Think Like A Game Designer - Elizabeth Hargrave — Distilling Wingspan Pocket, AI Ethics in Tabletop, and Building Equity for Designers (#112)

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

About Elizabeth HargraveElizabeth Hargrave is an award-winning board game designer best known for her runaway smash hit Wingspan, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019 and has sold over two million copies worldwide. Her diverse body of work, including Tussie-Mussie, Mariposas, The Fox Experiment, Undergrove, and Sanibel, explores rich corners of the natural world. Elizabeth recently released Wingspan Pocket, an absolute masterclass in distilling the core of Wingspan into an accessible, 30-minute, small-box game. Beyond design, she is a co-founder of the Tabletop Game Designers Association (TTGDA), where she champions a games industry that embraces diverse voices and respects the labor, creativity, and intellectual property of designers. In this returning episode, Elizabeth and I break down the mechanics of condensing big games into small boxes, the mission behind the TTGDA, and an honest, nuanced debate about generative AI, human intent, and the ethics of art.Connect with Elizabeth:* Elizabeth’s Website* Wingspan Pocket* bluesky: @elizhargrave Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Don’t Fall Asleep at the Wheel with AI: As machine tools get faster and more accurate, there’s a real danger of falling asleep at the wheel. Even if a model seems 95% or 99% reliable, never trust the machine over real human playtesting and lived player experience. Stay actively engaged in your process, verify your data, and remember that an algorithm can never replace the authentic human feedback loop.* Elegance is Deep Decisions with Fewer Rules: True game design elegance comes from the depth of player decisions while drastically stripping back the rules and components. Wingspan Pocket is a perfect execution of this exact principle. By shrinking setup friction and focusing on pure decision-making, it proves you don’t need a massive box or tons of tokens to deliver a rich, weighty experience.* Contract Details Matter (Even for Pros): Every single detail in a publisher contract matters, and you should never just blindly sign away your hard work. Look, I literally went to law school before I became a full-time game designer, and I still hire a lawyer to review my contracts! That’s why the work Elizabeth is doing with the TTGDA is so vital—giving emerging designers the tools and guidance they need to negotiate better deals.Show Notes“What would (Wingspan) look like to have a smaller version a more accessible version?” (00:05:40)Mass market retail doesn’t always require dumbing down your initial design. Wingspan proved that mainstream audiences at Target were eager to embrace a heavier hobby game, and iterating a pocket-sized, highly accessible version opens up a massive second wave of players who want that same engine-building magic without the setup footprint or intimidation factor.“But the actual ideas I don’t want to outsource. There’s a thing I’m trying to say.” (00:32:00)Elizabeth hits the philosophical heart of why we design games. Even as technology evolves to automate statistics, spreadsheets, or playtest simulations, the fundamental creative spark, the specific human perspective you want to express about the world, cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. Games matter because they connect one person’s lived experience to another’s around the table.“We put out a little position paper recently. When you talk about games, don’t just say who it’s published by, name the designer.” (00:54:40)How the industry uses language dictates how it values creators. Shifting public habits from “published by X” to prominently crediting the individual designer isn’t just about ego; it treats game design with the exact same authorial respect we give to novelists, directors, and playwrights. Normalizing designer attribution builds long-term equity for every creator in the space.“Because I feel like that’s there’s a whisper network. You hear about publishers that you don’t wanna work with, but if you’re a brand new designer and you don’t have the connections to hear those things, then you could end up working with people that you would rather not work with. I love being able to get that information to people who need it.” (00:56:30)Industry protection shouldn’t depend on who you happen to know at the bar. By creating peer-driven support networks through the TTGDA and formalizing contract reviews, Elizabeth is turning insider knowledge into a public resource, ensuring new designers are armed with real data before signing away their IP. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective,

whether it's inside the gaming realm, or beyond. I have something I am so excited to finally announce. If you are serious about designing games, not just thinking about games, not just listening to the podcast and dreaming about games, but actually finishing your own designs, then I have created something for you.

