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Tag: myself

The Business I Chose

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 16/09/2026

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

Yesterday I watched this interview with the CEO of Bulkhead, the studio behind Wardogs, an online multiplayer first-person shooter.

I knew the reaction would come instantly, and that this person’s words were perfect fodder for easy clicks and LinkedIn hot takes against crunch.

Today, a writer friend sends me this piece by another writer.

The business I chose

Nobody forced me into game development. My real passion is thinking about what kind of experience to bring to the medium. The part I enjoy most is discovering new cultures and finding brilliant people to talk and argue with about creative things. My dream is to put my name on a few games that actually leave a mark.

I don’t make games to get rich, and I don’t make them alone — though I had to try it on my own to figure that out. I make games because that’s the choice I made, pure love for it, if you like. Since I spend most of my waking hours at work, it matters to me to try and build something genuinely grand, rather than just tend a small, tidy little patch.

And when I work for others, I always look for projects that excite me. I don’t work just to pay the bills — I try to work on things I actually care about. And that sometimes comes at a cost: a mind that never quite switches off, extra hours, time taken away from my family.

The same was true for the family I grew up in. My mother, a paediatrician, worked far more hours than she was ever required to. My father, a lawyer, would pull all-nighters to draft briefs. My brother is a judge and he too has to do gruelling shifts with no extra pay. My family taught me that crunch doesn’t really exist as a concept — there are just things that need doing, and those things take time.

Recently I chose to move from mobile free-to-play to PC and console games, and that comes with a serious amount of extra hours. This is what I chose, and I know the consequences. We talk about our rights an awful lot, and about our responsibilities hardly at all.

The Pleasure of Walking

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 15/09/2026

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

Lately it feels like mistakes aren’t just piling up — they’re compounding exponentially. New technologies let us get from point A to point B sometimes almost instantly. But that very thing makes us miss out on opportunities that could turn out to be essential.

Imagine that this weekend you decide to visit a museum in your city. Imagine you have a helicopter at your disposal that picks you up from home and takes you straight there. A helicopter ride is fun (I assume — I’ve never been on one), so let’s say the price you pay is falling asleep for the journey. The upside is that you arrive at your destination immediately. But you lose everything else along the way: if you’d walked, you might have bumped into an old friend en route. Or, who knows, stumbled across a café doing a great breakfast. Or spotted a sign announcing the opening of another cultural centre and decided to head there instead. Sure, walking is more tiring, and slower — but it’s full of possibilities.

Right, well — in game design today you can generate a feature spec almost instantly. Your boss tells you to work on a feature, gives you a week, and within two hours you’ve already got a solid base to work from. All thanks to algorithms built essentially on probability, running on enormously powerful hardware, capable of producing structured, reasonably coherent documentation in next to no time. Far less time than you or I would need, that’s for sure.

The problem is what gets lost along the way: the chance to discover other things, to pick up new ideas and angles. But your boss gave you a week and you’re delivering in two days, so your OKR is probably going to look great — even if what you’re not doing is actually discovering anything new.

So where does that leave us? My own preference is pretty clear. For me, a true professional needs to take the time to do things properly — creativity needs constraints, yes, but it also needs time.

Eagles Dressed as Pigeons

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 19/08/2026

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.

Professionalism Above All

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 14/08/2026

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

I had a colleague a while back who seemed genuinely brilliant. They had made some specific lifestyle choices, and before they joined, a few people in the work chat had made the odd joke at those choices’ expense. Nothing malicious — just the usual banter.

When they joined the company, this person went through Slack looking at old messages to see if anyone had previously taken a dig at their lifestyle. They found the messages, and managed to work with HR to get the people who’d been laughing fired.

Years later, this person was let go themselves, and since then they’ve been constantly in the middle of some controversy or other. I’m not saying they’re wrong — in principle, they have a point. But I have to say things start to smell a bit off when either you keep getting sacked or there’s always a problem with the CEO or senior leadership.

I won’t set myself up as anyone’s moral compass here — my own tolerance for certain things is genuinely low, and I work hard to train it. For me, professionalism comes before everything else. If your colleagues make jokes that offend you, stop and think about what happens to them if they lose their jobs over it. Professionalism also means being patient when the situation calls for it.

If your company lets you go for any reason — say, because it would rather replace you with AI — the professional thing to do, in my view, is to accept it and move on to the next thing. Turning into a keyboard warrior and leaking company strategies that are covered by an NDA is not professional. I know it’s infuriating, I know it hurts, but professionalism, I’ll say it again, comes first.

If one of your employees calls something out publicly, professionalism requires that you go to your comms department and craft a proper response — not react from the gut, and certainly not without getting some advice first, ideally not from Claude.

The lack of professionalism I see in this industry is staggering. We all need more patience and more professionalism — every single one of us. Have a good weekend.

Give the best of your “more or less”

Published by Paolo on 14/04/2026

Many years ago, I lost my job ad a dream company and I decided to become the best game designer I could possibly be. Part of this is still within me, also if many things changed. One for all, I understood that teams/clients do not need, nor want, the best in class.

