For me, when you’re doing marketing there are always three relationships to keep an eye on: the one with your customers (obvious), the one with your partners, and the one with your peers. On all three counts, this move looks poorly handled.
With players
Sony has chosen to alienate a significant chunk of its own users. There’s a bit of confusion around that “20%” figure floating about — it’s not entirely clear what it actually represents. Sony reports roughly 80% digital sales versus 20% physical in the last fiscal year: that figure describes sales, not people. A handful of collectors who buy almost exclusively on disc is enough to generate that 20% of sales, without representing a fifth of the fanbase. That said, the underlying point still stands: there’s a real audience, far from negligible, for whom this news means their collection stops here.
I understand the move makes sense if you want to control the entire supply chain and improve margins, but I don’t understand the coldness of the execution. They could have offered an alternative plan rather than simply closing the book. The model of a physical object as a permanent access key already exists and is well proven: Nintendo’s amiibo unlock content through a toy that remains yours and resaleable, Limited Run Games has built an entire business selling physical editions with a code for games that would otherwise be digital-only — and people snap them up — collector’s editions with steelbooks and a code are now a standard that publishers use to monetise attachment to the physical object.
Sony could do the same thing at scale — with a figurine, a book, a collectible artefact that guarantees lifetime access to the game: a reason to keep buying physical even in a digital-first world.
With commercial partners
Sony has also managed to antagonise its main distribution channels. The response from Meridiem was blunt and direct: some things aren’t downloaded, they’re felt, with a promise to resist. And they’re not alone: GAME responded with “it’s time to defend what matters to us”, Tesura Games openly called for the decision to be reversed.
I don’t know who makes these calls at Sony, but with partners you act before you publish a blog post, not after. Now Sony will have to find the carrot to offer after already swinging the stick.
With competitors
The major publishers, Nintendo aside, seem to be almost competing to see who can upset their audience the most. I don’t always buy physical — I buy a lot digitally — but knowing that I could no longer choose even if I wanted to stings a bit, and maybe makes me feel a little more distant from this industry I claim to love.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
The games industry has been in crisis for a few years now, like the rest of the world. Mass layoffs, studios closing, investment drying up.
The crisis isn’t a surprise. Things don’t grow forever — that’s a natural law. And yet people coming out of MBA programmes and finance courses seem to forget this basic fact, or perhaps they’re trained to ignore it. The result is that unrealistic expectations of continuous growth are created for investors, expectations the industry simply can’t sustain for long. Add the global geopolitical situation to that, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
What struck me most, though, was the behaviour of developers themselves.
This year in Madeira an interesting workshop took place. Participants were first asked to pitch an original game, then to build a hypothetical investment fund with a million dollars. The result: most of the money ended up going to tools, tech infrastructure, and ecosystems like Roblox. The very same developers who had just passionately pitched an original project wouldn’t have funded it themselves.
As one participant put it: “I literally built an investment firm that wouldn’t have funded my own pitch.”
It’s a system that rewards short-term returns and penalises long-term vision. When money becomes the goal rather than the means, everyone falls into line.
This isn’t a game for people without a safety net
I should be honest about where I stand in all of this. I’m an independent consultant, and one of the reasons I chose that path is precisely that I understand this mechanism and I’d rather not be dependent on it. But there’s another reason too: my parents are well-off. I’ve had a safety net that allowed me to stay in this industry through the rough patches. Not everyone has that.
The games industry today is increasingly an industry for people who can afford to wait. For people who already have family money behind them, who don’t need this month’s salary to cover the rent. This is a problem not just of fairness, but of quality. You’re shutting out talent that simply can’t afford the structural risks of such an unstable industry.
So what do you do?
I look to Hollywood with genuine interest, because it’s found some practical answers to similar problems.
The slate model: spread risk across multiple projects instead of betting everything on a single blockbuster. It means accepting that some will fail, but that the overall portfolio holds up.
