There’s a stubborn bias in tech: that gaming is a hobby, something you do in your free time, separate from “real work.” Look closer at the people designing the digital experiences we use every day, training AI models, or building complex systems, and you’ll find that many of them learned their most important lessons by playing games, or building them. That’s no coincidence. Video games have always been the lab where technical limits, engagement rules, and the tricks for making something artificial feel natural get tested first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Codemotion Milan 2026, that lab resurfaces in three very different talks that all end up telling the same story from three angles: a game designer looking at AI, a hacker getting Claude to talk to a 1977 Atari, and an AI engineer teaching a tiny model to play Doom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carolina Pinto is a Senior UX Designer with over nine years of experience, currently at King<\/strong>, the Swedish studio behind Candy Crush Saga (released in November 2012), now part of Microsoft’s portfolio following Activision Blizzard’s acquisition of King in 2016 and Microsoft’s subsequent acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which closed in October 2023. The game is still developed and run day-to-day by King, even though the intellectual property now belongs to Microsoft. Pinto previously worked at Dell Technologies and CaixaBank, and also leads Women Who Code Barcelona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her talk, What Candy Crush Can Teach AI Products About Human Behavior<\/em>, starts from a simple observation: AI products keep getting more capable, but many still aren’t very enjoyable to use. Games, on the other hand, have spent decades solving the exact same problems AI tools struggle with today, onboarding, trust, motivation, retention, except at a scale of millions of users and with almost zero room for error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why watch it<\/strong>: if you work on an AI product and have never thought of experience design as a game design problem, this talk flips that perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enzo Lombardi is currently Cloud Software Architect at Cleafy<\/strong>, a Milan-based cybersecurity company founded in 2014 by a group of Politecnico di Milano alumni, specializing in digital banking fraud prevention. Before Cleafy, though, his career took him through Microsoft, where he was part of the original .NET team and worked on the Windows Compatibility Toolkit and Windows Performance Analyzer, and Google, where he worked on Hangouts and on the Directory part of Google Workspace. He’s also the author of technical books (including a series on Claude and one on Rust) and a contributor to MAME, the well-known open source arcade and retro console emulator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His talk, Racing the Beam<\/em>, is pure retrocomputing love applied to modern AI: starting from the Atari VCS 2600, released in 1977 with just 128 bytes of RAM and no frame buffer, Lombardi walks through how he built an MCP (Model Context Protocol) to connect Claude to a Go-based Atari emulator, manually reverse-engineered the assembly of an obscure 1980s game, and then asked Claude to build an AI good enough to actually put up a fight.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEnzo Lombardi: when AI meets a 1977 Atari<\/h3>\n\n\n\n