It is the brand new Think Like a Game Designer, Design Lab. It is a step-by-step system that I have created and tested with dozens of other creators and other aspiring designers that includes over 60 less. to take you from generating ideas to building prototypes to finding playtesters, refining your core design loop all the way through publishing, running a crowd fund, and even getting hired in the industry. You'll also get access to my private design discord filled with me, members of the Stoneblade team, and other creators all actively building games. Plus, I've got some incredible bonuses for people who join right now and for longtime fans of the podcast. If you're ready to stop pretending and start actually designing games with intention,

check out the Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab at justingarydesigns.com. In today's episode, I speak with Elizabeth Hargraves. She is back on the podcast for her second appearance. She is the creator of Wingspan, which has sold over 2 million copies since its launch in 2019. The Dragon Spinoff Worm Span came out in 2024. The Fish Spinoff Winspan came out in 2020. and I spend a lot of this podcast gushing about how amazing wingspan pocket is, which just came out in July of this year.

I got my hands out a copy at GenCon. Absolutely loved it. It's a great distillation of the larger game into something smaller. But I talk about that plenty of the podcast. I won't say anything more here, but it's already a hit. We talk about her new game, Sanibel. And we also dive into something that was a more controversial topic. Elizabeth and I were both on a panel together at Gen Con this year,

talking about AI and gaming, and we dig into a lot of the fears and concerns and challenges of LLMs and go back and forth on it. And again, one of the things we don't necessarily see eye to eye on all the subjects, but we do see eye to eye on the fact that we all want to support creatives and support this industry and being able to have conversations around this. I've brought a lot of different voices onto this podcast so that we can have a rational conversation about the opportunities, the threats, the challenges, the good, the bad, the ugly of AI. So we spent a good amount of time digging into that. And then we talk about her work founding the Tabletop Game Designers Association, which is a great organization that helps Tabletop Game Designers to negotiate

contracts, to meet up and get access to design resources. It's a nonprofit that she's a part of, which I fully support. So lots of fun things to do. Great to check in with her. Also, if you have not checked out the first episode I did with Elizabeth, it goes into her origin story and the original creation of Wingspan and the incredible tale about how she was able to get that accepted by a publisher. So I'll save that and add that link in the show notes. but otherwise, without any further ado, here is Elizabeth Hargrave. Hello and welcome. I am back with Elizabeth Hargraves.

Elizabeth, it's so much fun to have you back on the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me back. Yeah, so we got to meet up and be on a panel together at Gen Con. So we got some time to interact and chat. And I will get back to that subject. But the other thing that happened to me at GenCon has just transformed the last two months of my life. And that is that I picked up this copy of, of wingspan pocket, which I transformed your life.

You know what? It's, I only carry one or two games with me. I'm a nomad. I'm in Copenhagen as I'm recording this right now. I try, it's very hard for me to have good games around. And I always like to have games around. And this one, it fits appropriately in my pocket. Not really in my pocket.

Let's be honest. This is, this box is, I don't know who has pockets like this, but it's a little bit much. I have two sweaters and a winter coat that it fits in the pockets. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I avoid cold climates so I don't have to have such things. But it does fit in my bag very easily. I carry it around very easily.

And it is one of the things I love the most, which is it distills the heart of a game experience and the heart of the emotional core from a medium weight or relatively complex base into something that is very clean and very streamlined and playable in a short timeline. And I guess I was going to just start talking about how you did it from my perspective,

but I'd be let you talk about how you did it. and then I will jump in with enthusiastic comments and questions. Yes, the idea started around 2023, I think in the spring. I was at a convention with David Gordon, who is the co-designer of Finnspan, and Alex Schmidt, who is the C-O-O of Stonebrier Games. And we had all separately been thinking that it would be nice to do some sort of small, box wingspan. Alex hears about it from some of the mass retailers that wingspan is in.

No one thought that wingspan would do well in Target, but it made it in Target because it is so heavy. And what would it look like to have a smaller version, a more accessible version? And then I was getting a lot of requests for Wingspan Jr. And Jamie at Stomeyer really didn't want to do like a junior branded game, but he was like, if you can do something that, like, makes sense for the hobby market and that would cross over in a mass, like, I'll take a look at it. But he admits he was not sold from the get-go on the idea. But we brainstorm some stuff, Alex and David and I did, and then playtested a little

bit together. And then I just ran with it because I had this very clear vision of wingspan, but a single row of cards where everything is just cards. The eggs got added back in later. Oh, interesting. Oh, okay. I want to hear. So let me just tee up. So, you know, the base of the mechanics,

there's the you have the four rows in the center of four decks in the center that are cards that are flipped over to form a four card center row. The backs of the cards are the resources and the front of the cards of the birds. And you basically have the three actions you get to take, which is either play, you have birds in your, birds and resources in your reserve row. You either play one or you drop two cards or you play three eggs. and then you activate your row and do all the cool engine building trigger stuff. And that's it.

