AI and Gaming, a Birthday Reflection
Today is my birthday. No, not the day you’re reading this. The day I’m writing this. Today I’m turning 37, realizing that I’m not at the point in my life I want to be, and looking down the barrel of having to return to a field I thought I escaped, but most likely will have to return to in order to afford to stay housed, fed, and productive in society.
Not the ideal way to start a birthday, nor to start a blog, but as I reflect on this, I remind myself that my work is just a job, not really a career. It is a means of making money in order to do the things I actually love to do. Writing, playing games with my friends, working on household projects and creative ideas outside of the page, these are the things I live for, not what I do for a living.
Sometimes, I find myself forgetting these details when it comes to the hobby. I’ll admit that before a lot of the dangers of AI were revealed to me, I would use it to help me build stat blocks and dungeons for my games. A solid month of me using it felt like a weight being taken off my shoulders. Then as more was revealed about what it was taking from us, the critical thinking, the theft of intellectual property, the water, I went cold turkey on it. I found that I needed to heavily edit anything it gave me anyway, and returned to creating the nitty gritty elements of my game on my own, despite being tired from work and life.
Know what I found? I felt myself getting more excited for my games again. I felt more energy in my hobby space despite being tired from work. I felt the weight shift, it wasn’t my hobby that was weighing me down, it was the dread I was feeling in having to create after all my creative juices were crushed out of me by the grind of the day.
The world we live in is very much weighing us down, and I know that we’re all feeling the crushing weight of responsibility eking out any time we have for the things we love. Maybe you feel too tired to do what you love. Maybe you feel guilty for doing something you love when you have a million and one responsibilities that need to be taken care of. AI can’t fold your laundry, it can’t feed your kids, it can’t take the dog for a walk, but it can ease the burden of… creation. The thing that is meant to make us happy.
We’re being sold a lie to keep us content with the grind of unfulfilling work that makes others money while we shift the “burden of creation” to a computer in order to conserve the energy we have to direct it at that grind. When we allow the world to take away what brings us joy, what gives us meaning to stay in the world, we regress, we pull away, and we find ourselves staring down the barrel of unhappiness with an apathetic eye that sees all of it as inevitable.
Today, on my birthday, I’m mentally preparing myself to spend the rest of the week desperately trying to return to a field of work I hate in order to sustain a life I love. I’m learning to accept the fact that I may be able to control elements of the game world, I can completely control the world of my books, but I have exceptionally limited control over the world I live in. I only have control over myself. While I have to deal with dice rolls that I can neither see nor affect, I can choose how to react to the ups and downs life throws at me.
I can ride the waves of the storms I need to survive so long as I keep a clear eye on the calm seas that keep me grounded in what really matters in my life. So if ever your game begins to feel like it's too much, if ever the things you build up in your life to bring you joy start feeling like they weigh too much to continue to carry, take a break, reevaluate, and reprioritize. Identify the things that are really weighing you down in life, and either treat them with the respect they deserve (be that high respect, or low, this doesn’t always mean you need to revere the damn thing) or put it down and refuse to carry it any longer. Your life is yours to live how you choose to live it, even if you’re stuck doing things you no longer find joy in. Make sure to prioritize the things that fuel you, and minimize the things that drain you, be that people, places, or acts.
I’m choosing to do the same: prioritize the people I care about, prioritize my own personal growth, and only work hard enough to cover my bills and expenses. I want to get these books off the ground and in people’s hands. I don’t expect to become a millionaire, I don’t even expect these stories to pay my bills, but knowing that they’re out there, people are reading them, and enjoying them, that brings me joy. And I refuse to sacrifice that joy or my integrity by giving control of that away to anyone else.
DISCLAIMER: I have never, and will never, used AI to do ANY of my writing. Everything written for my novels, short stories, blog posts, and personal interactions is wholly of my own creation and does not use any AI generated writing. My use of it in my personal campaigns has been limited to the following:
Developing Stat Blocks for monsters (Which I later needed to edit anyway, so don’t even bother doing this, AI can’t balance shit)
Creating maps for dungeons based off my original designs for visual purposes (they came out crappy and I didn’t even bother using them in my games)
As a sounding board for ideas for both random encounters and NPC development (all of which were bullet points that I personally expanded on and fleshed out after initial generation)
Generating writing prompts (another thing that I can use as a jumping off point, but need to flesh out on my own because it generates the most generic prompts that require fine tuning to fit my needs)
Generating images of NPCs and monsters that I created or couldn’t find good representations of online. These were shared within our private discord server and no further. Any art used for my books has gone through an artist I hired through Fivrr, Misons (@misons), and is credited in my book on the copyright page, and on my website art has been created by Nicole Summers (our very own Morgan) and a friend of ours, Amber Tosi, each piece properly credited.
I have also ceased all use of AI in anything I do upon my learning of how destructive it is to the environment, society, and economy.
