Two years ago my sister asked me what was was doing to deal with AI in the gaming industry. I answered, not entirely facetiously, “trying to bring down capitalism”.

The point is of course that one – only one! – of the terrible things AI is already doing to our society is vast economic destruction. Capitalism is built on a fundamental principle of the rich paying their workers as little as possible while controlling them as much as possible. A significant automation that elides human salary will be applied as forcibly as possible and as swiftly and cruelly as possible. There is no human occupation not facing the threat of being eliminated: the only question is the likelihood of profit-making, the timeframe and the popular tolerance for it. (Weirdly some people have insisted their job is the special one which is safe, but I have seen no convincing argument that any job actually is. Feel free to try to convince me I’m wrong!)

The commercial arts are likely to be the first to go. We can see this by the fact that we are labelling things as human-made. A label is always a point of distinction. I remember in the 80s people starting using the term “disposable cups” for the new moulded plastic phenomenon; coffee then was only takeaway from McDonalds. Now we have “keep-cups” for the conscientious and adaptable (I have not been able to bring the keep cup into my life as yet). Human-made will be exceptional very soon and paying for it reserved for those who have space.

Which means games will stop being commercial art forms, except at their most base and most widely appealing – a chess set and a deck of cards will continue to sell, but everything else will be the domain of the enthusiast only. Like theatre, we will encourage people to step away from mainstream entertainment for something rough and ready and perhaps in a dingy community space. Like fine art we will have to rely on the government giving us grants and putting us in museums. If I were keen to preserve games, I think I’d start thinking about setting up game galleries: artistic salons which highlight the unique and the important. We can see this now with the popularity of things like Molly House and John Company. Certainly throughout history the chief way that games have been redeemed from being seen as louche, sinful and only for gambling has been to rebrand them as educational but I think here this is different: we must brand them as culturally significant or we will lose them altogether. The age of the arthouse game is here. It’s the only thing, I think, that will save us.

Some might accuse me of exaggerating, but we know technology can move very quickly and culture does the same in response. In 1825, there was one mile of railroad in the UK; by 1850 there was 6,000. In the space of two generations it changed the world. Along with the bicycle and the steamship it put mass transit into the reach of even the very poor. In 1837 the average difference between the birth place of husband and wife in the UK was 1 mile; by 1901 it was 100 miles. The gap between powered flight and the moon landing was 66 years. Some of us have lived through the digital revolution and the social media shift: in 2005, there was no real social media, almost nobody owned a smart phone, no Tea Party movement, and the idea of Donald Trump becoming president was ridiculous. By 2015, all of that had changed. Social media ran the world and was part of Trump’s ascension. We stand now on the verge of another explosive decade or two: despite the topic of this article it is hard to predict what 2035 will look like. But I think we can guarantee it will be vastly unlike where we are now, in every respect: culturally, socially, politically, commercially and maybe ludically.

It’s also worth noting that none of these inventions raised the ire of Luddites. Certainly the steam engine devastated the barge industry and reduced mining jobs but they weren’t existential threats of naked exploitation like early factories. Luddites were transformed into hating technology but they were nothing of the sort. (Although of course mass transit was not an unblemished blessing: it had devasatating effects when combined with colonialism, for example.) Similarly today if you point out the well documented job losses, capitalist dogmatism, mad financial speculation, government capture, health destruction, environmental threat, child endangerment, psychological damage, intellectual degredation, numerous deaths and general epistemological decay caused by natural language models and AI platforms you are called a “technological doomer”. One should be a tech optimist, as if this is possible in an era where nearly everything we use now isn’t something we can own, fails to work, treats us like the product and reports on us to the government. Worse: it will steal what we create, use it to create a fascimile and then sell it to our audience for less. And not a word of this is hyperbole.

For the early years, much of game design discourse in this area was plagued by the cultish early adopters, eager to prove that they were the smart ones for getting in early. (I remember someone telling me AI was a marvellous invention in most cases; I told him it was slowing down my software. He said I should never use software that forcibly included AI. I told him it was Microsoft Word. Just last week I saw him echoing my frustrations about Word. Early adopters have a flipside: there are also plenty of us who are accused of crying wolf just because we can see the wolf coming from further away.) Nowadays, they seem to have shut up because – as we explained – customers didn’t want AI. But also because the train lines are coming down, fast and hard, and it is true that humans get used to things very quickly. In many ways, the question has become moot. My job has already been taken by AI (see figure 1). The only thing stopping me being replaced is good will and customer insistence. How long can that last?