Game ends when you get to six spurs. It's basically the fundamentals are there. So I want to know you got rid of the resource tokens. They're all built into the cars. You simplified the number of rows. You simplified the turn structure. But I didn't even realize, yeah, the eggs are here. How did you get rid of the eggs?

Where were they? I had put the eggs on little tracker cards. Did you grow up playing euchre at all? I'm familiar with it. So I learned to play yuker where you kept scored with six and a six and a which cards. I forget. Anyway,

you cover up the little orientation. You cover up the little symbols of the cards to keep score and you're like moving net. So I did that with eggs on cards because I was like, it's going to be all cards.

And then Jamie was like, yeah, but we could do eggs. Everyone loves the eggs so much. And that allowed me to then do the spatial, which birds are the eggs on, which then very late,

I figured out how to do goals that make the eggs matter where you have laid them, which I think isn't nice for folks that want a little bit more crunch that definitely adds something to play with the goals. But usually when I'm teaching it, especially to people who haven't played Wingspan before, I leave the goals out and it's enough. Yeah. Oh, there's plenty there. And I play without the goals. I play with people who are not gamers as much.

Like it's got that, it's got that accessibility to it and enough, just there's still enough meat on the bones, even without that part. Even from some of the very early playtales, I was surprised at how much meat there is there with this much simpler structure. Yeah, that's what I, that's my design ethos is like, always that like, how much like really interesting weighty decisions can I get from like very little like complexity components, like that pure elegance there? And again, that's why I've just been, I've been so excited about this. It just, I could play this over and over again. And it's so quick and bite size and fits into a situation. Not to just be a salesperson for you, but I, I'll take it. Sure.

Keep going. I don't, yeah, people know, listen to the podcast. I don't just gush about any game like this. This was great. It's just really well done. So kudos to that. And then I'm actually curious that you also have a decently invested solo experience in this too with a Tomitaw set up and full play.

Like how much did that play? Like how much of your design time was spent on that? Like how do you think about solo play? Yeah, Stomare hires the automa factory to do the solo play. So I haven't. The guy who works on it was one of my early playtesters for Wingspan, the base game, like back in the 20 teens when I was working on that. So he just really knocked the solo for Wingspan out of the park

because he had been playing the game a lot along. way. So I was very happy to let them also do the solo bed for this one. It's amazing how much extra work getting the solo game right is. You're basically designing a whole other game. It's all another game. Yeah. It's wild. So we've done a lot of now solo cooperative variance and different things for our games. I'm just like every time I take those on, I'm just like, man, like I just like almost doubled my workload to make this thing. It's not. It's interesting. And yeah, that's very cool. And then you've had a lot of other spinoffs, of course, Finn's band came out recently. And then I'm really interested because, Because you've done, obviously you've designed a lot of other games.

I know Santa Belle just came out recently, which is a beautiful theme, as you described. You want to give a quick synopsis to that one? Yes, Sanibel is a tile laying game where you, to acquire the tiles, you have a little meeple that you're walking down a beach, sort of Takedo style movement. So you can go as far forward as you want to get the stuff you want. But then the next turn is the person in the back of the line. So you don't want to go too far forward. and after you pick the shells up off of the beach,

they're all on either hex tiles or diamond tiles and you're fitting them into a grid on your own personal player mat and the scoring has to do with the sets, but also sometimes how the sets are arranged on the board. Yeah, so this, you've had so many of these nature-themed, very wholesome theme things. It's birds and it's mushrooms and it's fish and its shells. and then I saw the giant banners for Wormspan.

And when we talked last, there was a, you're an avatar for breaking from the traditional dragons and fantasy and everything. So you've caved and you're one of us now is what I'm hearing. Well, but that's not Connie Vogelman design Wormspan. I was happy to let Stone Meyer spin it off. But she's a good friend of mine.

