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Two Days, Two AIs, and a Princess Turned into a Melon

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

Last week a colleague showed me an interesting video: a game dev getting ChatGPT’s Astra and Claude’s Fable 5.1 to work together inside Unreal Engine, to build a Souls-like boss fight.

The video itself is about game development, but what struck me was seeing two different AIs working on the same material rather than just one. It reminded me of a story I’d had in my head for a while — “Princess Melon”: I’ve been telling it to my daughter Maria Laura at bedtime since she was born, and over the past month I’ve actually sat down and written it up properly in my spare time. So I thought: why not try the same thing myself, with Claude and ChatGPT, but to finally put a face to its characters?

I spent two days getting the two services to talk to each other: one would propose a character, the other would refine or build on it, until we landed on a consistent cast across all the illustrations — from King Ant to the Little Mist, who feeds on the gossip of people who judge without looking. The process helped me understand who these characters really are, and gave me a much clearer picture of the story itself. When I showed Maria Laura the princess and the friends I tell her about every night, her jaw dropped: for the first time she could see them, not just hear about them.

This morning at the gym I was already thinking about the next step: getting in touch with a professional illustrator to give the book a proper, original look — and maybe, who knows, self-publishing my first fairy tale.

There’s a small irony in all of this. “Princess Melon” is about a Little Mist who thrives on “apparently…” and people who laugh before they’ve even bothered to look for themselves. When I read the comments from the usual modern-day luddites, quick to pass judgement on AI instead of actually trying it, I feel like I’ve somehow wandered into my own fairy tale.

Princess Melon presented to the kingdom

How to Stand Out Online

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

There’s a worrying trend that has quite literally exploded over the past few months, at least in my social feeds: posting drafts and half-finished work.

I see established professionals posting rough gameplay examples, presumably to catch the eye of a potential client or employer. I see junior people posting screenshots from 3D authoring tools or game engines, probably to demonstrate their skills.

Noise. Nothing but noise.

I understand the anxiety around wanting to carve out a place in the industry, and I’m all for the drive to get things done — but the problem is what we’re actually showing.

  • If your goal is to develop your indie game, think about serving an audience rather than collecting reactions on LinkedIn
  • If you’re looking for a job, nobody’s going to hire you just because you can open a piece of software.

The reality of the industry

I was reading yesterday this very interesting post by an industry leader — one of the most clear-eyed takes I’ve seen in months. The reality is that we’re in a moment of consolidation (not a crash, as some people like to say), where the investor narrative can’t promise growth anymore. There’s an enormous amount of talent out there looking for work right now, which makes it genuinely hard to stand out.

This naturally leads people to think that standing out and differentiating yourself is what matters. And in a way, that’s true — but I don’t think speed is the key factor here. Posting half-finished work does get your voice out there sooner, yes. But it also shows your scrappy, unpolished side.

So how do you actually stand out?

I don’t have a magic formula, but I’ve been in the industry for years and built my own position from scratch, so I do know a thing or two. The most important thing is the relationships you build with other people — anything you can do to build them better is worth doing.

If you’re an indie developer looking to get visibility for your project, you need to do everything you can to connect with your early adopters as soon as possible. Find out where they are, talk to them, genuinely try to understand how they play, what they buy and why. If you’re putting together a video to grab attention, do it with the right level of polish.

If you’re a professional without much experience, rather than showing things that frankly anyone can do (look, here’s my axe on ArtStation!), put in the work to figure out what makes you unique, and show that in the best way you can. Nobody cares about the how — they care about the end result and why you believe it’s strong.

If you’re an experienced professional, there’s no point showing off that you built a new prototype in a few minutes. Instead, focus on helping people understand why working with you is a good idea. Nurture the relationships you already have, teach what you genuinely know — videos work well for this. Help people see that you’ve learned to think deeply about certain things.

Less slop, less spam, and more real connections and genuine knowledge-sharing!

Design and Marketing: A Common Language

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

There’s a saying from Cilento (a region in southern Italy) that goes: “when strength fades, arrogance grows.”