RPG writers are especially vulnerable to this because like most writers we spent the first thirty years of the internet uploading as much of our work as possible. For the short term, I expect more and more we will just have to retreat. I’m not even sure I dare write games in Microsoft Word right now. Certainly not Google Docs. It feels too risky. Everything I do seems to enrich others and steal from me. But at the same time, I’m not sure – being poor, being disabled, being neuroatypical – that I can find alternatives like a keep cup. It is immensely depressing to be reaching perhaps the high point of my career only to see it on the precipice of being able to make any kind of money – but it is of course much more depressing for the young starting out. Again, others may say that is doomist, but I would say they will see the wolf soon enough.

This may be why we’re seeing zines creeping into the public eye again: they can contain games that cannot be owned or stolen. We’re also seeing more and more that people crave shared experiences and connection and passive media fails to give them that. They want to DO things, and do them together. And they want to feel things and touch them in their hands. Even if these things are the new keep-cups, they will have value to humans. Humans will certainly never stop gaming: I own a facsimile of a deck of cards made from the fibres of beds and walls in a WW2 concentration camp, and cell walls have had games carved into the stone. Gaming, uh, finds a way.

But selling games for money? I’m not so sure. I have so many wonderful ideas for versions of The Score. But I’m not sure there’s enough money in making them…and it might be better to make them as cheaply as I can and give them away as PDFs to print and play. Last year, I spoke at DevCon, the annual Australian meet up of designers, and I was asked a question and the asker said “but don’t just say ‘it depends on your definition of success'” – because I had said that a few times already. But I think it is going to be increasingly important because I think less and less will we be able to always align success with sales. Like the Bohemians, we will have to choose more and more between making games and eating food. Be ready for that choice: that is my message for now.

Science loves taxonomy, and science is always finding taxonomies fail. It is, indeed, the nature of taxonomies that they fail, because nature abhors straight lines and clear classifications. But we humans like them and they can be useful, and there are lots of them to find. I work in animal training so I encounter lots of taxonomies of the world, and one fairly robust one has some nice implications for thinking about game design.

In a nutshell, animal behaviouralists break all animal behaviour down into three categories: Foraging for the things it needs to survive, Hazard Management, to stop other things from foraging them, and Social and Reproductive activities, with their own species.

You can pretty much straight away see where this is going in game design: most game play urges really do come down to these three things. We need to get resources, cards, cubes, money, area on the board, pieces, information coming in. We need to manage the things that want to make us lose our resources or push us back on our tracks. And between it all we have a social space where we try to read and anticipate what others are doing (or work with them in a collaborative game). You can use this to analyze your game, as a lens, to see what might be wrong with it too. If players feel confused about what to do, then it probably means you haven’t made it clear that the resources are important or how to get them, or that the hazards can be avoided, and how to manage them. If players feel like the game is too hard then it’s either because they can’t forage enough to feel nourished, or they can’t manage the hazards coming at them. If a game feels too easy then either make it harder to forage or harder to manage the hazards. Social elements are often things that happen around the game rather than directly through it, but there are also plenty of mechanics that heighten those things. If you want to bring them to the fore, you need to make the mechanics drive player interaction. Happy with multiplayer solitaire? You can leave social mechanics to the side.

In my book I talk about how Tim Clare coined the elements of games being Identity, Goal and Law: who am I playing, what do I want to do, and what is stopping me from doing it? Who am I is the first element of the social aspect. I am noughts, you are crosses – that is a social position. What do I want is Foraging. And what is going to stop me is Hazard Management.

Now when it comes to starting the design process, this is probably too simple to be helpful. We all know that a game is an exercise in turning one resource into victory against some restrictions. Clarifying that does not give you anything to go on when you start designing! It’s too bare bones. But it might help you if you get lost in the weeds and can’t figure out where to go next, or which thing to change.

It might also help you understand what kind of games you like to play, and what kind of players you have at the table. Some players LOVE to forage. They want to build an engine that produces all sorts of goodies. They want to have that turn where they get all the wheat or all the money. Some players also like foraging but they want to really work for it. Like can they find that extra inch of game space that gives them one more wheat than anyone else? Still foraging. Some players HATE hazards. Everyone has risk aversion and loss aversion but there are some players who cannot stand it. They’d rather get a +1 than a reroll because what if the reroll is bad? They’d rather give an opponent +1 than lose a point. To them, fun means hazards need to get managed, hard. On the other hand, some people love the thrill of having a crazy ride with hazards. They want the thrill of the danger. There are some who want party games where everyone feels like they’re mostly on the same side, and some who want social games where betrayal is the only course served, cold or otherwise. I suppose you could think of these as axes: Abundance vs Threatened. This is usually a taxonomy you can read off your play(testers) pretty quickly. And these axes also give you levers to pull, to try different options.