We played us together every week. So I was definitely involved and did a lot of consulting on it. But that's all, Connie. I shoot so much work on that game. So you let it go. You're not opposed to other people making Dragon games. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, Jamie asked me, he was like,

we're getting all the requests for this. Would you be open to it happening? And I get the impression you wouldn't actually want to design it, but you're welcome to if you want. Yes and yes to both. I'm curious then now, what does your process today look like for picking projects? I remembered your attitude and the story,

I got re-listen to our last episode, and it was like so much fun. I just discovered what I learned about how you just go to your first gencon and go to pitch, and you're pitching and looking for your 10-nose, and you get the yes, and it's like, what, what, okay, crazy? And so, but what is it like now, right? You've worked with a lot of different publishers. What drives you on to decide on your next project, to decide who you want to work with? You kind of have the world as your oyster or seashell in this case.

Right, which is an incredible luxury. I mean, I know so many people trying to do this full time who just feel like they have to grind. And I really don't. So I can just work on the stuff I want to work on, which is nice. And I think it results in better games, but definitely it's slower, right?

Sure. My next non-wing span thing probably won't be out for a couple of years. Sure. Because I work when I feel like it. Yeah. It's a lovely place to be. And it's the thing, you do the jobs that we do, and it's like, I don't ever want to stop working,

but it's nice to not have to work as much as I do now. You know, whatever. Like that pays it yourself. I don't want to burn out or I do burn out after I've been crunching on something. And I just, I take a break. And it's great. And it's an incredible luxury that I don't ever want to take for granted. But I also had a 25 plus year career before I started doing game design.

So that's part of it too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's degrees of which this is, I guess this is your. retirement plan. I know. I was just talking with Eric, the founder of Days of Wonder, who's come back to the business now in his 60s after selling the business and coming back because he just, he missed it. And he was, there's only so many years you can go and sit on a beach or just relax. It's,

I want to do things. I want to be useful. I want to create. I want to be in the world. Now that my brain understands how games work at the level of like how you make one, it won't let it go. I don't think I'll ever not be working on something. Is there some kind of, I'm trying to think of those things. Is there a stretch goal for you now, right? Is there something where you're like, oh, it would be really cool if this type of project or this type of game or this IP or this partnership? And is there something that you're like, oh, this would be like, this would fire me up to do that you haven't had a chance to do yet? It's so funny that IP is on your list because people ask me that all the time.

I have a friend who does a lot of licensing games and he keeps asking me like, what IP do you want to work out? And I'm like, I am like the least IP driven person that you can think. I cannot think of an IP. What would the IP be for the stuff that I'm interested in? I don't know. Yeah. So yeah. So I don't, so there isn't something at that level.

And then the other stuff, I can just do it. Like, yeah. I don't, I've done it. I wanted to do birds. I wanted to do mushrooms. Those are my two big actual real life hobbies and kind of, I don't know. What should I do next? Something inspires me.

I'll work something up. I have another game. that I'm working on that's in Florida because I grew up there and I really have done a lot of, it's been a lot of time in nature there. And then I have another little very puzzly game about migrating amphibians. Okay. Right on. I love that. No, you've got to, you definitely, you have an archetype. I like that. I dig it. I dig it. I did start at one point before the pandemic. I started a dexterity game about stunt people that I might pull back up the shelf. I could have shelved it because there was no way to playtest it.

Yes. At this point, it's like so hard against type. I'm not sure. That would be amazing. I would love that. I would love that. Yeah,

I actually have a few games like that too that I was working on. I have a really fun physical pizza making game where you're trying to like fill pizza orders like, but it's physically with tiles in a timer and like it's really fun. It was really fun. But like once the pandemic happened and my whole, all of my entire plate testing infrastructure and my company is all remote.

So it's like, I just can't work on those kinds of games in a way that is practical, which is sad. Yeah. Yeah, it's fun. I love that. I think have you wanted to design anything native digital ever? Yeah, I don't play a lot of digital games either. Fair enough.

It hasn't really, yeah. All right. All right. I can imagine there being a scenario where my brain thinks of a puzzle that would work better with a computer. running the levels or something that you can't do physically. Like, I could imagine going there, but it's not like an aspiration. Let me try a question a different way then.

