Behind the Scenes: Chiara

My name is Chiara and I handle all the administrative tasks, the bookkeeping and liaising with suppliers; in short, I manage all the non-creative aspects of LOOMOON.

Who am I?

I studied ballet, but although I loved it, I knew I wasn’t cut out for the big stage as a dancer – partly because my favourite time of the year was the run-up to the recital: when we chose the costumes, make-up and hairstyles, and rehearsed the lighting, the musical arrangements and the set designs.

As the total swot I was as a teenager, I combined the rigour required for ballet with that of my studies, and today I bring that same dedication to LOOMOON: whilst the creative side is the show itself, I make sure the lighting is perfect and that everything is ready for the premiere.

The meeting with Nicola

After meeting Nicola, I swapped the evenings I’d spent revising my schoolwork for hours spent watching him play video games, almost spellbound both by the artistic quality and the complexity of the on-screen action, and by his extraordinary ability to manage so many actions at once.

Encouraged to have a go myself, I hadn’t realised how many years’ experience I lacked in using a controller; in fact, up until then, the only time I’d used a PC had been for school research, so the result was decidedly slow and clumsy.

Even today, the difference in skill and ability remains significant; however, it doesn’t stop us from enjoying evenings together with friends playing games such as Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Bomberman and Just Dance, which I’ve become quite familiar with.

Role-playing

I must admit, Nicola has managed to pass on many of his passions to me, because he has always made a point of seeking out aspects of these topics that might interest and engage those around him, and this has also been the case with role-playing.

To be perfectly honest, role-playing games are fertile ground for nurturing one’s passions and for understanding what brings satisfaction to each individual: as far as I’m concerned, let me play a dwarf just over a metre tall, capable of routing his opponents with a two-handed hammer, or, when it’s my turn, let me charge headlong as an orc wielding his trusty axe. Magic? What a bore!

The real reason why I’m now willing to jump straight into a new adventure without a second thought is linked to an experience I had during a campaign where Nicola was the Game Master: in every session, he would present us with a puzzle to solve, the solution to which pointed to a specific page in a real book and, subsequently, to the chorus of a song, which in turn had to be used as a clue to move the adventure’s plot forward.

The Lockdown Period

During lockdown, I spent my days attending online university lectures and my evenings playing board games with Nicola, which is where I discovered my passion for detective games; I learnt how to manage resources, devise my own strategy and adapt it to unexpected developments during the games.

However, my brazen luck – which allowed me to draw the perfect card at just the right moment and roll the correct number on every dice roll – was evident in most of the games we tried, and it prompted us to trawl through online shop catalogues in the hope of finding a game that offered just the right amount of adrenaline from a dice roll, whilst also allowing enough room for planning to compensate for bad luck.

At every match, as I imagine many people do, Nicola would tell me how he would have organised the game to avoid any unpleasant situations we’d encountered or to build on the experience we’d had, so I decided to encourage him – just as he had done for me over the years – to set up LOOMOON and start giving free rein to all those ideas.

Discover our projects!