I took part in a meeting about the creative vision for a project, and I put forward some “unique selling points” — elements that could make it stand out. I flagged the ones that, to me, were already floating around in the air, and suggested a few more. That was my way of opening up the discussion with the team. My role wasn’t a managerial one, but I needed to get a conversation going and hear what my directors had to say, to get a better feel for the project.

My proposal was shot down before it even got off the ground: a colleague — a designer — told me that “unique selling point” is a marketing term and has no place in game design. Everyone else in the room backed him up, and the discussion died right there. It felt like a classic case of pointing at the moon and someone staring at your finger: I’m trying to show something — which might be interesting or might not — and instead people take issue with the act of showing itself. This is what happens when you’ve been doing the same thing for years and start believing you’ve already figured it all out. But in the world of video games, where everything depends on so many human and contextual factors, nobody ever truly knows anything, deep down.

Beyond the frustration of the moment — and perhaps I wasn’t great at anticipating how that might land — what bothers me more is seeing how many designers fail to recognise the value game design brings to the business. Treating marketing as something lesser, something disconnected from the real work, a mere sales tool and nothing more — that’s just ignorance, as far as I’m concerned. Especially in 2026, when technology lets us cover more ground than ever before, there are elements of marketing that absolutely need to be folded into game design.

Reducing marketing to the act of selling alone is a pretty basic mistake. Marketing takes time — it’s about building relationships and trust. Game design can’t afford to detach itself from that process. Plenty of modern studios, before they’ve even released a single demo, are already setting up Discord servers. Building community, they call it (even if what’s being built isn’t really a community in the true sense — but that’s a separate conversation). Game designers are active in these spaces, engaging with people to understand how to improve their game. That is marketing, when all’s said and done.

When we talk about “unique selling points,” yes, the concept of selling is right there in the phrase — but the phrasing itself implies an intention rather than an immediate action. Getting to that sale means passing through stages where game design is absolutely critical. Thinking about why a player, three to seven years from now, should buy our game — rather than just doing whatever feels right in the moment — is maturity. It’s professionalism. It’s craft.

Have a great week, everyone!

Eagles Dressed as Pigeons

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

Sometimes we romanticise work to the point of ignoring that moment — which always comes — when we start running on autopilot. We begin measuring our value by the time we put into something, without thinking about the actual outcome or what we’re really delivering to players.

I’ve often found myself in situations where colleagues were clocking loads of extra hours just for the sake of it, or because they’d been pulled into this endless loop. Which inevitably leads to poor project estimates, treating things as feasible when they simply wouldn’t be without the overtime — overtime that, for the most part, adds no real value to the game.

I can’t change those attitudes, though I’ve tried. But I don’t fall into that trap either — I don’t do unnecessary extra hours, especially unpaid ones.

Disagree and commit

These days I’d rather focus on my own work than get into debates, because I’ve noticed people get defensive pretty quickly.

On one hand, I work on what I’ve been assigned, always trying to deliver on time and with something extra thrown in. On the other, I keep proposing improvements on whatever initial vision I’m given. They’re rarely accepted, but the exercise helps me think through the product — and it also signals what I’m capable of.

  • A client’s game is not my game
  • If a client asks me to design a half-baked feature, I first design it exactly as they’ve described
  • Then I offer what I’d consider an improvement, without pushing it. If the client says no, it’s no. Again — not my game.

Show, don’t argue

In a lot of organisations — bigger companies especially, where people go through incredibly elaborate hiring processes and are expected to show up with an impressive track record — verbal disagreements are very often read as personal attacks. Particularly in remote settings, without face-to-face contact, I’ve found that either I’m rubbish at arguing my corner, or people are just too proud to budge.

If I want a design change, I never raise it in the meeting. For me, meetings are a tool for one thing only: showing you want to work as a team, and giving people credit. What I’d rather do is present the requested version alongside a quick prototype of the improved one.

Eagles don’t crunch

I’m like an eagle — I fly high, and occasionally I dive to solve a concrete problem. A lot of clients want me to be a pigeon: fly low, peck around, make a mess here and there.

I have the experience to work efficiently. I don’t need to put in more hours than necessary. I’d rather focus on delivering high-quality work within my contracted hours. I always back other people’s ideas, however odd, but when my day is done, I switch off.

