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Tag: personal

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.

Learn to Tell Your Story

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 07/09/2026

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

Every six months a new piece of technology comes out and people start getting excited, declaring on one hand that we’re done for, that we’ll all end up washing dishes; and on the other that we’ll never have to work again and life will be wonderful for everyone. All of it accompanied by the same case studies every time, heavily inspired by the worlds of video games and science fiction.

I don’t fall for it anymore, thank God.

There is nothing that can replace the human ability to communicate with other people. This includes:

  • playing music for other people
  • telling stories to other people
  • informing other people
  • listening to other people

Imagine for a moment that we had a programme capable of creating a complete game. Production, programming, art direction, design, quality assurance, sound design — the lot. You’d still need people who could walk into a room and make others feel something. A conductor, capable of telling compelling stories, creating memorable experiences, entertaining. No programme can do that, because the moment something like that becomes automated, it loses its novelty.

I therefore think this is the time to be more serious about things, not to give up. Your mind, your physical abilities, and the way you read a context will carry more and more weight — precisely because they are human and unique.

This is also the area I’ve invested nearly 10 years in through teaching, and the reason this blog is still going.

Have a great week — now get to work!

Design from Below

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 17/06/2026

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.

Don’t Get Distracted

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 05/06/2026

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.

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