I remember well when I first met Dario
I remember well when I first met Dario. We were in Genoa, June 2017, at the wonderful Game Happens game festival. I saw this interesting looking game where you could interact by simply writing questions and answers simply in natural language. Parsing natural language was my first research love at the university, and of course it was a failed project (deterministic parsing of natural language is simply impossible), so I was very intrigued by this game. Playing it with it still worked though; and someone was watching me play behind my back. It was the developer, Dario, smiling.
“So you developed this?” “Yes.” “Well you know this will never work?” “Of course I do.”
And another smile, my nerdish, ugly aggressiveness melted away and we started a wonderful chat about the possibilities and impossibilities of natural language processing. It was always a pleasure talking with Dario, so sweet and full of ideas.
Creating a (good) game on top of a consciously doomed technological solution is all Dario, trying to express the contradictory nature of reality and of our attempts of understanding some of it. All this using the video game medium, so often used for the same boring aims but here with revolutionized roles and intents.
That is what he was doing and what many of us indie intend to keep doing.
My friend and colleague Dario Dambra recently passed away. You can play the game he created (with friends) Don’t Make Love here.
