GAMERS 3.0

27/06/07 - Italian publishing company Hobby Media http://www.hobbymedia.it/ has just released the third issue of Gamers: the first european magazine focused on underground videogaming.Each issues is packed with homebrew tips and technic, retrogaming, console modding news, retrocomputing, videogame programming, chiptune and circuit bending.

Edited by Francesco Fondi and Massimo Belfiore, GAMERS is an Italian videogame mag modeled after seminal Japanese publications such as Game Labo and Continue. It features a flotilla of prestigious collaborators, such as "Swiss collective Buro Desctruct's Lopetz, Japanese photographer Julie Watai (the author of Samurai Girl photobook), plus long time friends like Brandon Sheffield and the japanese designer Ani from "Nendo Graphixxx" (who is behind the pixel graphic boom started 10 years ago in Japan). What binds together such an eclectic team is a vision of gaming as a street phenomenon".

"Matteo Bittanti, a teacher at the European Institute of Design, in Milan, during Game Developer Conference 2004 came on the stage and said "Hello. I am here to talk to you today about videogame criticism. Because right now, it's bullshit."

Videogame magazines, Bittanti said, fall into three categories, mostly simultaneously: they are either Megalogs of game data, official/"unofficial" game catalogs, or promotion-as-information (or vice versa). They have an obsession with quantitative evaluation; all things must be numbered in comparison to other things -- thus, he calls it the "Nutrition Label" style of game journalism.

The problem is that the cultural, aesthetic, and social elements of videogames are ignored. Game magazines are trapped in a technological-determinist mindset; that is to say, bigger and better hardware means better games. More polygons means more excitement."

GAMERS is a response to Bittanti's criticism and wants to be a magazine for underground gaming that, as a huge phenomenon, only recently has started to catch attention of european videogame magazines but being first to market GAMERS will be the best established magazine about homebrew and underground gaming in Europe when other publishers will step into underground gaming.

About Hobby Media Srl

Hobby Media Srl was founded in the Italy in 2002. Today, is the Italian leading publisher of japan oriented magazines and is proudly 100% Independent

.http://www.hobbymedia.it/

About Francesco Fondi

In the '90s, Fondi produced a series of EPs (we are talking vinyls here!) using "the good old Amiga 500" under the nom-de-plume of Noisee Boyz, Anadyn e Frankie Bit. In 1998 created the first non japanese magazine focused on japanese videogames for adults and then, before founding Hobby Media, worked 4 years for a japanese company based in Akihabara. In april 2002 has collaborated as a retro expert and collector to "Play, The Videogame World": the first European art exhibition on videogames held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni (one of the main contemporary art museums in Rome) from the 24th of April to the 10th of July 2002. The exhibition was visited by over 50.000 people.

For further information please visit: http://www.gamersweb.it

For further information on advertising, sponsorship opportunities, or PR enquiries please contact staff@hobbymedia.it

®2006-2007 Hobby Media Srl - Thanks to Brandon Sheffield and MAtteo Bittanti.