What do you think about, are there other games that you've seen recently or things where you're like, oh, man, I wish I made that one. Like that blew my mind away. Like, for example, how I feel about Wingspan Pocket. Oh, that's great. What have I enjoyed the most lately? I was, I played Fate of the Fellowship a few times this year and it was really, impressed by the story that emerges from the way the different player goals and special powers

are set up. It's all built on the pandemic system that you do stuff and then the game does stuff to you and you do stuff. But there's something about the way you're moving on the map that just tells the story the way it should, the way it should come out, it actually happens on the board. It's so fascinating to see that. And I know a lot of thought went into that Yeah, Matt, Matt's coming on the podcast soon, so I'm going to ask him about that for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's very cool. We just did our Lord of the Rings, Ascension crowd fund and are getting to the end of executing the full storyline, cooperative mode kind of thing that gets, it's all about how do you tell that story and how do you build it? Again, it's designing a game on top of the game because it still needs to feel like Ascension, and then it also needs to feel like the Lord of the Rings and tell the story. So it's just very interesting. My career started, working on IP games, right? I started working on the Marvel and DC trading card game, the versus system. So I kicked off with the, okay, like, how do I make this world come to life and make a fun game that evokes those same emotions? And then the entire history of my company,

Stoneblade, we've only done original IP. We've only done the games that we needed. So it was interesting to come back to that world and now be, there's just a whole different set of challenges and interesting opportunities that come from working with an IP and trying to get that ethos correct, as well as just create a great game that stands on its own. Okay, do I still have you? Do we get cut off there? You can still hear me? You did cut out for a second there.

Okay, yeah. I apologize. I've been having some weird internet issues tonight, but this system does a good job of keeping the recording going. So even if I cut out, it'll catch us back up. This is one of the ones that does a recording on each end. Correct. Yes, you're getting a recording.

It does both. It has a cloud recording and then two local recordings. So in case we get broken up because, Yeah. Worst thing ever, you have a great conversation and then lost forever. Okay, let me use that. My husband once did a radio interview where he took so, he's a forger, he took someone out foraging and they did this whole thing and she had this fruit for the very first time out in the woods and they had to go back and pretend and recreate the whole thing because we're recording to work. Oh, man. Yeah. Soon, soon we're going to have every

Everybody all have those stupid glasses on and be recording everything all the time. So we're going to be all set. Please no. Please no. Please no. Okay. I do want to take, I'm going to take this opportunity because I do want to transition into what's a meaty and heated topic, right?

You and I were on a panel at Jen Con called Rolling for Wisdom and it was a conversation about AI and gaming and what does that mean and what does it look like. And it was an interesting thing for me to go even before. going on to the panel, right? Like, get approached about it. And it was, it was scary to even be in that space and say anything positive about AI, right? The vibes and the approach has been a pretty hostile. This is the enemy. This is the devil. And we're all, we have to fight it with every fiber of our being. And I think that there's a more nuanced position, of course, and it was good to, I think everybody on the panel respected that. And we had a bunch of different

interesting perspectives. We had the Secretary of State for Washington. We had the CEO. of Jen Con, you and I, and we had a very, I think a good discussion that was very interesting, and I wanted to take the opportunity to expand it more out to my audience and talk about it here. Because I think you've been, the typecasting here is that you're anti-AI and I'm pro-AI, but the actual realities, I think, are a lot more nuanced on both sides. So I would like to explore what that means to you today. What do you think about it? How we can create a better world where, one, my goal is that we can.

have conversations about this, like we can disagree without being disagreeable and we can all agree, we all want the same kind of end goals. Two, how do we structure our community, right? So designers, players, gamers, like to be more team human and trying to be more creative and live better lives and have this be a net positive for us. And then I think just opening with those is my goals for how we structure this conversation. So maybe we could talk a little bit about where you see here and we can bounce around the few different. I know there's a lot of different sub-topics that'll come out of this. And I think the first thing is that AI is such an amorphous concept.

