Welcome back to Artcade, the newsletter that likes to keep you waiting. Is waiting for a new episode of Artcade the very essence of Artcade? Readers, in unison: no. Okay, message received. And without wasting any more time, let’s get started.
Normally, the summer break ends in September. This year, though, September was taken over by the arrival of a new gamer, one who, for the time being, spends his days filling diapers and drinking the milk he’ll use to fill the next one. As you may have guessed, his dad (that would be me) has spent his time washing things, cuddling, washing more things, daydreaming about sleeping for more than three hours straight, and washing things he didn’t even know needed washing. And here we are in October.
Quite a lot happened between August and September. I wrote a piece for Santa Pazienza, the Italian newsletter by Mattia Ravanelli and Alessandro Zampini, in which I look at five video games from a human perspective. Because video games are too often described as a solitary pastime, while those of us who play know that some of the best moments happen when we’re sitting side by side. You can read it here:
Inside, you’ll find moments of wonder, moving experiences, and unexpected patriotism. We start from when I was veeeery little and work our way up to more recent times. Can we compare it to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? My answer: no.
Proust’s answer:
Other things happened, too. Domenico Schillaci invited me to give a guest lecture in his Principles of Game Design module, part of the Master’s program in Interaction Design and User Interface at the University of Palermo. I want to thank him publicly because the experience made me reflect on just how vast the expressive possibilities of video games really are. His students seem to have fully embraced the endless possibilities at their disposal, and every prototype I got to see was more interesting than the last. My only regret is that I couldn’t be there in person.
And to top it all off, I took part as a “reader” in the selection of projects for the second issue of Game Poems Magazine, a fantastic online magazine featuring short interactive experiences: the equivalent of poetry in video game form. You can play through the entire first issue here: www.gamepoems.com/issue01.
It’s a fascinating experiment and well worth checking out.
Thank you all for your patience (I can picture you checking your inbox to see if a new episode has arrived, opening your spam folder, filing a missing-person report...). The plan is to get back to publishing every other week, though we’ll see whether the little guy who just moved in agrees. For now, I’m sending each and every one of you a hug. There are almost 900 of us on Giochetti, the Italian edition (nine hun-dred!), and about a hundred here on Artcade. We’ll catch up on social media, through messages, or in the next episode. Ciao!