I thought it was time I attempted to blog regularly about my actual day job, rather than my various non-work related interests, which is the co-owner of the UK’s oldest brick-and-mortar tabletop gaming shop Leisure Games. Hopefully this will become a regular thing but we’ll have to see.
Ryan Dancey has lost his job as Chief Operating Officer of Alderac Entertainment Group, after asserting that generative AI could create ideas for board games as well as a human could.
Dancey has been a controversial figure in the tabletop gaming industry throughout his career over the past 30 years. Most famously, at Wizards of the Coast he championed the idea of releasing the Dungeons & Dragons rules via an Open Gaming License (OGL), essentially a license similar to Creative Commons or the Open Source licenses used in software development. This fundamentally changed the nature of roleplaying publishing in the early 2000s, which resulted in both a boom and eventually bust (for the record, I think that the OGL is on balance a good thing and that the devastating impact on the roleplaying industry was largely down to wider issues than the OGL).
The use of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) in the development of tabletop games has been a controversial topic for quite some time. Companies such as Stronghold Games, publisher of Terraforming Mars, have embraced it. Others including Stonemaier Games (Wingspan) have declared that their games will be AI free. Wizards of the Coast, publisher of both Dungeons & Dragons and trading card game behemoth Magic: The Gathering, been involved in numerous controversies over the use of LLM art. It currently has a policy of not using AI art, but Chris Cocks, the CEO of its parent company Hasbro, has enthused about using AI across their brands, explicitly including D&D. Finally, within the indie roleplaying game space, there have been moves to create more of a culture of rejecting generative content, with creators being encouraged to include branding on their zines and books such as Human Made.
Speaking as a retailer, AI is a bit of a challenge for us; you can feel it looming. Since the rise of Catan 30 years ago, the board game industry has been turbo charged by embracing a culture of designer board games. During that period, there’s been a trend to put designers’ names on the cover of their games. Designers such as Reiner Knizia, Elizabeth Hargrave and Uwe Rosenberg have become brands in themselves. As an industry, it has used its focus on design and craftsmanship to sell itself as a medium to be taken more seriously than it was in the past.
As designer board games have become more successful however, there’s been a countervailing trend of larger companies in the field such as Hasbro and Asmodee to deemphasise creators in favour of companies and retheming existing games. And the affordability and speed of generative AI has proven very tempting for smaller designers with much more limited budgets.
As a retailer, I don’t think that my personal values should necessarily mirror what we stock; it isn’t really my place to get in the way of consumer choice — at least, up to a point. I wouldn’t automatically rule out stocking AI generated product (despite my concerns about it, I will guiltily admit to personally purchasing the latest expansions for Terraforming Mars). But I do think it devalues the worth of games and pushes them back into a sphere where they’re seen as disposable commodities, which takes us backwards as an industry.
Thousands of new tabletop games are released every year. In such a busy market, where is the space for AI? For that reason we haven’t even considered stocking games which obviously make use of AI generated art, for example — ultimately it just makes it easier for us to decide what to not bother with. It helps that they are generally pretty ugly; perhaps I simply don’t get the AI aesthetic.
The resurgence of tabletop gaming over the past three decades has been due to people embracing the analogue, distinctly human nature of playing a physical game in person. Pivoting to AI now seems like a bad business decision in both the short and long term; our strength is distinguishing ourselves from bland mass-produced, anonymous corporate fare. I suspect that notion will be challenged over the next few years, but honestly I think that embracing the “human made” selling point of tabletop games will serve the industry far better than pouring out an endless slop of AI-generated games.
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