Little Antifa Novel: https://maurovanetti.itch.io/lan

Mauro Vanetti (it's me), the author of the controversial indie game Two Interviewees about the gender gap, has released a new "playable leaflet". This time we're talking about the Antifa movement in Italy, and more precisely in my hometown Pavia.

This game was made in Unity + Fungus (Two Interviewees used Ren'py) and it's playable in the browser or - with a better quality - on any desktop OS (Windows, Linux, Mac).

It's an experiment in interactive journalism and at the same time an attempt at using new media for political discourse and militant self-funding. The players can live through what happened in 2016 in Pavia when we tried to prevent a 300-strong Fascist (in the US you would call it white supremacist or alt-right) march from walking through the city centre. You can take completely different choices from the ones we took and see what would have happened.

The money donated to the game will go to support the legal expenses of the Antifascist Network of Pavia; in the game you find out why we need one.

PS: We played the game live on its launch day in a left-wing pub in Pavia. It's the same pub that you find in the game itself (see the screenshot above). It was quite exciting. The event was introduced by the indie duo We Are Müesli who spoke about narrative games and their usage as an alternative medium to explore history. Afterwards, we assigned each game character to a patron who had to act his or her role, plus the pub's host who read the voice-over. The game choices were voted by everyone in the room by raising hands, and sometimes this aroused  heated debates. It was fun and a nice example of what interactive theatre can achieve, I hope games conceived for this purpose will start to pop up!