Games & Gamification
Public Engagement Games & Videogames for FACETS
As a post-doc working in the ERC project "FACETS", I have created several games for the purpose of public engagement. From card games on pareidolia to "guess the deep fake" quiz and even a mobile videogame on the cultural bias of faces used on social media and in AI. You can check the official Google Store Page of the videogame here
Semio-Murder Mystery Dinners
Back in 2016 I was studying Semiotics in Bologna and I became friends with another student with the passion for both semiotics and games: Jacopo Cellini. Together we reinvented the formula of Murder Mystery Dinners by writing our stories and having players being all detectives! We started from some small bars in Bologna and had so much success with hundreds of participants that we ended up organizing one even for the 5stars Hotel of Allegro in Turin! You can check the video here .
With Club Silencio I also created one special version for the European Night of Research back in 2022.
Truth Detectives: An award winning conspiracy board game on digital disinformation for enhanced media literacy skills.
One day I got a call from the friend, scholar and VR Artist Momchil Alexiev. He asked me: "how would you make a board game on disinformation and digital media?". I spent some time thinking at a game concept and wrote it down. As I couldn't work on it at the time, he and his team developed this idea for a whole year. When I first playtested it I couldn't believe how good that game was. And very soon it became an award winning board game! You can check the website here: https://truthdetectiv.es/
Videogames at the Movie Theater
The title of my book is a reference to a famous quote of Pasolini on Cinema. To present the ideas inside of it to a large audience and to spread a literacy on videogames, together with my friend and colleague Bruno Surace we proposed to the National Museum of Cinema a live and commented session of gameplay inside a Movie Theater. Who would I've thought that so many people would be willing to come to a movie theater on a sunday morning to see me playing games?!
Roleplaying at the University after Covid-19
Covid-19 has affected in many ways how we live today. One consequence of it has been the reduction of social gathering and interactions between students. To fight against this issue, I am part of a group of nerd scholars which organizes role playing sessions and LARPS for students. We not only allow students to discover well known games, such as D&D and Pathfinder, but we also invent stories and systems. You can check some of our activities on Instagram!
