MADE IN ITALY
LANGUAGE: ITALIAN
What does the label Made in Italy mean when it comes to videogames? How is Italy represented in and by video games? In this GAME TALK, Marco Benôit Carbone and Riccardo Fassone share an overview of the Italian videogame visualscape.
The elusive Italianness is expressed by video games both by domestic productions and by international titles that depict the local culture. In the recently published anthology IL VIDEOGIOCO IN ITALIA. Storie, Rappresentazioni, Contesti edited by Marco Benoît Carbone and Riccardo Fassone, several Italian and international researchers examine the Italian consumption and production of video games, the representation of this country, the relationships between games, comics, cinema, sports and national brands, the communities of players, critics and scholars as well as the growing institutional recognition of the medium as a vehicle for the promotion of historical and cultural heritage. In this GAME TALK, Marco Benoît Carbone and Riccardo Fassone discuss some peculiar aspects of the “Italian videogame”. So, what is the quintessence of the Italian video game, to paraphrase Roland Barthes?
Marco Benoît Carbone is Lecturer at Brunel University, London. For Mimesis he wrote Tentacle erotica. Horror, seduction, pornographic imagery (2013). He is founder and editor of the magazine GAME and editor of JICMS - Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies.
Riccardo Fassone is a researcher at the University of Turin. He has published two monographs, Every Game is an Island. Ending and Extremities in Video Games (2017) and Cinema and videogames (2017). He is founder and editor of the journal GAME. He creates games with the Dotventi collective.
