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The Player’s Cut

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 12/06/2026

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.

Gaudí Didn’t Build the CathedralLa Sagrada Família quasi completata vista dall'esterno, giugno 2026

Gaudí Didn’t Build the Cathedral

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 11/06/2026

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.

La Sagrada Família nearly complete, June 2026

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:

Fable – Gameplay Demo (2025)

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.

Like saying “Gaudí’s cathedral”.

Ocarina of Time: A Masterclass in Designing a Tragedy

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 10/06/2026

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.

Read the original article on Goomba Stomp

Action, Response, Reaction, Consequence, Implications

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 09/06/2026

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.

Digital Eye Strain: The Hidden Cost of Hyper-Focus

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 08/06/2026

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:

  1. Sync your fonts and sizes so everything is large enough to read comfortably
  2. Reduce contrast where possible, and avoid constantly ping-ponging between different windows
  3. When the AI gives you a long explanation, close your eyes and listen to it instead
  4. Use CLAUDE.md or instructions.md files rather than chatting back and forth with the agent, to cut down on the number of iterations

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.

Video Game: A Complicated Reality

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 02/06/2026

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.

Testimonials for Freelancers

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 01/06/2026

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.

What if students made the video game instead of studying it?

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 29/05/2026

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

You’re studying how Hitler’s rise to fame unfolded in the Weimar Republic. Economic causes, political crisis, beer hall rallies, cut-price populism. Serious stuff, but heavy going.

Then someone in class says: what if we made a beer hall simulator?

You pour pints, serve customers, make money. Hitler wanders between the tables spouting nonsense. Get him drunk enough and his popularity drops. Let him talk and it rises.

That’s a video game. You just designed it. And an AI builds it while you’re talking.

This is the after-school activity I have in mind.

AI applied to video games applied to the humanities. History, philosophy, literature, economics. Games have always been rule systems built on real-world activities and events.

The format is simple. The class sits down. The teacher is the only interface with the AI agent. The students focus on coming up with ideas and coordinating to give it instructions. The teacher types, guides, asks questions. The agent builds. At the end, everyone plays together.

No one needs to know how to code. No one needs to know how to use Godot. What you need is the ability to reason about a problem and work together.

History translated into mechanics.

When a student decides that “drunk equals less popularity”, they’re reasoning about how political consent actually worked in Weimar Germany. They’re building a causal model. They’re doing what historians do, with a tool that feels like their own.

The game forces you to simplify — deliberately. You have to choose what matters, what to measure, what to leave out. That choice is the critical thinking you’re trying to teach. And then you play. And you have a laugh. And that laugh is memory.

New frontiers

Today, anyone with a clear idea and an AI agent can have a working prototype in hours. Not a masterpiece — a prototype. Something that runs, that you can touch, that responds.

Access to creation is no longer filtered by technical ability. It’s filtered by clarity of thought.

Schools already have after-school activities like robotics, drama, and computing. All perfectly valid. But there’s a new territory I think is worth exploring: using AI to turn humanities subjects into interactive experiences that students design together.

Someone will do it, sooner or later. It could start in any classroom.

Do the work, even if no one is paying you yet

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 27/05/2026

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

Breaking into an industry from the outside has become incredibly hard. And that goes doubly for games, especially if you’re not in a geographically convenient spot — far from London, Montreal, Amsterdam, or whatever hub happens to be hot right now.

Dreaming is fine. But you have to be practical.

The best way to find work is to already have some. A portfolio that speaks for itself, a real project to show, a recognisable voice. If you don’t have work, you have to make your own.

Sitting there sending out CVs and waiting for replies isn’t a strategy. It’s a way of feeling busy while actually standing still. You’re better off using that time to work on a personal project: a prototype, a public write-up, a series of posts — something that actually exists in the world.

The periods when you can’t get your foot in the door are periods to use, not to endure. Develop your voice. Build things. Talk about what you’re learning.

It’ll matter later. Trust me.

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