Structural protections for creatives: Hollywood’s unions exist because without them the balance of power between capital and talent is too heavily skewed. The games industry needs similar structures.
The A24 model: small, curatorial, with a clear editorial identity. It picks the projects it believes in, makes them with care, and generates sustainable profits. Modest scale and a sharp vision can coexist with financial health.
A solvable problem
What’s needed are financial structures built around the actual timelines of game development, not venture capital cycles. More forums where developers can practise thinking like investors before they’re ever in a real boardroom. Models that give a studio enough runway to build something that lasts.
This is the moment when the people with decision-making power — investors, publishers, leads — can choose to build something more solid than what came before.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Many analysts and consultants give software houses the same advice: “look at the genres that sell, and make one of those.” If roguelites are exploding on Steam, ride the wave. If survival games are dominating the charts, build one.
What players actually evaluate
When I jump into a new game, I’m looking for something visceral: a feeling, a sense of stakes, a specific pleasure. I’m trying to live out a fantasy: that of the lone survivor, the strategist who bends chaos to their will, the hero who beats the impossible.
Genre is the container. What the player is buying is the experience inside it.
It’s not a new idea — the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) by Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek has been articulating this since 2004. But the convenience of taxonomic classification keeps winning out over actually studying player experiences. It’s much easier to put a genre label on a spreadsheet, after all.
Fantasies have a historical context
Fantasies don’t work in a vacuum. They’re rooted in the cultural moment they emerge from.
The survival game boom (DayZ, The Forest, Rust) grew out of a decade of economic crisis, political instability, and distrust of institutions. The fantasy of “starting over from scratch with your own two hands” resonated because it spoke to something millions of people were feeling in the real world.
The same goes for city builders and management games: they sell the fantasy of control and order in a world that feels chaotic. And when that collective feeling shifts, the fantasy that sells shifts with it — regardless of genre.
Identifying which fantasy is culturally ripe at any given moment is a completely different job from watching which genres are performing well on Steam. And it’s far more useful.
Where enormous budgets aren’t enough
Concord (Sony, 2024) is the textbook case. Estimated budget: over $400 million. Genre: hero shooter, going after the Overwatch and Valorant market. Everything looked right on paper — popular genre, quality studio, near-unlimited resources.
But players had no real reason to choose it over what they already had. It was pulled in under two weeks.
Skull & Bones (Ubisoft, 2024) followed a similar trajectory: eleven years in development, estimated budget around $650 million. Genre: naval combat with live service elements. The pirate fantasy — being a free-roaming corsair, master of the seas — was barely present in the actual gameplay, replaced by a hollow grind loop.
In both cases, the genre was “right.” The fantasy was empty.
The right question
Before asking “which genre is doing well?”, the productive question is:
What dream do players want to live out, right now, in this cultural moment, that nobody else has yet figured out how to deliver?
Answering that question takes empathy, a feel for the times, and the ability to connect culture with design.
Genre, for its part, is a handy map — but it’s not worth navigating by, because it was never built for that.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
The most common problem I see with my clients is that they often know too much. They listen to podcasts and take online courses, study competitors, gather feedback, analyse trends… and then they freeze.
Steve Jobs, in a famous 1997 interview, said that focus doesn’t mean saying yes to the most important things. It means saying no to hundreds of good ideas. Too much information can push you towards choices that are right, but not yours.
How I analyse the competition
When I analyse competitors for a client, I work in two columns:
What interests me about this competitor? What are they doing that points in an interesting direction: vision, audience, priorities — in that order.
What doesn’t interest me, and why? What are they doing that works, that the market accepts, that isn’t a mistake — but that simply isn’t right for me. Not for the audience I’m serving, not for the identity of the product I’m building.
It’s important to tell the difference between things that are too vague and things you can actually act on:
“We want to make something accessible” is vague.
“We will never build a system that requires an external guide to understand” is concrete, operational, and defensible.
