This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Years go by, tools come and go, but the spreadsheet remains the most useful and irreplaceable tool in any good game designer’s kit. When I start working on a new project, I open a spreadsheet.
In practice, I put into a table what’s already there: the mechanics that exist, the numbers in play, the things the team has already built.
There’s always a moment in a project — especially on the big ones — when nobody really knows which direction things are heading. Putting everything into a table is the best way to find out.
The designer as ethnographer, not as lawmaker — that’s sometimes the most useful version of a game designer there is.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
A mid-June 2026, while Ninja Theory was still showing off its next game at the Xbox Showcase, Microsoft was already having internal discussions about shutting the studio down.
According to Bloomberg and sources confirmed by multiple outlets, Ninja Theory, Double Fine, and Compulsion Games are currently in talks to buy their independence from Microsoft. (Sources: IGN, Kotaku)
Microsoft’s justifications
On 10 June, the new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma published an internal memo that went public: “Next 100 Days: Xbox Reset”. The tone is the kind of corporate candour that’s more about preparing staff for cuts than sharing a vision.
The numbers cited are hard to ignore:
Xbox has invested over $20 billion in five years across content, platform, and hardware
Over that same period, annual revenue has fallen by nearly $500 million
The projected margin for 2026 is around 3%, down from the previous year
Hardware memory costs have quintupled in two years
The document talks about an “overstretched studio portfolio” and the need for speed, margins, and a guaranteed annual pipeline. Sharma comes from EA and is known for a data-driven approach. Applied to studios like Ninja Theory, the result is predictable.
The paradox of doing your job well
What’s striking, though, is that Ninja Theory did exactly what we’re all told to do: build a recognisable artistic identity, reward creative risk-taking, make games the industry has talked about with genuine respect for years. Creative excellence is no insurance policy against budget decisions.
Times have changed. Large corporations buy studios to consolidate a catalogue, then optimise when the numbers stop adding up. The difference between Ninja Theory in 2018 — freshly acquired by Microsoft, future apparently secured — and Ninja Theory in 2026 is the financial context they find themselves operating in.
It’s an uncomfortable lesson, and it applies to everyone working in the industry: doing your job well is necessary, but it’s not enough. Protection comes from other factors — margins, positioning, financial autonomy. None of that has much to do with design quality.
That said, doing your job well remains the one thing you actually have control over. And this post is, in part, a small tribute to those who did it at the highest level.
What Ninja Theory leaves behind: the tool
I never worked with Ninja Theory, but like many people in the industry I watched what they did with genuine respect. The analysis below is an attempt to understand why their work worked.
Ninja Theory’s strength lay in the fantasy they delivered to the player. And that’s a distinction many people — inside and outside dev teams — struggle to make.
One of the most common mistakes I come across in my consulting work is this: a team can describe their game in terms of mechanics, genre, and art direction, but can’t answer the fundamental question:
What do you let the player become?
Not “what does the player do” (verbs and systems). Not “what is the game about” (theme and narrative). But: what does the player become while playing? What fantasy do they inhabit?
Case study: Hellblade — Senua’s Sacrifice
Subject: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Ninja Theory, 2017. The product in its entirety.
Stated fantasy: Ninja Theory talked about “experiential storytelling”, about wanting to simulate psychosis authentically (with genuine psychiatric consultation), about a third-person experience playing as a Celtic warrior. The stated fantasy is loosely “warrior + dark journey + Norse mythology.”
The player’s verbs — what you actually do, on loop
In Hellblade the player:
Moves through hostile, often disorienting environments
Interprets the world through visions and voices (the Furies) that comment, deceive, warn
Solves visual puzzles by finding shapes in the landscape — but the solution is never objectively certain; it’s your interpretation
Fights in situations that feel overwhelming, against enemies that regenerate
Carries a burden (literally: Dillion’s skull) that cannot be set down
None of those verbs is “be a powerful warrior”. None of them promises dominance or mastery in the classical sense.
The emotional promise
The best moment in Hellblade isn’t when you win a fight. It’s when you manage to keep going despite everything. Despite the voices. Despite the feeling of being watched and judged. Despite a world that resists being understood.
The emotional promise is persisting in the face of internal suffering.
Separating the fantasy from the thematic skin
Strip away the Norse mythology. Strip away the Vikings. Strip away Helheim.
