli. It's a massive effort. Massimo, the Italian equivalent of Espen Arseeth, currently works at Nintendo Europe in Frankfurt and will be teaching at our Master in Game Design at IED Milan next year (more info about this soon). You can read the extended synopsis here (Italian only, sorry - English description on its way, along with Ruggero Eugeni's preface). The book is part of the ContaminAzioni (Contamin/Actions) series, which features our 2002 Game Reader, Per una cultura dei videogames. Teorie e prassi del videogiocare. By the way, since we managed to sell all the available copies, we decided to print an extended version which includes three new essays. Sort of Per una cultura dei videogames. Teorie e prassi del videogiocare 1.1 The book will be available in late May as well. We will be presenting both books - plus the Ludologica series - at the Turin International Bookfair on May 7th. More information will follow. Here is the book description:
Come funzionano i videogiochi, e cosa accade quando li giochiamo? L’obiettivo di Semiotica dei Videogiochi è decifrare il linguaggio con cui videogioco e giocatore si scambiano informazioni e valori, si seducono reciprocamente ed entrano in conflitto, dando origine al fenomeno dell’interazione. L’autore esamina i videogiochi da una prospettiva semiotica, con il fine di sviluppare tanto una teoria generale della testualità videoludica quanto una pratica di analisi dei singoli videogiochi. Rielaborando all’interno del panorama teorico dell’interattività gli strumenti messi a disposizione dalla semiotica interpretativa e quella generativa, dalla teoria letteraria, dagli approcci post-strutturalisti, dalla teoria dei mondi possibili e quella degli ipertesti, Semiotica dei videogiochi propone un approccio innovativo ed originale che dà conto delle strutture testuali dei videogame così come della dimensione pragmatica della loro ricezione.
More info to follow soon!
