English

Daybreak (localised as e-Mission in some languages) is one of my favourite boardgames. It’s a game about climate change made by Matteo Menapace, a brilliant Italian game designer that lives in Britain, and the US game designer Matt Leacock, a veritable boardgame celebrity that authored the bestselling co-op game Pandemic long before the 2020 peak in usage of the word. I had the privilege of getting to know Matteo personally when we worked together on a videogame prototype for Games for the Many, a courageous attempt by the Corbyn-era British Labour Party to leverage videogames for political change. I met him several times at different game fairs, festivals and conferences, and I always found him full of unusual ideas, positive energy, intellectual curiosity. Daybreak is the condensed result of these two minds.

In 2023 I developed an app to tackle drunk driving.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin is a novel about work, video games, loss and love (in the ambiguous, or rather, extended, meaning “love” has in English).

Review based on the Rules-Play-Culture model.

Review based on the Rules-Play-Culture model.

I made a tiny video game, Trickle-Down Economics, for the anticapitalist game jam #GamesTransformed.

I’m migrating old content for this website/closet from its previous embodiment.

During the 2020 Spring pandemic, I’ve been invited to speak at an online meeting by IMT Madison, a Wisconsin branch of the International Marxist Tendency.

In January 2016 I made a narrative game, Two Interviewees, during the Narrative Game Design course held by We Are Müesli in Bologna.

In a period of crisis and decline of capitalism, to many people religion is the one certainty to cling on to. But if the Pope himself is no longer convinced he can keep his position until his death, this illusion of solidity begins to break down. The effect of the surprise announcement of his retirement by Pope Benedict XVI on the consciousness of over a billion Roman Catholics is going to be that of a spiritual earthquake, and it is surely going to have political consequences too.

These are the reviews, published on In Defence of Marxism and Hands Off Venezuela, of the three parts of Patricio Guzmán’s film The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile) screened in London in 2008. I’ve been responsible for this series of screenings during Autumn 2008.

When conservative Western commentators want to expose some “Third-World regime” involved in a conflict with one of the more powerful capitalist countries such as the United States, Britain or France, very often they use a journalistic device, that of the unelected interfering villain. According to this device, these “evil, backward countries” are in a far worse state than the more “civilised” Germany, Belgium or Canada, because there is either an unelected ayatollah in Iran, an unelected general in Myanmar, an unelected Dear Leader in North Korea, who can deliver a speech in a Teheran mosque, a Rangoon military school, a Pyongyang Party headquarters and decisively influence the course of national politics.

There is a gigantic social group that includes billions of human beings united by some fundamental elements:

During a summer holiday by the sea, many years ago, I invented a variant of Connect 4 together with Errico De Lisi and Giuseppe Sguera. We called this game Doh!, after Homer Simpson, of course.