Are we talking about LLMs? Because people do stuff with AI. Like, all the scientific research that's using AI to do big data analysis is really important and a totally different ball of wax from the plagiarism machine that people are using to generate crappy art, right? AI is a very general term. And I think one of the most useful things to do is to be much more granular about which uses are we talking about, which models are we talking about. And clearly, we're not talking about scientific research. But if I say, I don't think people should be using AI, it's usually shorthand for, please don't use a plagiar as a machine to make things that are replacing human-made art, right? Yeah. Yeah. So let's break that down. appreciate. I think definitions are important, right? So the LLMs, the sort of large language models are

is the version of AI that has made the most technological progress over the last several years, right, since the original release of chat GPT kind of became a global phenomenon. It is causing massive breakthroughs in science, right? Alpha Fold won the Nobel Prize for being able to show how to fold proteins in ways that we had never done before. It just recent. And human brains aren't necessarily made to do that. Great. Go for it. Yeah. That's not, that's actually making. in the world better and not stealing other people's work. Yeah, so those tools were still trained on the same data set that the LLM that people used to make a pretty picture is or steal a picture, as you would put it.

It's the same base model technology. It's just being put to different uses. So I want to disambiguate all of it, right? So there's a world where we believe this, and I think we'd agree, that this technology applied to science, math, medicine is a pretty unadulatory. good thing, right? The fact that we could potentially discover new drugs and new medicines. And frankly, I've used it personally and I've seen people of my family that have used it personally to help self-diagnose and get some treatment and get care and learn more about their blood test

results and things like that. That stuff seems, I think we're all in favor of. Is that a reasonable assumption? In general, with the caveat that I think that a lot of people are overly optimistic, because sometimes it is just wrong, right? And you have to like not be so polyanish that you forget I agree with you. Across the board, there's this really, so there's a really interesting phenomenon that's happened because originally when the first kind of LLMs were coming out and doing these things, like they were hallucinating all the time and it became a kind of running joke across the board. Like, yeah, this is what I'm going to, you know, in the same way that they used to be a joke of the, the LLM taking the graphic design job and having six hands shaking, shaking six fingers, shaking a hand, right?

But, all right, so it was very funny. It was just turning out slop and it was making mistakes. But like much of that is now gone, right? Like the caliber of the answers it gives, if you actually have it do like a citations with to its work and its research, like it's pretty damn accurate. In fact, it catches errors in my own citations now sometimes when I'm doing work. And so, but it's wrong sometimes, right? So there's this danger of falling asleep at the wheel. The closer you get to, you're at 95% 99% whatever.

You're going to just trust it. And then you will stop checking and stop following up on. So I think that's a very real concern, even as it gets to 99.9% or whatever, however accurate it ends up getting. So I agree with you there. But I think also I've learned the hard way that doctors are wrong far more often than that. Sure. I've had some pretty bad doctors and pretty bad experiences and even lost my grandmother to a misdiagnosis that could have been fixed. So to me, there's, there are many things that are wrong and that need to be protected against and that we should be very clear about the dangers and both. of LLMs and of this technology on its own and of our own becoming complacent in it. But also I want to, I think it's just important to see that there's, the upsides are actually

enormous. And just out of curiosity, do you use any of these tools for things in your day-to-day life? Got in Google search now, you can't help but get the AI summary. Yeah. And I have been impressed sometimes by the info gives back. Sometimes it's 10 pages more info that I actually want. I want the simple answer. Yeah.

Yeah, it clearly are getting better and better. So I think that there's opportunities for leveraging the AI in a way that makes us more creative and empowers us to do more things. Like, for example, the board game lab that Eric Outmont is, was from Days of Wonder, has just launched as a beta. He's doing, he used AI to build a tool that lets people prototype way faster, right? You let you prototype faster, it lets you play on a virtual tabletop. it lets you potentially use bots to run through

a thousand simulations of your game to see if it's broken. In principle, if there's still a designer at the heart of that, if there's still a human that's creating the core of it, that mean that we get more games than people would have less of a hard time making them. Does that type of thing fall within the dangers onto you? Or is that more? I think I'm pretty comfortable with all of that. I know there are other designers who are not.

It's a big spectrum. I love the idea of doing Monte Carlo simulations and other bots to play games. Although to me it feels like a black box and it depends what the gameplay style is probably, like how close that simulation can get to how people would actually play. And I think, again, you run that risk of you also need to play chess with humans. Don't trust machines over human experience. but if you need something to do a bunch of math for you, great. One thing, so we did a survey for the TTGBA.