And if they’re paying me eagle rates to do pigeon work — fine by me. Less responsibility.

Learning to Use Platforms

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

Yesterday I went out for dinner with my family at a restaurant. I asked for details about a dish, the waitress gave them to me, I ordered it. When it arrived, several of the things she’d described were missing. I pointed it out, she went to speak to the chef, who sent back the message: “that’s how the dish comes.”

I’m unlikely to go back. And for a moment I thought about leaving a negative review on Google Maps. I went to look the place up, read through the existing reviews, and found plenty of positive ones and just as many negative — the negative ones almost always about the exact same thing as my experience.

Adding mine would have just been noise on top of noise. And when you think about it, what we’re really doing when we leave a review like that is feeding a platform and potentially damaging someone who, that evening, had simply made a mistake. I let it go. If someone asks me to recommend a restaurant in future, I just won’t mention that one.

What struck me, thinking it over afterwards, was why that dish had bothered me so much. It wasn’t just the missing elements. It was that the explanation I got — “that’s how it comes” — left me with no sense of control: I couldn’t understand what had happened, I couldn’t avoid it next time, the blame sat entirely outside me and was presented as a fixed house rule. If the chef had said “you’re right, we missed that, let me redo it,” I’d probably have left happy anyway. It’s the same mechanism that makes a player get angry — not so much at losing, but at not understanding why they lost and not knowing what to change next time. Negative reviews, whether for restaurants or games, more often come from that kind of frustration than from the difficulty itself.

And players leave reviews on platforms far more often than a customer leaves a review for a local restaurant. That review, on Steam, has a direct impact on a game’s sales. It’s why platforms in my industry have overtaken even personal recommendations: your opinion, if you write it there, carries real weight (unlike with neighbourhood restaurants, thank goodness).

How do you survive in this kind of situation?

I was watching an interview with a designer who says he doesn’t play other games during development, so as not to be influenced. The interviewer points out that Shigeru Miyamoto has said similar things on several occasions — arriving at his own solutions rather than retracing what already exists.

I work in exactly the opposite way, probably because I don’t make my own games but work for third parties (clients and GSC Game World, at the time of writing). When I start a new design I always look for the unique and distinctive elements by starting from what the competition is already doing. Pareto’s rule applies: 80% familiar territory, 20% novelty. To put it into practice I use a few platforms:

  • I use Gemini and Claude for research
  • I use Steam to study competitors’ capsules and descriptions, and to read reviews
  • I use YouTube as a kind of quick playtesting proxy

A concrete example: if I’m working on a progression system, I’ll first go to Steam and read what players love or hate about similar systems that are already out there (that’s my 80% — what the audience already expects and recognises). Then I look at where all the competitors start to look too much alike, because that’s where there’s room for the 20% of novelty that makes a game stand out without scaring off the people who try it.

It also depends on the kind of work I do: I can’t play the “misunderstood genius” when I’m working for a client — I need to meet their requirements as professionally as possible. But I don’t experience that as a creative compromise. Looking first at what already exists and figuring out what I can adapt, recombine or recalibrate is a genuine working method, not an imposed constraint: more often than not, the smartest move isn’t to invent from scratch, but to find the right lever in what already works.

Platforms, in this sense, help me enormously — speeding up tasks and bringing solid data to help me align with the client. The very same platforms that now dominate the games industry are the ones that provide the most valuable tools for improving what I do. On the other side, though, the most skilled creators use them differently, and go out of their way not to let them have a hold over the creative process when it really matters.

Maybe the answer isn’t to pick one approach over the other, but to know when to use each. Platforms as a research tool when I’m working for someone else and need to understand what the market expects. Silence when I’m working on something of my own and want it to come from an idea, not from a comparison. And in both cases, the lesson from the restaurant stays the same: whether you’re reading reviews or designing a system that will generate them, the right question isn’t “how harsh is the verdict” — it’s “does the player understand why it happened, and do they feel like they can do something about it next time.”

What Became of the Old Values?