What’s left: a person who perceives the world differently from everyone else, who must act despite that distortion, and who doesn’t stop.
That is the fantasy. It’s completely independent of the setting. It’s systemic, not cosmetic.
Fantasy conflicts
The main risk sits in the combat. In some segments the player can start to feel competent in the classic action-game sense. When that happens, the fantasy of the “survivor pushing forward despite psychosis” starts to crack.
Ninja Theory manages this by keeping the visual and audio pressure high even during fights. But it’s a delicate balance. Had they deepened the combat system to compete with other action games, they would almost certainly have broken the fantasy.
The choice to keep it simple isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a design decision in service of the fantasy.
Design implications
Three direct implications follow from Hellblade’s core fantasy:
Don’t give the player too much control — if they feel like they’ve got the situation handled, the fantasy of surviving under internal pressure weakens
The voices must interact with the gameplay — not as flavour text, but as elements that shape the player’s decisions in real time
Avoid any explicit “right answer” — the fantasy depends on perceptual ambiguity; a clear HUD or a direct tutorial destroys it
Closing thoughts
Microsoft ran the numbers and concluded that Ninja Theory isn’t profitable enough for the scale Xbox has built. But there’s one thing the numbers don’t capture: Ninja Theory knows how to answer the hardest question in game design — “what does the player become?”
If the studio closes, we lose one of the few voices in the industry that had genuinely understood that the player’s fantasy matters more than the mechanics, more than the genre. And perhaps, in the long run, more than the margins.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
When I start conceptualising a new game or feature, I prefer to focus on feelings rather than on a feature count. For me, thinking about the impressions a game leaves behind after you’ve played it is a great way to start identifying the systems you’ll need to build it.
What emotional promise are we making to the player?
What should they feel during and after a session?
Case study: F-Zero (SNES, 1990)
The first step is to name the dominant feeling. For F-Zero, you might say “speed”. But I like to push a bit further: the feeling of barely holding on to something too powerful for you.
There’s a constant tension in the game between the machine you’re trying to tame and the track slipping away from you. The emotional promise is: you’re on a knife’s edge — prove you’re good enough.
How does this feeling register, in body and mind?
The emotional texture of F-Zero is: cold, metallic, tense but not anxious, solitary, futuristic, unforgiving.
Mapping the emotional field — adjacencies and antagonists
Around the target feeling there are emotions that support it and emotions that undercut it.
Adjacent to F-Zero: intense focus, controlled adrenaline, perceptible growth in skill, a dignified kind of loneliness, the future as aesthetic.
Antagonists to F-Zero: comfort, humour, nostalgia, warmth, perceived randomness. If the player feels they lost because of the game rather than themselves, the promise breaks.
How does this feeling translate into concrete choices?
Let’s try to identify all the elements F-Zero puts to work — the emotional palette the designers had available when they were building the game.
Visuals: saturated neon colours on dark backgrounds. The track is readable in a single frame. The horizon rushes towards you at the speed of light. Mode 7 gave them the visual language of speed itself on that platform.
Audio:Mute City, Big Blue, Silence — aggressive synth-wave, high BPM, strong melodic hooks. The game’s heartbeat. Crash sounds are metallic and final.
Environment: tracks suspended in the void. No living world beneath you — just an abyss or a landscape impossibly far away. Space is wide open vertically and razor-thin laterally. The track is the world.
Characters: they don’t exist during the race. The driver disappears inside the machine. Captain Falcon, Samurai Goroh, Dr. Stewart, Pico — their profiles live only in the manual. I don’t know whether that was a deliberate choice; maybe it’s partly why it was one of Miyamoto’s least favourite games. No narrative during play, just racing.
What would break the mood?
It’s worth pinning down what we don’t want in our game. In F-Zero’s case:
Slow or soft music would break the rhythmic tension
Warm or pastel colours would contradict the “metallic future” promise
Humorous elements would introduce warmth, which is the exact opposite of F-Zero’s cold, clinical feel
Any narrative during the race (even a single line of text) would interrupt the flow
Results that feel random — if I lose because of the game, the fantasy of control collapses
The design heuristics
From this canvas you can extract short, reusable principles to return to during review:
Speed over comfort
Readability over visual detail
Tension without anxiety: the game can be hard, but it’s always your fault
The future as aesthetic: don’t explain it, show it
The machine is the character: any feature that adds humanity to the driver during the race is an anti-pattern
Why did F-Zero stick in people’s minds?