If you are reliable, honest, candid, and humble, generally speaking you will be better welcomed into games teams. I notice, especially among junior game designers, the will to be better than others or more knowledgeable. You can easily end up being perceived as superb, like that.

The best way to do your job is to give the best of your “more or less”, without delivering too much. You will lose less energies and your job will be recognized in any case.

Management and direction

Published by Paolo on 08/04/2026

Last year I found a great client; good team, excellent leadership, profitable company. The project was (well, is) ambitious and novel. I felt part of the leadership team, I contributed to the development of their MVP. And then, a more expert designer joined and I was out. I had an interesting chat with my client, and he explained me exactly why the decision. It made sense, I learnt a lot. Still, it hurt because everything worth in life hurts a little.

Now that it’s one month since I joined GSC Game World, I already feel there is something very different in the way of managing high-quality projects compared with mobile f2p. Mobile needs pragmatism: you are chasing big numbers because you are investing huge amounts of money to give a highly technological product in the hand of distract people for free with the hope to engage their attention. High quality games, on the other end, are for people who decide to light a console up to be immersed into an experience they paid for.

And this leads to a fundamental difference: (product) management is what leads mobile, while creative direction is what leads high quality games. Of course, I am passionate and prepared designer and I can tackle any challenge, plus I have a certain age and experience so I can be a great leader. But mobile games are managed in a McKinsey-an style, and companies chase perfection. And the best way to avoid the risk of not having it is to hire people with a real pedigree (which I don’t have). On the other end, PC/Console single player high quality games (open world, FPS, survival) look for people capable of prototyping and realize the creative vision being away of design pillars, vision, and so on.

Two different worlds that I am sure can learn from each other. I know I will bring learnings from premium to mobile, and viceversa.

AI is not just a tool

Published by Paolo on 27/01/2026

I’m not convinced by this “AI is just a tool.” We’re wired for stories and narratives, in the sense that our perception is very attentive to them and our memory contains narrative sequences. A tool capable of creating a narrative structure ceases to be a simple tool for me.

It’s a bit like saying “movies are just a tool,” or “video games are just a tool.” Well, it’s certainly possible to use movies and video games as tools. How many times in school were we shown a movie to explain a story? Some teachers use role-playing games or even computer games to explain concepts.

However, these artifacts aren’t just tools. And AI isn’t one for me either. It can heavily influence the way we implement an idea, given that it’s capable of arguing (often bullshit) very well and could catch us at a stressful moment when it’s easy to give in to the temptation to trust. And this inevitably leads to missed opportunities.

Of course, you can cut off your finger with a knife. With Photoshop, you can gather a series of images and make a collage. But that’s a direct use during which you’re aware of the error, either before or just after.

AI isn’t just a tool; it can only be used as a tool, that’s true. But it’s designed, like many things these days, to capture our attention (so we pay the monthly subscription) in exchange for the feeling of being more productive.

And that’s not the case.

Christmas break

Published by Paolo on 23/12/2025

I wish you and your family a merry Christmas and a happy 2026. I scheduled a couple of posts for key dates, but I will spend some day with my family in Italy so I will not post over here during two weeks.

See you next year, I hope you will find your “Zelda’s Lullaby”, your key for multiple solutions.

I like to share success stories

Published by Paolo on 21/12/2025

One of the things I like the most about the games industry are the success stories. I like when people, for a reason or another, join together and achieve great success, higher than they expected. This possibility is one of the elements that keeps me within the games industry.

I am aware of the “survivorship bias” here, and I know that I cannot reproduce the success of others. I have been in enough projects to understand that every successful game is a little miracle. A combination of multiple factors. You cannot just follow guides and tips and be successful. And that’s exactly what I find attractive of this business.

When I celebrate concrete case studies over here is not to give false hopes to people. It’s not a “hey, look at them! they did that with few resources, you should do the same, it’s easy!”. Not at all.

It’s just that my LinkedIn feed in the last 2 years is filled with empty messages, sexy selfies, and bad news. And I just genuinely like to spread good news, and say “hey, everything is freaking hard, but I am a gamer and believe me: an epic win is always possible.”

Things that matter

Published by Paolo on 16/12/2025

Yesterday I wrote an introduction on LinkedIn because suddenly I got lots of new contacts due to my post on The Game Awards. I was taking care of things here at home and wrote that piece spontaneously, got much more traction than other times where I have the time of think and structure better my thoughts.

I got two new leads for clients, and the post shows nothing about my knowledge and skills, that is surprising. On the other side, the temptation to go always more personal and deep is strong.

I am sure that this is valid also for game making. If we create something that connects truly with us at a personal level, chances are we can achieve better results than making things just for the sake of business. It’s a delicate art, and it’s easy to believe to weak theories I am aware of that. But I am also aware that I have maybe 20 years of career in front of me and it would be better to spend them on something that truly matters.

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