Coping with Death through Elden Ring

I lost my grandma last summer. Even though my family should have been prepared for her departure, losing such a key figure in my life had a devastating effect on my thoughts. Two years of pandemic and the awareness of a brain of a 34-year-old man created a very bad mix. Tormented by the most common and human feelings about Death, I found comfort in an unexpected ally: a game that repeatedly puts the player in front of the Grim Reaper, Elden Ring.

Between the notes: A chat with The Last Guardian's Composer Takeshi Furukawa

Six years ago, I started my short but intense career as a freelance video game journalist taking courage and contacting Takeshi Furukawa for an interview. Takeshi is none other than the composer of one of the most intense and heartful soundtracks you can find in the video game industry: the score for The Last Guardian. The third game of Fumito Ueda and his team, genDESIGN, is something that never ceases to amaze me and for its fifth anniversary, I had the pleasure to have another chat with Takeshi, this time digging together behind the scene of the most iconic moments of The Last Guardian.

The following interview is a full transcription of a podcast we recorded on December 2021, spending an hour chilling together and talking about this incredible game that somehow kept us connected since its release. I have been guilty of failing to finish editing the video version all this time. Partly because my video editing skills are quite limited and a bit because a series of extraordinary events brought me here keeping me away from the keyboard for quite a while.

Ghosts and Devils: Jin Sakai, my great grandfather and me.

Ghost of Tsushima, the new IP by Sucker Punch, is finally out and now everyone can enjoy the story of Jin Sakai and his journey to save his home from the invaders. I had the pleasure to review the last big exclusive of Sony for this generation and one of the great things I experienced during the process is the many common points that this fictional adventure has with a real historical episode of my homeland. It put me in a unique position 'cause I found myself emotionally overwhelmed by a game that I approached with no expectations in this respect. This game brought back family memories shared by most of the sons of my land, some of those memories still hurt my people, others shaped a legendary legacy.

Warm-hearted thoughts for my quarantine

I'm in self-isolation since Monday 16th. At the end of that day, I started to feel very bad: my head was heavy, I was shaking, feeling cold. Soon after the fever came up and for the next three days my body's temperature raised up to 39,1 degrees. I lost the smell and taste, the cough was chocking me. Never felt so bad like this in years.

I'm still waiting to have a test, to understand if I'm one of the 528.000 persons in the world who have been infected by the COVID-19. In the meantime, most of the main symptoms are gone. I'm recovering fast, thanks to the love of my wife and some warm-hearted thoughts of strangers.

Games of the Decade: Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation

Ten years is a big chunk of time for Technology evolution. During this decade rockets have begun to land vertically on their start point, virtual reality to be more accessible, the cloud-based services to cover pivotal roles in our daily life. Video games as well have been overwhelmed by an impressive amount of transformations showing the incredible potential of the medium.
Innovation takes courage and these ten years were probably some of the most memorable considering how far we arrived thanks to the bravery of some game designer. So let's celebrate their creativity, their vision, their way to intend art and entertainment.

The unbearable lightness of Digital Delivery

The rise of digital delivery in the entertainment sphere is a topic widely debated in recent times. It doesn't matter how we look at it: digital delivery is the most economical solution for the video game industry and the cloud-based services are only the tip of the iceberg. With the growth of increasingly high-performance internet connections, new dynamics and phenomena are also emerging, rewriting our way of perceiving everyday life. A good example is how we conceive property, the way we own something, which is becoming less and less linked to the actual presence of a material component.

Art is Strange: talking with Dontnod about challenges and inspiration

The EGX Rezzed is one of the most awaited appointments in London during spring. It usually anticipates BATFA Awards and behind its doors, indie developers show their creations while an impressive amount of great panels full of special guests fill the calendar between the many hand-ons available. During one of these panels titled "Developing Daniel", Co-Game Director and Writer Jean-Luc Cano and Producer Luc Baghadoust talked about the new challenge creating Life is Strange 2 and what inspired the team. After this half an hour of interesting backstage, I had the pleasure to talk with them and delve into the topic.

Patrice Désilets restarts from the very beginning

The story of human evolution is amazing. Non-linear, chaotic, unexpected. We started from a curious adaptive advantage, the ability to discern the red colour from the rest of the range, which helped us to distinguish unique elements: ripe fruit, safe food, a way to survive. Soon those resources diminished and from the trees, we pushed ourselves towards the ground, an insidious environment that forced us to rise on the strength of our legs, widening the horizons. The walk became a run and the run then blurred into a marathon of millions of years. Now we are the pinnacle of the food chain, self-conscious, able to perceive the extraordinary miracle of existence. At the head of Panache Digital, Patrice Désilets - Assassin's Creed's dad - wants us to experience all these things through Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, his new, ambitious creature.

Drinking from the Firehose: No Man's Sky case as the mirror of the industry

"The intensity of the feedback was overwhelming but I decided: you either had to hide or you had to face it, so I did something that I wouldn't recommend but I decided to kind of drink from the Firehose. Every mail that you send to Hello Games goes directly to my folder (...), we didn't block or mute peolpe, if you talked about No Man's Sky then I probably read it."

With these words, Sean Murray, guilty of having been part of a failed mechanism, starts to talk about a long process of redemption. From the stage of the 2019 edition of the Game Developer Conference, the founder of Hello Games, visibly tense, shares his experience as a developer. His story is, at the same time, the sum of all that is good and unsustainable in the video game industry.

A journey with long-awaited Trico

Back in 2015, I was in Venice the day before the E3 Sony conference took place. I was a spokesman in an event built around synergies between video games and contemporary art. In those days I had the pleasure to meet great people such as the journalist Emilio Cozzi and Alessandro Bragalini, Art Director at Forge Reply for the video game transposition of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf. At lunch we found ourselves talking about our expectations for this new year of wonders and, case you don't believe me, they could confirm you I had no doubt about The Last Guardian being shown on stage. I'm a big fan of Fumito Ueda's games and the information I had gathered brought me to the same conclusion: the time was ripe for its comeback.

"If it happens, tomorrow I'll walk naked all around the San Servolo island.", Alessandro said, happy to share the same enthusiasm for Ueda's works but while keeping a reasonable amount of scepticism.
Well, too bad for him, 'cause I was right.

War at the time of video games

In the last 15 years, video games underwent a dramatic evolution, becoming the medium able to convey deep messages that we now know. Its maturation has made possible to handle issues of a certain weight, and now video games can contribute to people's cultural formation.

The result, however, has opened the flank to the intrusion of other spheres of our daily life that found in video games a new chance to influence and direct the perception of reality. I’m referring to the use of video games for propaganda purposes, a phenomenon that we can recognize in ISIS recruitment message its most recent iteration.