I probably should have pulled it up before we talked about. One of the things that I remember people saying that we didn't ask in a structured way about, but we asked what else are you using AI for? And there was a set of designers who said when there's a math issue in my game that I don't understand the statistics, I will ask AI, and it will tell me how to do the statistics. And I am really nervous about that. And again, like the models are getting better and better,

but the large language models six months ago, a year ago when we were asking this question, we're not always great at math. Yeah. Yeah. That used to be true. It's definitely, they're good at math now. They're winning the Millennium Prize math problems they're solving.

They're doing front. hear of math now. They're quite sure. That just made me really nervous that people were like, again, like we've built the system that some people just buy into so wholeheartedly that they're not necessarily using it in ways that it was designed to be used and possibly to their detriment. So there may be a set of games out there where they like structured the statistics in ways that may or may not have been based on a sub foundation. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And I've out of curiosity every once in a while the last chat GPG, give me some ideas for wainspan cards.

It gives me shit, man. Oh, yeah, no. That's like cursing on your, but like anything that requires actual creativity, it's not there. It's taking existing stuff and recycling it. Yeah. Yeah.

So I would, I would have to push back on that a little bit because I think there's, so I work with the Wharton School of Business. I've had Ethan Mollock on the podcast before. And they do a lot of studies around the stuff. And we've done, I work with them to build creativity games and exercises that we ran for companies and the components. And so this game is called the breakthrough game, which is the process that people go through

to generate new ideas and how they, which evaluate which ones are good. We ran it for many years and some people are better at them others, but like certain teams and certain team diversity makes it go better. And now they've run that same game with AI in the mix. And the creativity of the output judged in by, independent people who don't know who's doing it and which teams have AI and which ones don't. And the quality and likelihood of those ideas, like the quantity of quality ideas is higher when people work with AI than not. And I think it's not, if you do the prompt, like,

as you described it, where it's like, hey, give me some wingspan card ideas. It's going to be terrible. I agree with you. It's going to just push to the middle, not do very much. But if you push it to be out, to push it to be outside the box and try to like force like, hey, I need 50 different ideas for this and it can generate them in seconds, right? Or I want to, what would it be like if wingspan was in space and start pushing to bizarre concepts? It can often help ideate new things in ways that are more interesting if you know. If you get away from its tendency to always push things towards the middle. But anyway, I encourage a little bit of prompt to trying for that.

I do think there's this interesting challenge of what things, when is it a companion thinker with us and when or when can it help have somebody to idea with? Right. And normally like a lot of my game design skill, I developed because I got lucky enough to go work at a company where there were a lot of other brilliant game designers. And I just talked to them and I just took all their knowledge and I got it and deserved it to me. And there's a lot of people that don't have that ability.

And if they're able to find that or have some at least moderately intelligent entity to talk to that can help train them and get them information, I think spreading that is I think is valuable if they keep their unique perspective and don't get just driven towards the middle is where I'm hoping that this goes. And I think the driving toward the middle, and depending on what you're working on, driving towards stuff that was lifted from other works, which we do all the time in game design, right?

But at a almost always where we're putting our end spin on it, right? We're always like taking ideas from the past and running it through this human filter of the thing that I'm trying to say about the world. I guess part of it for me is there's a thing that I'm trying to say with my games about the world. And what the process is part of the interesting part for me. Like why would I want the computer to do that part for me? I can imagine there being things that I want computers to. to do for me. And I use spreadsheets and I use Nandek and there's all these things that I do automate. But the actual ideas, I don't want to outsource. There's that thing I'm trying to say.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that that makes sense to me. I think that the goal, and this gets to the heart of like design and creativity and art in general, right? We are trying to communicate something about our human experience and create that experience or evoke that experience or connect to that experience in some other person. And that's why we do this, right? And I know that there are people out there playing my games that came out of my experience and thoughts. And like, now they get to experience that themselves. And that's such a human connection. Yeah, no, I agree. And so my goal is always 100%, and I want that to still always be the case, right? But what I would I want what I'm trying to do and what I think used correctly,

kind of LLMs and AIs can help, is to reduce the barrier to get people like you and like me to get our ideas out of our heads and onto the tables and in front of players. Because it's hard. I'm ready to so much work that goes into getting a game made, so much work to get into building prototypes, trying to be able to get people tested,

let alone actually like making something that looks pretty and putting it out onto the world and getting it somebody shared with somebody, that if there's tools that let you accelerate that or make that cheaper, that means more people can do it, right? And more ideas and more unique, weird things can happen. That's the world that I'm trying to push towards, because there's so many people, I teach a lot of people. I teach a game design course,

and most of the time, most people's ideas are just way too big to be practical. Right? They want to make a TCG. They want to make a video game. They want to make a, they have this massive over arc of story that's going to require 500 cards and a bunch of different components. And I'm like, as a new game designer, you can't just so impractical. You're just not going to get there.

