"Experimental cross-media work" that aims to produce linked novels, comics, RPGs and computer games.
March 31, 2022
[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Game Developer and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press]
Author: Age Of Games
Saturday 9th April 2022, in Bari (and livestreaming), at the “Middle Earth” pub, historic meeting place for the city's gamers, AgeOfGames (ex-PMStudios -Italy) is proud to present the indie cross-media project NumeN and to give life to a meeting-debate, live and online, with the Narrative Designers Collective CyberScrivens
NumeN is an immense Narrative Universe developed by Age Of Games (www.ageofgames.net) and conceived by the Narrative Designer Collective CyberScrivens. The aim of the project is to create an independent experimental cross-media work based on a trilogy of novels, a comic, a pen&paper rpg and a strategy-rpg videogame. The common denominator of these media is the setting, a powerful immersion in a futuristic reality characterized by the existence of a cyber-oneiric web that connects, manipulates and confuses the unconscious dreams and thoughts of a humanity immersed in a hell of lies and despair. Salvation can only be achieved at the cost of a gruelling battle for the truth. Following the launch of the first novel, which will be published and distributed in Italy by the well-known Delos publishing house from 9th April, many other developments and international meetings will be announced and it will be possible to talk and interact, even concerning elements of game or narrative design, directly with the authors at various stages of the project. Presentation of the First Novel
During the meeting on April 9th, the first novel of the trilogy will be presented, published and distributed in Italy by the well-known publishing house Delos Books, an entity of primary importance in the field of fantasy. For those who attend live it will be possible to speak in person with the authors and receive a physical copy signed by the CyberScrivens collective. Presentation of the ludic-narrative declinations and social-aesthetic inspiration of the project
The authors of the work, game & narrative designers, artists and producers, will illustrate the basic lines of the conception and development of the project up to the launch date of the first fundamental piece: the novel. Exclusive images, designs and work-in-progress concepts by the artist Giuseppe Falco will be shown for the first time.
On this occasion the public will be able to fully grasp the social- aesthetic conception of the project, an idea of aesthetics deliberately in conflict with most mainstream productions of pure entertainment, an aesthetic that has been entrusted to a great old-school artist, with a solid training in the last century, and has given life to a style of graphic design that can be defined as materic and tending towards oneiric impressionism in which the author's mark is linked to the complex reality of lines traced by hand on a sheet of paper rather than to the bare sharpness of the virtuality on the screen.
Every phase of the project's presentation will be open to a wide debate with the live and online audience.
"I like to think that NumeN is the spiritual successor to a project developed more than twenty years ago by a group of crazy young people who, with very little resources - in a really difficult territory like that of Southern Italy - at the beginning of the global era of internet, managed to give life to a work of great narrative depth, a work also conceived in cross-media mode that today I define a paradoxical, epic, and successful failure ". - says Fabio Belsanti, AgeOfGames CEO and Lead Game Designer. "Today we are relaunching 'ship of fools', with, in part, a new crew, no longer young on a personal level, but no less enthusiastic and motivated. The group of creators of this "thing" comes from multiple "psycho-physical-cultural" places of our strange, contradictory, conflicting, complex, beautiful Italian peninsula. We are all veteran storytellers, far removed from classic commercial-mainstream logic, intimately fascinated and shaped by the structures and the swirling dreams of meanings in the great ludo-narrative flow of human history. I truly believe that NumeN will succeed, in all its many directions, in being what the aforementioned Etrom project could have been. "
“I am a great supporter of contamination between genres". - says the best-selling science fiction writer Maico Morellini "I have always practised it with conviction and I find it a really powerful tool for storytelling, as much of my writing demonstrates, intertwining genres that tend to evade canonical classifications. Therefore, taking a step forward and getting to contaminate the narrative by mixing different forms of communication with each other was the natural evolution of this preference of mine. And what better way to do it than through an innovative cross-media project like that of NumeN, together with an 'enlightened' collective like that of CyberScrivens? So to contaminate styles and contaminate media: this is the course I hold to with determination."
“I've always wanted to add a further dimension to everything I write” . - says the award-winning writer and publisher Lukha B. Kremo, "I have felt this need since my first novel, in fact my first novel came out in 1999 with a CD-ROM attached containing a soundtrack and a series of images and drawings for the book. Some of my other works have inspired augmented reality projects. The scenarios I describe are very well suited to both videogames and interactive digital productions. After 25 years of experience (and my specializations in History and Philosophy) I believe that my contribution can be decisive in giving a mark of quality to NumeN and future CyberScrivens projects.”
The meeting will take place on Saturday 9th April 2022 (6:30 p.m.) in Bari, in the "Throne Room" of the “Middle Earth” pub (Via Giovanni Amendola, 133).