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

La crisi che stiamo vivendo nel settore dei videogiochi deriva principalmente dal fatto che il potere si è spostato dai publisher alle piattaforme. Una delle piattaforme contemporanee più rilevanti è Roblox.

Anche se il suo modello di business è discutibile, il 50% dei bambini americani apre Roblox nel corso della settimana. La piattaforma è estremamente accessibile e presente su molteplici dispositivi. Il che mi riporta, a mio avviso, a un momento simile all’inizio degli anni ’90, quando la gente iniziava a chiedersi cosa fosse davvero un videogioco — il momento in cui nacquero Baldur’s Gate e titoli simili, per capirci.

Lo dico sempre ai miei colleghi e clienti: se il tuo gioco esce tra sette anni, il pubblico a cui ti rivolgi in questo momento sta probabilmente giocando su Roblox, Minecraft e Fortnite. Fare previsioni è impossibile, perché i videogiochi toccano corde molto personali e le tendenze vanno e vengono. Un gioco in stile anni ’90 potrebbe tornare di moda nel 2030 — non lo sappiamo.

Eppure noto una tendenza a voler ignorare queste mode, in gran parte perché non corrispondono a quella che consideriamo la nostra idea di come dovrebbe essere un videogioco. Siamo cresciuti con certi valori, quei valori vengono oggi messi seriamente in discussione, e questo porta inevitabilmente a degli attriti. È del tutto umano cercare di evitarli con qualche scusa, perché fare i conti con ostacoli reali fa anche male.

Quindi, per quanto sia vero che Roblox ha permesso la diffusione di un gioco in cui era possibile pagare per derubare bambini dei loro personaggi virtuali e umiliarli, è altrettanto vero che moltissime persone scelgono quella come forma di intrattenimento. La formula del successo, secondo me, sta nel trovare il modo di far convivere i nostri ideali con queste nuove tendenze.

The Taste of Results

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

When we design a new game, we enter a battle between personal taste and results. The taste of whoever truly owns the vision is what shapes even the reading of those results. In my career I’ve never seen a 100% scientific team. I have, however, seen a 100% artistic team — meaning a team focused solely on results.

Results as objectives

One of the most common problems in contemporary game development is using KPIs as objectives. This immediately drains them of meaning — the team fixates on hitting the number and loses sight of the bigger picture. And obviously, that harms not just the artistic side, but the scientific one too.

KPIs are useful for understanding two things:

  1. Whether the direction we’re heading in is the wrong one (but they won’t tell us if it’s the right one)
  2. Whether the changes we’re making to the product are moving things in the right direction (but they won’t tell us if the idea itself is any good)

To find genuinely good, winning ideas, we need to make room for creativity and our artistic side.

Taste as an excuse

The problem I see most often on the other side is using the artistic dimension as an excuse to stop thinking about the player’s final experience, and focus only on our own personal challenge of making content. A game is indeed a work of art, but it’s sold in a fiercely competitive market, in a world where attention spans are razor thin. The only way to survive long-term is to create play experiences that are genuinely worth people’s time. And taste alone isn’t enough for that.

It matters to think about the fantasy we’re offering players — what players can become through our game. To structure that thinking properly, and channel our personal taste in service of it. When we’re working with a team, things get considerably more complicated, because as designers we have to constantly worry about aligning, influencing, and communicating. And that’s not always an easy job, especially with more artistically-minded teams. You have to be honest and make yourself vulnerable, even at the risk of being undermined by colleagues. It’s not a role that suits everyone.

Art, Craft, and Science

For me, the best approach is always to start from something intimate and personal (again, tricky when working in a team), because games are an art form and players want to live through experiences that are aesthetically rich. Aesthetic here meaning the essence of the experience, not just the visual layer. So the base of the pyramid is the artistic one.

Then there’s the second side, which is the engineering and technical side. Depending on what you want to realise on screen, you’ll need specific resources — and if the final quality is low, it drags everything else down with it.

