This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
In the last few days I’ve written about what retains value when copying a game becomes trivial and about prototypes built by mixing existing games together. Today I’m coming back to the same territory, but from the audience’s side — prompted by two pieces of content that landed in my inbox almost simultaneously.
Taking apart and putting back together
The first is a video from the AI Search channel that explains how to use AI to decompile games and remix them with each other. Mirror’s Edge parkour inside Skyrim, Minecraft inside GTA, Spider-Man in a Batman game. The parkour port, the author says, took roughly a day. His summary:
“Think of it as like copying and pasting various elements from different games to create a completely new game.”
A lot of these mashups are rough around the edges — collisions and physics breaking all over the place. Almost none of them will ever become a product. And yet loads of people watch them, recreate them, and share them.
That’s what I find fascinating. For a certain segment of the audience, the game has become a toy. The objectives we design become optional; the fun is in opening the box, pulling out the pieces, and building something nobody planned for.
What they’re really after
The second is a long post by Seth Godin on which AI businesses are actually worth building. Godin writes that at the root of almost every purchase there are three drives: status, belonging, and freedom from fear. On top of that he places an intermediate layer made up of things like control, transformation, and belonging to a narrative.
The people making mashups live exactly in that layer. They want control over the game they love, they want to transform it, and they want to show it to people like them. Every community swapping these experiments around is a network effect that nobody had to pay for.
Then there’s the line that hit me hardest as a game designer:
“Mechanics without a story is the race to the bottom.”
Godin is talking about startups. It applies to us just as well. If a mechanic can be lifted out in a day, on its own it’s worth very little. The player is looking for the story that mechanic lets them tell.
Fallout’s dog in Human: Fall Flat
I tried looking at my own game, Pawtners Case, through this lens.
Take Dogmeat, the dog from Fallout 4 — the one you order to fetch items and bring them back. Drop him into Human: Fall Flat, the physics puzzle game from No Brakes Games where Bob wanders through his own dreams grabbing everything with floppy arms. The result looks a lot like Pawtners Case: a police dog in a dreamlike city, two buttons, objects picked up with the mouth, and physics that makes you laugh.
Today I could watch that mashup running before I’d written a single line of code. It would be a private, unpublishable prototype — and it would be enough to tell whether the feel works.
There’s also a detail I now read differently. In Pawtners Case every case can be solved three ways: noob, pro, and hacker. The hacker route is designed for players who exploit the physics and the levels to reach the end in their own way — in other words, for people who treat the game like a toy. I’d designed it as a bonus feature. Maybe it’s actually speaking to the most interesting audience of all.
So, is it a business?
For the people making mashups, almost never. For whoever gives them a legal sandbox, pieces to combine, and a stage to perform on — very likely yes. Roblox, Mario Maker, and Fortnite Creative have been proving that for years.
For game designers, the question shifts: how easy is it to take my game apart, and what will players build with the pieces?