CriticalCity Upload: Intervista a Augusto Pirovano e Matteo Uguzzoni

CriticalCity Upload is an Italian urban transformation game, a variant of pervasive games created by Augusto Pirovano and Matteo Battaglia to stimulate young people's creativity by having them play in their own cities. The project, run by the social cooperative Focus, is free to join and received co-financing through a Fondazione Cariplo youth creativity grant. In this interview, Pirovano and Matteo Uguzzoni describe its structure: players complete missions, documented with images, texts and audiovisual material, and earn points, with progression unlocked from simple indoor tasks toward urban ones. The project draws on Jaime Lerner's concept of "urban acupuncture," and its distinctive feature is a player-driven map of "nodes," areas where players who have completed several missions can request bonus-point zones, linking digital activity to real-world social interaction.

According to the interviewees, the first year of play produced around 10,000 completed missions across Italy and occasionally abroad, with roughly 5,600 registered players in the first twelve months. They present these figures as modest compared with mainstream social networks but significant for the offline effects of getting young people to act creatively in public spaces. They distinguish their approach from commercial gamification, emphasizing sustainability over profitability, a deliberately light ideological framing, and a shareware-style model in which the community is invited to contribute time, donations or merchandise.

The interview also covers partnerships with municipalities, in which the project promotes participation locally and delivers qualitative and quantitative reports on participants' activity and expressed interests. Regarding the future, the founders describe a planned mobile application but acknowledge limited user numbers and the mismatch between on-the-go access and the careful preparation their most committed players give missions. Overall, the conversation presents the project as a bottom-up, low-pressure model of civic engagement with cautiously optimistic assessments of its impact.