This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Many game designers start from a flawed assumption: they think the player needs to be skilled, attentive, strategic in order to enjoy the game. They build systems that only reward people who read tooltips, calculate probabilities, and optimise resources.
The reality is that most people don’t do any of that. And the real craft of design is making the player feel like they made a smart choice — even when the system quietly steered them there all along.
Building the feeling
A good combat encounter doesn’t ask the player to figure out the winning move from scratch. It puts options in front of them, makes one of them slightly more readable, and lets them get there “on their own”.
The same logic applies to puzzles: the solution feels like a personal insight, but the game has already silently ruled out ten red herrings before the player ever considered them.
Attribution matters more than difficulty
When a player wins and feels like the credit is theirs, they come back. The right question during design is: what can I remove, simplify, or surface, so that their conclusion lands easily and still feels like their own?
A designer’s skill is measured by how much invisible work they can do to make the player feel a certain way.