Because every single choice — visual, audio, mechanical — serves the same emotional promise. Nothing is superfluous, but more importantly, nothing contradicts it.
And that’s the whole point of this post, the reason I’m sharing this emotional canvas with you. Games are getting more and more expensive to make, and I think from a design standpoint it’s worth thinking carefully about these things before you even start counting up all the components you’ll need.
The best design does the right thing with everything it’s got.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Matthew Ball has become Chief Strategy Officer at Xbox. In a recent interview at Summer Game Fest 2026, he said: we know what we want to do, but we’re not ready to tell the world yet.
I respect the transparency. But the problem I see goes beyond Xbox — it’s the whole industry. Modern games keep being designed around an implicit assumption: that the player has the desire, the time, and the patience to move through a linear experience from beginning to end. An adventure game, an RPG, a narrative game. You sit down in front of a work that’s meant to be experienced like a 60+ hour film. That’s the unspoken contract.
I get it. Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda, GTA — these were experiences you lived inside. But who are today’s players? Not me at 13. They’re people who grew up on Roblox, Minecraft, TikTok. None of those platforms require you to start from the beginning to make sense of them. The experiences are modular, replayable, fragmented.
Roblox has no ending. Minecraft has no main storyline. TikTok doesn’t have an episode one. These are architectural features that reflect how new generations consume digital experiences.
The player cut
I had a simple idea — maybe a slightly radical one. What if we designed a long game — an RPG, an adventure — not to be shortened, but to be edited by the player themselves?
The basic principle: it’s not about removing content. It’s about giving the player the tools to cut their own version of the experience.
System features
Differentiated build paths. A warrior and a mage in the same adventure should have different routes through it. Imagine the same story, but filtered through your character’s abilities. Pick a character and play a phase based on their particular strengths. Then move on to the next, or replay the same section with a different specialist.
Narrative entry points. Like a TV series with self-contained episodes, each session should have a recognisable beginning and end. A player coming back after three weeks shouldn’t have to piece everything back together mentally — they can re-enter from a designed access point, with a short, contextualised recap.
Variable pacing, not variable difficulty. At the start of each session, the game implicitly asks: do you have 20 minutes or three hours? The flow adapts accordingly. It’s about respecting the player’s real time.
Smart skipping with no penalties. If you’ve already completed a similar quest, or if a section is just dragging, the system lets you summarise and skip it — without losing rewards, ideally. The choice is always yours. The game doesn’t punish you for making it.
The cut as agency. Here’s the truth: in games, freedom lives in what you choose not to do. Cinematic games risk collapsing into map markers, checklists, completion trackers, and so on. All designed to make sure you don’t miss anything.
What would this system actually solve?
The industry’s fear is: less content = less perceived value = fewer sales. But look at Roblox. Every single experience lasts 15–30 minutes, and the platform feels “infinite”. Modular architecture multiplies value. An 80-hour RPG that respects your rhythms is worth more than an 80-hour RPG that makes you feel guilty every time you stop playing.
Matthew Ball declined to answer a lot of questions. But the one the host never asked him is this: are you rethinking the product format, or just the platform?
Because if games keep assuming a player who’ll sit down for 40 hours straight, you won’t lose the next generation to Roblox. You’ll lose them because you didn’t change the language. Roblox is just the language they already speak.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
La Sagrada Família has been under construction for 144 years. Antoni Gaudí died in 1926, yet we still call it “his cathedral”. He didn’t lay even a tenth of the stones that make it up. He designed it, his whole life — that much is true.
The same thing happens with video games. Audiences love attaching a single name to a work. It’s a cognitive shortcut: it’s easier to remember a face than an org chart. Miyamoto is Mario. Kojima is Metal Gear. Molyneux is Fable.
The name on the cover represents the original vision, but the game is the result of a building site.
The new Fable
Peter Molyneux is the perfect example. For twenty years he was the face of Fable: its promise, its vision, its name. Then Lionhead closed. Microsoft handed the franchise to Playground Games. Molyneux is gone.
Yesterday the gameplay demo for the new Fable dropped. Have a look:
The game seems to carry forward the fantasy — the storybook England, the dark humour, the flawed hero — that Molyneux lit the spark for decades ago. But it’s being built by different people, at a different studio, with a different budget.