You can also use this as a wider length to think about beliefs, values and conflict, whether that’s in games, about games, or anywhere. A taxonomy of conflict – or rather places where healthy conflict breaks down into unhealthy, painful stuff – is one remarkably similar to these three things. These are Care, Control, and Respect – and they line up with Forage, Hazard, Social.

Care is the point of contention where someone feels like they or someone they value isn’t being cared for. And this isn’t a left or right position; one can see Care being a sticking point when folks feel like immigrants are taking the jobs of hard-working locals. Care can also be about an idea: not enough is being done to Care about justice, or free speech, or the rule of law. The conflict arises because the person sees these things or these resources as important, and wants to forage and store them up. The flipside of Care is the Control sticking point. The person wants themself or some other group to be able to do something, to have an impact, or they fear they will lose control. The need to be able to act on ones environment stems from a fear of the environment being hazardous. Valuing control is the valuing of managing those hazards. I want to be able to do thing X, and I feel worried that I might not be able to. Finally we have Respect, which is the social one. I want you to respect me, or respect a hierarchy of some sort which I feel I am somewhat a part of. This can be respecting everyone, too: everyone gets a fair go. The duck at the back that hasn’t got any peas, let’s make sure we throw one to him too. Of course, each of these can also be inverted: I can be stuck on a belief that something is NOT worthy of respect, that a thing should not be foraged for or is in no danger of running out, or that, having given up control, you should as well.

It’s definitely not that case that how someone plays games will reflect where they encounter conflict or their political views! I am someone extremely averse to not being able to tamp down hazards in my games, and love a good forage, but my politics are broadly accepting of risk as the price of freedom, for example. Nor is all human behaviour nothing but foraging, managing hazards and socialising. But we’re all animals. Huizinga was wrong – we are not the only species that plays. And so we all also forage, manage and socialise.

EDIT: Someone suggested a third kind of playstyle, so now we have this:

Last week, someone asked me what the difference is between a toy, a game and a puzzle. The short answer is a game usually has a goal and a struggle to it and is interactive. A toy is interactive but has no goal or struggle. A puzzle has a goal and a struggle, but isn’t interactive (or the interaction is purely one way). But it also made me think something else: how do people learn this?

Ratatouille is a film about a rat that becomes a chef but it has in it a discussion of a concept that is beyond what we might expect from an animated film. Pixar is of course always good about going above and beyond: the Inside Out films are radical in how they depict emotional psychology, quite against what everything else in our culture says, there is that famous Marxist speech in A Bug’s Life, and so on. Rataouille turns on a debate about artistic process. Remy the rat is told by chef Auguste Gusteau that “anyone can cook”, which allows him to believe in himself and become a chef too. The “villain” of the film is Anton Ego, the food critic, who finds the idea that “anyone can cook” offensive. The disagreement turns on the idea of craft: Ego believes that the saying anyone can cook implies that cooking is easy. That it has no craft, no skill, no quality. He would agree that anyone might learn to cook, which is what Remy believes Gusteau means: that although he is the sworn enemy of any chef, a rat can become a chef, if he learns the craft.

One thing we’re extremely aware of – and suspicious of – in this world is gatekeepers. Liberal politics, post-modernist art, anarchist and Marxist politics, structuralist philosophy, all of these modern things share an overlapping distrust of systems as barriers to access. One could argue that this is more about modern consumerist thinking leaking in to our brains, that the constant emphasis on accessibility and approachability of things is something that arises from a world of push-button products and instant gratification. Coca Cola famously put its vending machines everywhere because they wanted to ensure that the moment someone wants a Coke they are only a minute or so away from getting one. Thus you get people writing entire books about how cooking is ableist (it isn’t) because it takes work to cut up garlic.

Similarly, critique has become taboo. Partly because the internet is so hostile and so full of criticism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater (while at the same time leaving almost all critique to the manosphere crying about wokeness). I think also the hyperscrutiny of social media also makes us weary of critique which also explains the previous problem: we are so constantly exhausted by every part of our lives being measured and evaluated that we cannot bear to have something else come along and tell us we’re not good enough. At the same time, we’re learning that maybe we’ve never liked being wrong, or failing. As I discussed in this blog a few months ago, training people through constant correction of errors might be killing desire to learn.

All of that said, game design is an art and a craft, and we should take it seriously. We should learn this discipline. And we should talk about learning it, without fear of being accused of gatekeeping. And we should also talk about the whole process – how we learn about games, what does that look like.

