Behind the Scenes: Nicola

My name is Nicola, I was born in 1997, and it’s highly likely that any text published by LOOMOON – be it a set of rules, an article on our website, or the effect of a playing card – has passed through my hands.

Who am I?

I started playing when I was very young; in fact, my journey with video games began in 2000, when my father brought home a PlayStation 2, although even today I still wonder whether my controller was actually connected, or whether my sisters were just pretending to let me play with them. In any case, that period turned me into an insatiable gamer. I fell in love with the atmosphere of *Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance*; I devoured the second instalment and lost myself in *Champions of Norrath*, reloading the game and importing characters from my previous save to face the same boss hundreds of times, all in the hope of obtaining his rarest loot and levelling up as much as possible.

Although, until I recently cut down on the time I spent playing video games, I had always played on as many platforms as possible, my official move into the world of PC gaming took place during the early alpha versions of Minecraft and Terraria and was cemented by the start of my journey with League of Legends, during the original second season of the popular MOBA.

All in all, I can say that I’ve spent more time in Purgatory in *Mass Effect 3* than in local nightclubs, that I’ve lost myself for whole minutes gazing at the magnificent starry horizons of *Destiny 2* – even though the game didn’t quite win me over – and that I could watch the extended version of *The Lord of the Rings* on a loop without ever getting tired of it.

School Term

At primary school – that magical time when secrets about video games were passed on by word of mouth like urban legends – I gained a ‘superpower’: access to the internet, which allowed me to reveal the existence of Shedinja to my classmates, to be the first to learn the meaning of STAB, and to discover the possibility of encountering Shiny Pokémon.

During secondary school, it was the turn of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts – games that were hard to come by because they were spread across different platforms and generations – which fuelled my passion for profound stories of love and true friendship.

At secondary school, however, I was the sort of pupil you wouldn’t want to take as a role model, and I often got into trouble because of my passion for games. I still remember that lesson when a classmate and I had our expensive Magic: The Gathering decks confiscated: we’d finished our homework early and, confident in our knowledge of the game, decided to play a match that ended in a draw, as the decks ended up in the teacher’s bag and, to be honest, I can’t remember if she ever gave them back to us.

Role-playing

Where video games failed to give me the freedom and narrative depth I was looking for, role-playing games came to my rescue, treating my trusted group of friends to long evenings full of laughter – like when, during our D&D 3.5 adventures, I created a monk capable of outrunning a fully-grown dragon in flight. Meanwhile, I still can’t stop laughing when I think back to the time, whilst I was acting as Game Master, when one of my players brought an end to his own life and that of all his companions by triggering an earthquake whilst they were inside a hundred-storey tower.

Although I have been, and will always remain, a ‘forever DM’ for a few years now, during my evenings as a player I have managed to play numerous characters across a variety of settings: my gaming experience has also led me to create characters that take me out of my comfort zone and to explore literary genres that I don’t particularly favour, such as horror and detective stories.

The Lockdown Period

Although I tried to play role-playing games whenever I could and spent many evenings rolling dice and drawing cards with my friends, my real passion for board games was sparked quite unexpectedly during lockdown.

During that period of enforced isolation, Chiara and I started buying games from every online shop imaginable and played a wide variety of games every single day: from the most complex worker-placement games to fast-paced deck-building games, as well as tense co-operative games and narrative-driven American games. Playing games had become our way of communicating!

It was amidst this whirlwind of discoveries – probably because we couldn’t get enough of what was around us – that we decided to set up LOOMOON and start creating our own games, so that we could channel our passion, our accumulated experience and our creativity into bringing something of our own to life.

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