PlayNook Spotlight | Valerio Acampora, Author

Valerio Acampora is one of the authors of PlayNook. He was born 41 years ago in Torre del Greco but grew up in the province of Livorno (Tuscany) where he currently lives. Following his graduation in Pisa, he specialised in screenwriting at Rome’s Centre for Experimental Cinematography. After living for some time in Canada, Rome and Turin, collaborating on screenplays and creative projects of all kinds, Valerio discovered his other great vocation, teaching. He is a teacher now, but since he has never lost his passion for screenwriting, writing and great stories, he decided to return to his first love by joining the PlayNook gang, and more specifically the team of authors led by Roan Johnson. Here’s what he told us in a wide-ranging conversation.

First of all, Valerio, do you like AudioGames?

I do, very much. They are easier to play than gamebooks and video games, but they are just as rewarding, if not more so. You see, I walk to school in the morning, the journey takes about 20 minutes, and I really appreciate the possibility of playing an AudioGame instead of listening to a podcast because an AudioGame does not drain one’s mental energy. Instead, it entertains, it stimulates, it gets the day off to a good start like a good cup of coffee. 

You come from screenwriting and things work a little differently in that field than in publishing, don’t they?

Of course, there are differences. One of the reasons why I have always enjoyed writing screenplays is that you are never alone if you write for the cinema, whereas if you are a novelist, for instance, you often work alone. Apart from battling with the director [he laughs], you have discussions with other screenwriters, with colleagues, and I really like that. I love brainstorming, I love listening to other people’s ideas and then proposing my own. You definitely get farther together.

Ever since you were a boy, you have always read a lot. Which authors have influenced you the most?

As a child, I eagerly read Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne: great adventures, great characters like Sandokan, unforgettable readings. As a teenager, I continued with Tolkien, who really marked me, not only on a literary level but also in my daily life. In fact, it was thanks to him that I approached the world of Dungeons & Dragons, a world that conquered me and that I have never left! Just think that the friends from the D&D group I had as a child are still friends [he laughs]. Fantasy, after all, has the ability to unite people in a truly extraordinary way, forever. 

But there hasn’t just been fantasy. For example, I am a great fan of science fiction: one of my favourite books is the wonderful Flowers for Algernon, which made a deep impression on me. Growing up, I also loved Murakami and Edith Wharton, especially her two masterpieces The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome, my favourite novels. Then the great French novels: Les Miserables, The Mysteries of Paris, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and so on. By the way, my colleague Celeste is currently working on an AudioGame of The Count of Monte Cristo... Finally, I would like to add that I am a great fan of classic detective novels. I have read all the books by Arthur Conan Doyle, the “father” of Sherlock Holmes, and I have read all the books by John Dickson Carr, the author considered to be the king of the “locked room lecture”: authors challenge their readers in this type of detective story, which I adore, perhaps because I am also a great fan of rebuses.    

Do you also like thrillers?

I prefer classic detective novels. I think I have read almost all of them; after all, they are books written between the early 1900s and the mid-1950s, so there are only so many. Unfortunately.

And what do you usually read now?

A lot of non-fiction: history, politics, environment and so on. I also love Wu Ming and I remain fascinated by science fiction, particularly social science fiction.

What about cinema? How did your interest in screenwriting start?

It all started with Sergio Leone. It was through his films that I discovered my passion for cinema. I watched A Fistful of Dollars with my grandfather; I have a very clear memory of that movie and also of Ennio Morricone’s beautiful soundtrack. And then Stanley Kubrick, a genius. But the director and screenwriter with whom I felt most affinity in my cinema training years – so when I was between 18 and 23 – was François Truffaut. And also the great Takeshi Kitano, who is incredibly multifaceted. 

How did you end up working for PlayNook? 

Last summer, partly for personal reasons, I decided to return to writing. So I reached out to Roan Johnson, whom I’ve known since university, and asked him if he had any work for me to get involved in, any scripts for me to read, etc. Five months passed without any news from him. I was about to call him back when one fine day he phoned me and told me that this project, PlayNook, was about to start and he asked if I wanted to help. I must say that from the very beginning, the project seemed profoundly innovative and visionary to me, so I accepted the opportunity with enthusiasm. Over the past few months, I have been working on chapters 3 and 4 of Marco Polo, and now I’m on a major fantasy story that’s kicking off.

So you like the PlayNook revolution, don’t you?

Yes, absolutely. Not least because, as a role-player, I immediately grasped the similarities between gamebooks and AudioGames. The idea behind PlayNook is great because it allows everyone to play a kind of video game but without the need for a console, a super-performance machine; a smartphone is enough. Moreover, I really like the podcast dimension; I am a great lover of this kind of fruition, I like audio. PlayNook rediscovered the huge immersive potential of sound, of voice.

Did you play gamebooks as a kid? 

Yes, absolutely, I played a lot of gamebooks as a child. Some were science-fiction themed, really immersive, but I also played Lone Wolf, Oberon, and of course detective gamebooks, for example those starring Sherlock Holmes. Moreover, I believe – and here I speak as a teacher – that gamebooks have enormous didactic and educational potential.

Why?

You see, children have long found it difficult to do much reading. After a while they start to get tired. However, reading a gamebook, which consists of half-page paragraphs, a page at most, can entice them to literature because there is a twist at every turn; you don’t have to get to the end of the chapter to run into the cliffhanger. And then a gamebook is interactive through the use of dice, character cards, etc. This makes it similar to a video game, and children love video games, but it also encourages them to read. And there’s a further difference: gamebooks require a greater capacity for concentration and attention than video games, and if the child does not read, the game does not go on!

The possibilities are manifold. Imagine a gamebook set, for example, in the time of Charlemagne, so that children can discover the Middle Ages through a story that allows them to make choices instead of a school textbook. We recently discussed this in PlayNook; we could think of such AudioGames to enter the educational market. 

You worked on chapters 3 and 4 of Marco Polo: Adventures, PlayNook’s first AudioGame. What was it like working on it?

It was very nice. Obviously it wasn’t easy, I had to study a lot beforehand because those two chapters are set in a 13th-century Venetian ship, and it’s not like there’s an endless bibliography on the subject. However, it was fun to find out what they ate back then, how the rowing system worked, what kind of sails they used, who was in command, etc. Then the real challenge was to carry out the storyline in an engaging and entertaining way. The Travels of Marco Polo, as you know, is an encyclopaedic text but contains very little action. Moreover, there is nothing in the text about the sea voyage from Venice to the Holy Land; Marco Polo merely says that he leaves from ‘Vinegia’ and arrives in Acre. This of course means that the author, me in this case, has to invent what happens in the course of the voyage: a mutiny, a shipwreck, the arrival of pirates and so on. None of this is in The Travels of Marco Polo; it is a work of fiction. But at the end of the voyage, Marco Polo still has to get to the Holy Land. He cannot get to Marseilles or Bruges; he has to get to Acre and then from there to China.

It doesn’t sound easy!

Indeed it is not. Writing a text with choices is very complex; the stories multiply, the time stretches.

You are now working on a fantasy story for PlayNook, right?

That’s right. It is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman whose first chapters are set in a great desert. At the centre of it all is a small tribe that lives underground because life on the surface is impossible. I cannot reveal more, except that it will be a great adventure!