The scientific side helps you understand where not to go, and how you’re currently tracking, but it generally doesn’t offer a diagnosis. For that, you have to go back to the art. If I picture all of this schematically, it’s like a pyramid with a strong base (art), something that coils around itself and can complicate things (craft/technology), and a final point that doesn’t carry too much weight in the end, but is still essential to complete the shape (science). I tried asking Gemini to visualise this concept and it generated this image:

Rolled triangle

A Few Techniques for Better Navigation

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

I’ve been working for a few months now with a new team in a part of the industry that’s completely new to me. I keep thinking back to a post I read a while ago by Owen Mahoney about the 4 industries of video games. My hands-on experience is confirming that the different worlds Mahoney identifies really are different.

Communication is genuinely different

In mobile f2p, as a designer I always have to justify everything with KPIs and metrics — that’s just the deal. In the PC/Console world, though, that kind of thing is generally frowned upon. These are games far more grounded in the creators’ personal taste, which brings another consequence with it: to avoid too much noise and keep the development process from getting muddy, people very often don’t communicate properly. You work in isolation, and you have to trust your teammates completely.

My previous professional experience pushed me to look for solutions to this problem, but I was stopped almost at the first attempt. I took it pretty badly at first — I’ll admit I felt almost useless in that context. But then something shifted: as a designer I don’t have to justify every single thing with numbers, and that is genuinely an improvement.

So all I’m left with is complete trust in my fellow travellers — but one fundamental problem remains: the feeling of being lost. Sharing is limited, documentation is all over the place, and it’s easy to feel disconnected from the bigger picture.

How I’m tackling this challenge

My years of experience, even if not directly in high-end games, are still there, and I’m adopting some techniques to get my bearings. Fair warning: they’re not for everyone — not everyone can make themselves vulnerable and risk coming across as the person who doesn’t know what they’re doing. But for me, the goal (my personal and professional growth, and my connection with the team) outweighs any bruised ego.

The first technique, which I call probing, is to keep putting proposals to the team. I structure them properly, make the best case I can, and table them in a meeting with everyone present. The typical response is that it can’t be done that way, that it’s always been done differently, that the game is not what I’m imagining. And that’s exactly what I’m after: the designers who know the product better than I do finally start sharing what they know. Sometimes they even argue amongst themselves — I just sit there and listen, taking it all in.

The second technique I use is reverse-engineering assets and commits. Following comments and discussions in the code helps me really understand what everyone is actually trying to achieve.

The third technique is mapping the team’s knowledge holders. Domain experts, and sometimes short one-to-one chats to concretely understand how something works. The trick there is to go in with an idea already formed, then ask for confirmation. Something interesting always comes out of it.

Finally, the last thing I spend time on is being a bit of a documentation archaeologist. The information is fragmented and often contradictory, but it’s still something. My goal is always to track down documentation written for external partners, because that’s usually where you’ll find the clearest articulation of the vision.

Change isn’t easy, but it makes you richer

Sometimes I have to sit with feelings of helplessness and incompetence — but for me, that’s exactly where the real personal, spiritual, and professional growth lives. I hope this post can be useful to anyone who finds themselves in the same situation, or something like it.

It’s also really important to make yourself useful: pick up simple tasks that nobody wants to do, so the team understands you’re there to help, not to act as a consultant. There’s a bias against people who come from mobile, like me — no point pretending otherwise. The only way I know to push back against it is to roll your sleeves up and get on with it.

Studying the past to design the future

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

I read two interesting articles this week: the first is by Rob Fahey on GamesIndustry.biz.

The title says it all: five years of rolling layoffs have taken a serious toll on talent and experience. Contractors, often left out of the official numbers, have probably taken two or three times the hit compared to permanent staff. People who leave often don’t come back, especially if they have a family. Fahey proposes a model closer to the indie world, where small teams prototype on limited budgets and publishers decide what to take into full production, separating the creative-risk phase from the execution phase.

The second article is an interview with Miyamoto for Famitsu. He says something that complements this perfectly: “if you try to base things on what seems to have broad appeal, you end up with something generic.” Nintendo starts by asking why people play in the first place. The great classics didn’t come from market research, for instance:

  • Pokémon grew out of Satoshi Tajiri’s passion for collecting insects
  • Splatoon came from the physical pleasure of painting over territory
  • Mario works because movement itself is fun.