This year I was asked to teach an aspect of tabletop game design and it reminded me that when I was younger, that wasn’t a thing. I remember when Erick Wujcik, a Palladium designer and one of my great heroes and someone who found me in the early days of the internet and became my friend, wrote to tell me that he was flying to Singapore to do a guest lecture on RPG design, and it was one of the first such things in the history of the world. When I got to university, I was thrilled to have access to proper, deep libraries and I combed every shelf I could for things about games and especially about TTRPGs and they did not exist. Nobody wrote anything about games, anywhere, at all. There were books about mathematical game theory, which has almost nothing to do with games at all, and in some cases I could find The Compleat Gamester, or books about that tome from the 17th century. Oh how my heart leapt as I misread that title, only to crash as I realised it did not say the Complete Gamemaster.

The one exception was Shared Fantasy. This was a sociological study of the RPG hobby, conducted between 1978 and 1983 by American sociologist Gary Alan Fine. It was an excellent, deep and scholarly look at things and provided a really solid history – but only up to 1982! It was now 1995 and so much was changing. I decided it had to be up to me to write a history of the hobby, which I did in my first publication in RPGs when I put out my zine Places to Go, People To Be, which still survives online! And is still update in its French spin-off version. We wanted to be scholarly too, and tell the history of RPGs and also pick up where Interactive Fantasy left off, another of the few great leading lights.

The other ur-text of the time was I Have No Words And I Must Design, by Gary Costikyan. Originally published in the late 90s, the version there datees from 2002. Costikyan defined what a game was in that essay, and its an excellent definition but what’s most important I think is that nothing else existed besides that. We were voices crying in the wilderness, saying that game design was a discipline. That you could do it well or you could do it poorly. And there were very, very few of us.

And then, of course, everything changed.

World of Warcraft made video games cool. I remember the day that computer games were said to have made as much money as Hollywood films had that year – at last, this strange eldritch thing that nobody did, might become something that people had to pay attention to. Then Magic the Gathering came along and made tabletop games make money – so much money people really had to care. From 2000 to 2010, gaming went from barely a thing to dominating everything. Then along came social media too and kickstarter and things took off. And of course, along the way, starting around about 2005, academia started paying attention to video games. Not tabletop still – still not much. But then the actual play movement arrived and things shifted again. RPGs became big business. In 2015, RPGs were still nerd games that nobody took seriously. In 2025, they are on stage at the Sydney Opera House. (Not all boats were lifted, of course, but it did change the nature of the subject).

Along the way, we’ve created a kind of lacuna, however, of knowledge. Because people like me, who grew up in the 80s and 90s, we tended to study games because that’s one of the few ways you could encounter the hobby. We tended to be game nerds who dug out the old stuff and got into every obscure thing. And now, we have game design courses and we’re building towards an academic syllabus, and we recognise things like Molly House being art. People who came into the hobby since 2020 have scholarship to acquire. But if you came into things between 2005 and 2020, you had neither version. And I don’t know how you can get it, since you are likely too old to go back to school.

Sometimes I assume folks know what I know. But they don’t. And so I think about how to pass all this on. We do have somethings. The Ludology podcast. Increasingly more academic works. The wonderful new stuff coming out from CRC press. My shelf is now filled with academic books and new how-tos – although some of the latter, to me, are entirely absent of actual scholarship, and want to ground game making in entreprenuerial practices, not ludological. There’s a sense of building towards financial success and being a big brand, not mastering a discipline. If we’re not careful, that will dominate. We want a world of ludologists, not gurus.

We find ourselves, then, much like the cooking world. All of us want the world to know that Anyone Can Cook. But in Rataouille, Gasteau’s mindset is part of his marketing to sell his sauces and his cookbooks, and Anton Ego has, after all, a point: that sometimes, what we call lack of gatekeeping is in fact just marketing in a mask. Anyone Can Cook is an inch away from “and all you need are these magic beans, which are on sale today”. It is an inch away from knowing Gasteau is a good cook because he sells so many cans of sauce, which in the movie becomes the business model of his inheritors. Keep making the same things and selling it in a jar. It is consumerism that turns everything into a club where the only requirement is you buying in and wearing the badge, and that must flatten out all skill and all craft into being worthless or worse, devalued. And that not only leads to bad games which drive people away, it leads to game players not understanding the field either. People who don’t get why Monopoly is a bad game, just that it isn’t popular. Education is a golden key that opens up all gates, but we can’t let that key be commoditized and sold off.

With kindness, with openness, with a seat open to all – this is how we must teach, always. With a sense of collaboration, not of dictating from above. Without the weird hidebound ideas I see in some game designers who should know better. But we must really teach. And people must be willing to learn. We cannot say that just because Anyone Can Cook that any cooking is good cooking. We must have a critical voice. We must say that anyone may cook, but one must learn to cook well.

If that is a gate, then I will keep it.