One of the many great Ideas Seth coins is this particular one: if Internal Logic doesn’t matter, Thinking doesn’t matter. Seth mentioned it in the Dungeon development series he had. As someone who grew up with old dungeons “Why” kind of bothered me so I just stopped thinking and played mainly to hang out with friends. I have a background in Construction and deal with engineers, my IT skills have so many parallels with engineering troubleshooting that I cant help but remember – like just smelling to check ventilation, my lips cracking from humidity or how short of breath I become, then there is the trade offs of better materials vs more available materials, and how to peel back finishing works (how it is what sets the appearance and hides the gaps and how something was made).
When reasoning doesn’t matter, thinking doesn’t matter.
So Seth, for me, pointed out how I just stopped thinking in some games. My friends are having a great time, I’m just shut that part of. Have you been in a meeting where you can’t think – I get sleepy and struggle to keep awake. It’s not out of malice, sit in on anything that doesn’t engage you and see how your brain reacts to it: is it looking for a distraction? Did it find one? Is it engaged with a distraction? It’s either engaged or not engaged, age and how we evolved that the brain consumes so many calories – its no surprise that being unengaged we become sleepy – or being engaged we can go all night long in a game or conversation.
It’s just more work? Yes. It’s more work to engage players – its more work to try to engage them and learn. It’s more work to test our limits and stretch ourselves thin. Of course what is expected is an attempt, a dialogue, and an understanding what is challenging. Nothing beyond what can be given.
So basically i stumbled onto this wisdom by accident, writing – “Why reaction drives?” Why should I care? So what? When it came to Learning harder sci-fi. The most underlying thing about the hobby is mental engagement. In the age of AI able to generate adventures – what does it mean to be the GM? What does it mean to be the story teller if AI is going to generate more stories? John and Hank Green have an interesting take and exploration of AI and when you compare what the AI wrote for John Green as his script and what John Green wrote on the topic – there is that uncanny valley – John acts to engage the audience he knows – the AI (as of current) can only guess and uses its current data set to craft what it is programmed to estimate about the audience.
So what will happen, in my prediction, is that there will be some GMs and Game Designers using AI as prompts – ways to get started but discovering its disappointed hollowed content – and the human fills that content. The World Building will be, for now a human task, until humans can work out how to enhance its Working Memory and Scale their compute power – we will be trapped by our hardware. AI drawing from the public information of the Crowd for the skilled Writer and User to transform into something more.
What the AI can’t do – can you imagine that – we are at the age where the AI is now competing with many lower skilled work and people are struggling to level up. The AI will quickly follow. I wont be surprised if Disney, Wizards of the Coast, WB, HBO, NYT or some major media will invest heavily in AI to create content – we are so disconnected from each other dispite being able to connect that we will not be able to tell if its a Human or a Machine manipulating us.
I just realized I have to make my Kids AI-proof (Both as a target of its manipulation and being made obsolete by AI).
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