The one thing to cut
In game design I often use a simple mental tool: find the one thing to cut. Almost always, it’s a good idea that someone has grown attached to. It’s not wrong in itself — it’s just wrong for this product, or at this moment.
The same logic applies to a strategy, a piece of communication, a roadmap.
Saying no to a good idea is the hardest part of the job. It requires knowing precisely what you’re trying to be, not just what you’d like to do.
And that clarity comes from deciding what to leave out.
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.
There’s an article by Renan Fontes on Goomba Stomp that analyses The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a classical tragedy. Link loses his childhood to save a world he can never return to, and even when Zelda sends him back in time, that act is the final confirmation of the loss.
It’s worth a read. I came back to it when the remake of this all-time classic was announced.
The tragic mechanism
The core of Fontes’s argument is straightforward: Link is a war orphan, already separated from the Kokiri before the story even begins. The Sword of Courage punishes his impatience with seven years of sleep. Waking up as an adult in a ravaged Hyrule, he has become someone else.
At the end, Zelda sends Link back to the past — but Navi leaves at exactly that moment. Even if you could go back to being a child, you would no longer be the same. You can’t unlive time.
That feeling doesn’t come from the writing itself, but from how the game was built around a coherent emotional identity, and from how the memorable peaks were distributed with care.
Peak-End: the moments that stay with you
Peak-end psychology tells us that people don’t remember an experience as the average of every moment they lived through. They remember the emotional peaks and the ending. Everything else settles into the background, but doesn’t shape the overall judgement.
In OoT, the peak is probably Navi’s departure. It’s the silence in the Temple of Time as the world takes shape again. It’s Saria saying goodbye without knowing it’s a final goodbye.
A mediocre game would have put the emotional peak in the boss fight. OoT puts it in a quiet loss. The ending — young Link in the castle courtyard, Zelda watching from a distance — resolves nothing. It leaves a wound open. A wound players carry with them for decades. The same one that, for me personally, changed something fundamental inside.
Lesson: the most powerful peak often doesn’t coincide with the mechanical climax. If you want an experience to be remembered in a particular way, design the memory, not just the event.
The emotional promise
OoT has a precise emotional identity: heroic melancholy. The feeling that growing up costs you something you can never get back, and that courage won’t save you from paying that price.
Every element of the game is charged with that atmosphere. The music (Saria’s Song, the Bolero of Fire, the Song of Time) anticipates the action and then comments on it. The temples feel like places abandoned by someone who once loved being there. Hyrule Field at night is as vast and silent as a promise that might not hold.
When a game knows what its emotional promise is, every decision becomes coherent. The colours, the silences in the dialogue, the distance between characters — all of them are carrying the same feeling.
Lesson: alongside designing mechanics or systems, it’s worth naming precisely the emotion you want to leave behind. Something specific. This can lead to uncomfortable conversations with the team or with management. But it matters.
Player Need Satisfaction: why the loss hurts
Self-Determination Theory breaks down fundamental psychological needs into three areas: autonomy (I feel like I’m acting), competence (I feel like I’m improving), relatedness (I feel like I belong).
OoT is a tragedy in part because it satisfies all three — and then takes them away before the credits roll.
You have autonomy: you choose where to go, when to return, how to use your tools. You have competence: you grow up, defeat impossible enemies, master magic. You have relatedness: Saria, Navi, Malon, the sages — a web of connections built piece by piece.
Then the game pulls it all apart.
Saria is trapped in the forest forever
Navi leaves without explanation
Zelda sends you back, but the version of you who lived through those seven years can’t come with you.
Lesson: loss in a game hurts in proportion to how much the player has invested in building something. If you want a tragic ending to land with real weight, the psychological needs have to be fulfilled before they’re taken away.
Conclusion
Fontes wrote a narrative analysis. But underneath it there’s something more interesting: OoT works as a tragedy because the design choices and the narrative choices are pointing in the same direction. That’s coherence. And I’m glad my daughter will get to experience this remarkable game in its updated form.
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
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The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
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Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