Participating in the presentation event will be:
• Fabio Belsanti (CEO & Lead Game Designer - AgeOfGames, Founder of the CyberScrivens collective)
• Lukha B. Kremo (Award winning writer, Founder Kipple Officina Libraria and the CyberScrivens collective)
• Maico Morellini (Award winning writer, Founder of the CyberScrivens Collective)
• Marcello Santoro (Game Designer - AgeOfGames)
LIVESTREAMING
The livestream, in Italian, will be broadcast on the AgeOfGames Twitch channel:
https://www.twitch.tv/age0fgames
SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENTS OF THE PROJECT
Further meetings, national and international, physical and online, will take place following the presentation on 9th April, culminating in a Crowdfunding campaign in the autumn of 2022 to support the publication of novels, comics and the pen&paper rpg in English and other languages.
Our strategic-creative plan also provides for fundraising for the development of the videogame in connection with the aforementioned activities during the second half of 2022 and 2023.
To follow and participate in the next phases of this collective creation, we invite you to navigate with us in the parallel universes of dreams of the post-truth society starting from the portal www.cyberoniric.com.
About AgeOfGames (www.ageofgames.net)
AgeOfGames, based in Bari, Italy, is an indie development company of games and interactive narrative works in the cultural, historical-reconstruction, and entertainment sectors.
Founded in 2001, the company develops and publishes, through various distribution partners, interactive cross-media projects around the world (for consoles, personal computers, mobile devices and the Internet).
The company has always preferred cultural narrative projects as the founder, CEO and Lead Designer, Fabio Belsanti has an academic background as a historian with a master's degree in geopolitics, teaches "Game Design" at the Link Campus University in Rome and other major institutes, and writes multidisciplinary novels, articles and essays.
AgeOfGames has successfully used game design in many fields by creating recreational-educational services, products and brands for large international companies such as IBM (Historia Ludens) and important public bodies such as the Puglia Region administration and INAIL.
In 2018, the company also launched a continuing multidisciplinary research project, based on a series of meetings and round table discussions, which studies and investigates various historical-philosophical issues related to the theory and practice of game development in global culture (www.videogamesandhighculture.com). The project, which will see its fifth edition in autumn 2022, has had international guests, and counts among its partners organisations of primary academic, videogame, scientific, and cultural importance.
About Delos Books
Delos Books is an Italian publishing house active in particular in the field of fantasy and genre literature, founded in 2003 by Silvio Sosio, Franco Forte and Luigi Pachì. Over the years Delos has published multiple novels and short stories by award-winning authors.
About CyberScrivens
Cyberscrivens is a collective project of narrative designers, directly linked to AgeOfGames, founded in 2021 by Fabio Belsanti, Maico Morellini and Lukha B. Kremo.
The primary goal of the three founders, veteran indie game designers and writers, is to explore and shape all the interactive forms of storytelling historically connected to the creation of complex psycho-emotional experiences. Starting from the assumption that there is no real conflict between the multiple narrative universes to which man has given life over time and space, CyberScrivens bravely wants to get lost in all the past, present and future paths of the stories of history in an attempt to give life to a flow of ludo-narrative meanings tending to an unattainable atemporal "absolute".
About the three founders of CyberScrivens
Fabio Belsanti is the CEO, founder and lead game designer of AgeOfGames & PMStudios. Earning his degree for history at the University of Siena, he has written various articles and reviews for specialized magazines while also developing multiple multimedia projects in the cultural field. In 2013, he began creating algorithmic trading strategies developed for automated AI trades. In 2015 he wrote the science fiction novel Etrom-The Astral Essence (Delos Book), and in 2018 Betting on the end of the world (finalist of the Urania prize). In collaboration with professor Marco Accordi Rickards, CEO of Vigamus Academy, he published in December 2021 the essay "Homo CyberLudens" which crystallizes, thanks to contributions from game designers and academics of international importance, some of the considerations from his project "Videogames & High Culture".
Maico Morellini, born in 1977, lives in the province of Reggio Emilia and works in the IT sector. With his first science fiction novel, Il Re Nero, he won the 2010 Urania Award, published in November 2011 by Mondadori. In 2014 he created the hard science fiction series The Necronauts for Delos Digital. In 2016 his novel The Third Memory was released by Urania Mondadori. In 2018 he published The Diary of Extinction (Watson Editions) and, in 2020, The Spider of Time (Providence Press), both novels won the Italy Award (2019, 2021) as best fantasy novels.
Lukha B. Kremo, possessor of a degree in Medieval History, in 2015 won the Urania Award (Mondadori) with the novel Pulphagus® Mud of the Skies, and the Robot Award (Delos) 2018 with Invertito (published in the homonymous magazine and in the Hungarian magazine Galaktika). He has published a dozen science fiction and noir novels and more than a hundred short stories. He directs the Kipple Officina Libraria publishing house, teaches History and Philosophy in high schools, and delights in composing experimental electronic music.
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