I’m a little worried, actually, given that Molyneux’s target audience was kids like me. And the freedom on show in the gameplay video assumes a type of player quite different from whoever buys Fable on the big consoles. Those people are on Roblox and Switch, not PS5 and Xbox.
What the visionary actually leaves behind
If the game isn’t “made by the director”, then what exactly is an auteur’s contribution?
Two things, mainly.
The first is the fantasy: the emotional promise that the player is chasing. What the player becomes while playing. In Fable, you become a morally ambiguous hero in a world that doesn’t take itself too seriously. That feeling is Molyneux’s signature. Whether he’s there or not, the new team is going after it — even if they’re steering away from black-and-white (good versus evil) and leaning into grey. Moving with the times, I suppose.
The second is the design pillars: the principles that guide every single design decision, even when the original author isn’t in the room. Gaudí didn’t need to be alive for his vision to be followed. What mattered was that he had set it down with constraints clear enough to hold up across decades of subsequent interpretation.
Directors direct the vision. Game designers don’t execute it — they facilitate it within the team. Game design is a constant negotiation:
between the original vision and what the technology makes possible (any game worth its salt always has some kind of technological leap baked in)
between the designer’s intent and how it’s read by the player and the rest of the team
between what you want to do and what you can actually ship in time.
Every programmer who decides how to implement a mechanic is doing design. Every artist who figures out how to make a space readable is doing design. Every level designer who places an enemy is doing design. The game designer isn’t the one holding the whole thing together.
Gaudí started the building site. The architects who came after him interpreted it, completed it, sometimes corrected it. The Sagrada Família is great because of that collective effort.
Video games work exactly the same way. The genius lights the vision. The building site — made up of hundreds of people with different trades, different skills, different perspectives — makes it real.
The next time you say “Miyamoto’s game” or “Kojima’s game”, it’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
When we’re designing a new game, we very often look for verbs that describe what players can do. One way to stress-test those actions is to use a framework that forces us to think through every possible consequence.
Action: describe an action in three words or fewer
Response: the immediate feedback the system gives the player to confirm their action has been registered
Reaction: other entities in the system need to react to the action in order to give it meaning
Consequence: the game’s economy must be affected by the action, even if only slightly
Implication: wherever possible, the game’s narrative should also be something the action can influence
Players are the ones who make the story — we simply give them the tools to do it. That’s the best way to think about narrative, in my opinion.
Let’s look at a concrete example:
Action: throw a rock
Response: sounds, particles, objects hit and broken
Reaction: one NPC runs away in fear, another starts attacking us…
Consequence: there’s now a rock on the ground, plus scattered debris that could be picked up and used by the player or by NPCs
Implication: if you break something that belongs to someone, your reputation might take a hit until you’ve paid for the damage
Not every action needs to be put through this lens, but I do think games today should be thinking about these things — it’s what allows a system to respond meaningfully to whatever a player decides to do.
A useful cut rule: when you can’t afford to implement all five layers for an action, ask which layer is load-bearing for that specific action. Response and Reaction are almost always required — without them the action feels dead. Consequence is required if the action involves a resource. Implication is a bonus unless narrative is your core loop. Stripping a layer intentionally is fine; stripping it because you forgot to design it is where games start feeling hollow.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
These days I’ve been getting to grips with the agents from Anthropic and OpenAI, and I can genuinely see improvements in the speed and quality of my work. Where I used to need developers to build prototypes, it’s now much more straightforward to tackle that kind of challenge with Claude or Codex guiding me along.
That said, I’ve recently been noticing a strange heaviness in my eyes by the end of the working day. This weekend was rough, especially Saturday. It felt as though something was stopping my eyes from even moving properly, on top of a general dryness and fatigue.
I found out — credit to Gemini, actually — that this is a pretty common problem. Using AI tends to pull us into states of hyper-focus.
Having to think forces us to take breaks
The first thing worth noticing is that before, I had to take lots of breaks to think things through, look up tutorials, or browse various forums. Everything was slower, obviously, but that also meant natural breaks for my eyes and spending longer on the same block of text.
Now, though, working with an agent means receiving large chunks of text in quick succession. You have to skim through them fast to separate the useful parts from the hallucinated ones, and more often than not you fire off another question straight away — which brings you back to reading another big wall of text.