What the history of video games teaches us

When an industry is under economic pressure, as it is today, the instinctive reaction is to reduce risk everywhere — including creative choices. But a “safe” idea is often also an invisible one: it holds together on paper and is forgotten the next day. Financial caution and creative caution are two different axes, and conflating them is the fastest way to end up making uninteresting games, at exactly the moment when you can least afford to.

Players don’t get attached to mechanics in the abstract — they get attached to what those mechanics let them be. Global appeal is almost always a side effect of genuine interest.

The solution runs through game design too

A design pillar that can’t say no to anything isn’t doing any real work: when the pressure is on, it’s the vague pillars — the ones that look good on a slide but have no practical consequences — that are the first to go.

I think Fahey’s article and the Miyamoto piece together are really saying one thing: the way to navigate an unstable industry is to get clearer about what you’re actually trying to make players feel. Everything else — budget, team structure, production models — is a separate problem.

Denshattack: Return to the Dream

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

A few days ago I came across a video on the Modern Classic channel about what’s been happening in the games industry lately. Physical discs disappearing, film licences being pulled from people’s accounts, sudden restructurings at major publishers.

But the part that really got me was the way it reconstructs how we ended up here — specifically the section about the Dreamcast.

The business model the Dreamcast took to its grave

For the first twenty years of gaming, a console was the vehicle for the games of whoever built it. You bought an Atari to play Atari games, an Intellivision for Mattel games, a Super Nintendo for Mario and Zelda, a Genesis for Sonic. Third parties existed, but were sometimes seen as almost diluting the identity of the machine.

Then Sony arrived with the PlayStation, and from that point the console became a generic platform — the business was in royalties from third parties, and whoever had the most volume won.

The Dreamcast was the last system built seriously around the old model, grounded in a powerful arcade identity and a massive first-party catalogue. At the time it looked like a system that couldn’t lose.

And yet Sony simply squeezed Sega out of the hardware business through sheer size. Which is exactly why the Dreamcast’s failure still stings today: it’s the symbolic end of the idea that a console should have an identity, a personality, a reason to exist beyond “taking a cut of every sale”. From that point on, the video argues, everything drifted towards the bean counters — live service, monetising the same game indefinitely instead of making a great one and selling it.

Denshattack: that spirit isn’t entirely dead

The day after watching that video I bought Denshattack!, which came out on 15 July. The premise, in a single line, is gloriously absurd: it’s an action-platformer where you pilot an anti-gravity train that does tricks and grinds on rails like Tony Hawk, inside a wildly colourful Japanese fantasy, all in service of dismantling a corrupt corporation. “Tony Hawk, but your skateboard is a train.”

A small studio (Undercoders) believed in that idea, built a strong and instantly recognisable art direction around it, and made something designed simply to be played and to be fun from the very first minute.

Denshattack gave me the same physical feeling I had as a kid turning on the Dreamcast: an idea that exists because someone wanted it to exist, not because the market asked for it. Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez — these came from people who had a clear vision in their heads and an equally clear aesthetic, and pushed them out whole, without sanding down the edges.

An interesting case study

Two tools I often use when analysing a concept turn out to be directly relevant to this Dreamcast/Denshattack comparison.

The first is what I call fantasy extraction: before you even look at the systems, ask yourself who the player becomes and what they should feel in the best moments.
“You’re a train grinding rails to take down a corporation” is a fantasy you can’t mistake for anything else — exactly the same kind of clarity the Sega mascots of the Dreamcast era had.

The second is the novelty spectrum audit: every original concept sits somewhere between too familiar and too new, and the trick isn’t to maximise novelty for its own sake, but to understand what kind of innovation you’re actually doing. Denshattack recombines trick-based skating physics with a subject — the train, the dystopia — that nobody had ever thought to pair with it. It’s innovation by recombination: familiar enough to read in three seconds of trailer, strange enough to stick in your head.

“We’ve lost the reason consoles exist,” the video said in its conclusion. It leaves me with a very concrete urge to keep designing things with a sharp fantasy and genuine novelty, rather than filing them down until nobody finds them offensive. I hope Denshattack turns out to be proof that audiences reward that kind of thinking.