Far Away: Corporate Espionage has a new behavior module for the alien creatures. In the lore, they are controlled by a nanobot AI. These days, the term “AI” has become overused and dripping with connotations skewed based on how much of your net worth is tied to a tech company. While I hold the controversial view that board games are not “art”, board games are one of the mediums that stand to be affected by the recent surge in AI technologies, much like illustration, graphic design, and writing. Generative AIs can create card art, write manuals, and make advertisements, all in service of Cherry Picked’s goals. Those are also things humans do. Given the tension around these AIs, I wanted to describe how CPG views generative AI and plans to use some of these tools.
Full disclosure, my day job is in the Office Product Group at Microsoft. Copilot is a big bet in that world and is fueling recent stock growth. My thoughts in this blog reflect my role at Cherry Picked Games and the role of generative AI in the tabletop game industry. I’m also describing the current state of AI technology, not a potential future.
Games are about delivering an experience to the players. Doing so requires understanding the target audience and planning each constituent part of the game around matching the experience to that audience. AI can’t plan or predict. These large-language models can analyze, repeat, and rehash. We want to make new games and these tools can’t do that. You could get ChatGPT to reskin an existing game, but that’s the laziest thing a game “designer” could do.
While a whole game is beyond AI technology, the individual parts of a game are within its grasp. With the right prompts, you could make cart art, icons, copy text, a game box, and whatever else a thoughtful designer would need. Given these capabilities, it would be foolish to outright refuse to acknowledge AI tools. We should use AI where it’s valuable and retain the human touch when a hand-crafted experience is needed.
For CPG, there are a few applications of generative AI that will help us. The biggest place is in advertising. Our recent “Gratuitous Shopping Weekend” ad used an AI-assisted design tool. Advertising is an area where investments detract from new games. If I can make a quick Instagram post, our artists can keep drawing dogs and laying out tokens. I used Dall-E to make the blog header image, which is never a task I’d ask a professional to do, and the result seems on par with the value it adds.
Another application is prototyping. People can get distracted by the look of unfinished components. Far Away’s art assets are typically created after a mission is designed to avoid unnecessary work. AI-generated icons may look strange (or off-brand), but can help overcome some initial skepticism or confusion during tests. Of course, we’ll never ship anything with AI art. We care about the aesthetics of our games. AI art has a particular generic look to it (a “shine” if I had to put it in words) and has trouble rendering details. It does let us produce a step between playtesting with handwritten cards and playtesting with a complete product.
The final way we’re utilizing generative AI at CPG is in editorial assistance. While I don’t trust ChatGPT to write game rules, I do see value in a second opinion. Asking these tools to give suggestions about clarity gives us a quick way to evaluate sections of rule books, without engaging playtesters (who bring numerous biases from their exposure to the game). We hope this solves an ongoing challenge with authoring rules: playtesters will ask for more verbose explanations until the rule becomes so cumbersome they ask for a shorter version. Even if the AI tools can’t find that sweet spot, another eye (“I”?) on the text is welcome. In an editorial context, AI tools aren’t fundamentally different from Word’s grammar check: sometimes they catch a mistake, other times they suggest something you should ignore.
Ultimately, these AI tools can’t replace people who make original games. Similarly, I’d argue they can’t replace any valuable job. Some companies may be sacrificing value to save costs: the call center relying on bots isn’t helping callers, the content farm pumping out AI articles isn’t adding to society’s intellectual discourse, and the deepfaked political images certainly aren’t improving the world. What we should embrace is using AI to add value to our core jobs by assisting in tasks that aren’t the core jobs. Beyond being the “creative director”, I’m CPG’s accountant, sales rep, marketer, community manager, quality assurance, lawyer, and the guy who packs the games you buy in boxes. I enjoy some of those jobs. I’m happy to outsource others to a computer.
—Alex