AI interfaces with dark mode, VS Code with light mode
I’ve moved to using VS Code to manage my agents, since I find it better for keeping an eye on token usage and for other perks like keyboard shortcuts and so on.
The thing is, AI interfaces generally use a dark background, whereas in VS Code I prefer a light one. So I’m constantly switching between the two, which puts extra strain on my eyes.
It seems that parsing text-heavy content like code also makes us blink around 60% less than normal. Medicine calls it Digital Eye Strain, and it’s an increasingly widespread issue.
I hope this post helps others identify the problem. The fix comes down to:
Sync your fonts and sizes so everything is large enough to read comfortably
Reduce contrast where possible, and avoid constantly ping-ponging between different windows
When the AI gives you a long explanation, close your eyes and listen to it instead
Use CLAUDE.md or instructions.md files rather than chatting back and forth with the agent, to cut down on the number of iterations
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
This week there was the Sony State of Play, and the new God of War was announced. The game features Kratos’s wife as the protagonist, with a cube as her companion — not quite what you’d expect. After the event I was scrolling through LinkedIn, and all the “experts” had their take. The character is wrong. The cube makes no sense. Swapping the protagonist’s gender has never worked for other franchises.
Watching the reaction of someone who actually worked on the game is worth more than a hundred LinkedIn posts put together. Honestly, I’m a bit tired of people exploiting the algorithm’s tendency to push outrage content. Especially when those people don’t make video games — they’re not in the trenches. I’d rather hear the passion of someone who actually works on games for a living.
The other thing I want to point out is that Santa Monica Studio has a more than proven track record of making successful games. We should all respect expertise and acknowledge that people who know more than us are probably right. I’m in the process of unfollowing podcasts and channels that thrive on controversy, because they distract from what actually matters.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
The issue of creating and distributing video games is a complex reality. Talk to anyone working in the industry and you’ll always hear the same thing: “making games is hard.”
During the years when video games received massive investments (especially during COVID), an illogical mindset crept into the industry: treating this delicate reality as if it were a complicated problem.
Complicated problems are solved with the left side of the brain. Building a rocket to go to Mars is a complicated problem. You need experts who, with the right knowledge and reasoning, will get you there. Once the process is found, the problem is solved — barring human error, of course.
A complex reality, on the other hand, requires entirely different skills. Skills for which the right side of the brain is better suited. It requires building certain relationships — both with people and with creative work. There is no single method, no formula. Companies that succeed and rely solely on formulas eventually pay the price.
Game creation and distribution cannot be treated as a complicated problem: it must be respected as a complex reality. Otherwise, it boils down to a game of stolen ideas and performance marketing tricks that only bring in money in the short term. Then, inevitably, someone comes along who is willing to work with fewer protections and longer hours, and overtakes us.
Sometimes I get the feeling that we need more humanists and artists, and fewer mathematical minds and business people, among our executive ranks.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
In recent years I’ve watched talented, experienced colleagues — people with years under their belt — lose their jobs overnight. The game they were working on didn’t sell well enough, the studio shifted strategy, or the publisher pulled the funding. The games industry is hit-based.
In this context, the “classic” path — find a studio, work there, build a career — is less secure than it looks. It carries real risks that people often don’t factor in, because we’re conditioned to see a permanent contract as the gold standard of job security, especially here in Europe.
When you work for a company, you have a single client: that company.
If things go wrong for them, they go wrong for you too. When you work as a freelancer, you have multiple clients. Losing one is a problem, but it’s not the end. The risk is spread.
But freelancing isn’t something that just happens by itself. You have to build it deliberately, over time. You need a system: a way to find new clients, keep existing ones, and make yourself visible to people who don’t know you yet.
The crux of it is this: the right clients need to know you exist. Since you’re almost always under NDA, you can’t show the games you’ve been working on, you can’t mention the titles, sometimes you can’t even say who you’ve worked for. The portfolio — the main tool most creative professionals use to present themselves — becomes all but useless for us.
The simplest solution is the client testimonial.
When a project wraps up, before the collaboration closes for good, ask your client to write a few lines about you. Three sentences is enough: what you did, how it went, what they took away from it. What you get is the voice of someone who’s worked with you and can say, publicly, that you’re worth hiring.
It works because it lowers the perceived risk for a new client. Someone who doesn’t know you has no way to evaluate you directly. But if they can see that someone else has already done that evaluation for them — and had a positive experience — the leap of faith becomes much smaller.
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