Go shrink your ambitions first and then maybe we'll get there eventually. But now it's, oh, no, you can actually generate. If you need 500 art pieces for cards, let's take the most controversial example, right? Because instead of having to pay, you know, $500 per art piece to humans, you could just generate these things. And that means you could have that game, that your creative vision that you want to share with the world, your thing you want to express could now be made, whereas otherwise it would be come. it would just never come to life because you couldn't afford it. Yeah. Now, art is a whole other set of questions

because to me it's just fundamentally based on theft. I really feel strongly about not using AI-based art. Yeah. Do you believe that in prototypes as well? I don't have a huge problem if people are putting it on their prototypes because I'm going on the internet and grabbing images off and Google image search or whatever. I am also stealing the art, but I'm like,

it's for personal this, right? And when it crosses over into then making money off of art that was made from a model that stole all the art that it was based on without consulting the artists about whether they wanted to be included in that, I do have a problem with that. Let's, let's, I just want to dig into the morality and the theft. Obviously, theft's a very loaded word, right? And there are some cases where it is obviously theft, right? They've taken from art that there was not in the public, was not on the public. It was not on the public sphere, was not posts online, or they reproduce something that's an exact copy of something that's already protected.

That's copyright infringement. It's clearly, that's clearly illegal. Yeah. And it's all throughout it. And if you ask the models to make art in the style of a certain artist, it will do it for you. And it's all based on that artist's work. But I've done that.

I've done that with artists with human artists, right? Where I'm like, hey, I wanted to look like this. I wanted to remind me of this artist's style and this. kind of thing. And a human artist does offer me, and that's totally legal and that's totally fine, right? Or I'll give examples. Well, Pinterest boards. When I have a new game property, I'll do Pinterest boards of a variety of different ideas and different arts from different styles. And then I'll give that as part of a style guide to my artist to say, hey, this is the vibe I'm looking for, make me something that works for my game. And that is taking from pre-existing work and

combining it together. A lot of modern-day artists, you know, you literally sometimes will copy the work of the masters, combine those things, and then eventually have your own style. But they're doing it with sort of a human set of ethics on top of it that say, I know not to directly reproduce something. And, you know, I know how different it needs to be for it to be my own versus a copy of someone else's. And to my knowledge, that's not really worked into the A&O's. Yeah. Yeah, I can't speak to how well the models do that because I haven't tried to get done to copy stuff. But I do know that they will stop it if you're like, hey, make me an inappropriate picture of Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader. It won't do that. But I don't know how well it's there.

So I guess it's like I want, I agree, if it's outputting something that's a copy and that's ripping that's a direct, obviously direct rip off somebody's work that's copyrighted work, that's protected work. Like we agreed stealing. There are cases of that that have already moving the way through the courts. It's clearly inappropriate. It should be stopped. The laws that exist today can stop that. But if it's a world where it's like, hey, it's generating something, that's original, that's an art description I asked for from a, and it's obviously it has learned from all of these other artists and it is taking their styles and merging them to create the thing for you. It's hard for me to tell a story that's different than that of most modern-day artists.

It's just much faster and cheaper and takes all of the arts all at once. It's the most humans can't do that. Yeah. And you say the legal system, protects it, but there's, there was just that big settlement for all, for the text that all got scraped, right? And people get paid some small amount of money for every work they got scraped. That hasn't happened with visual artists yet. One's been compensated. Their stuff all gets scraped without their consent. Yeah. And it's just, it's so frustrating. Yeah. Yeah, it's challenging. They've been done differently with respect for artists. And it was just done completely

willy-nilly. Yeah, I think my hope here is that there's no easy solution from where we are today, right? I agree with in an ideal world. Because the case you're talking about is actually really interesting because it's talking about which a book specifically that were scraped and the data was used. And it was a settlement that did include all the books that they used that they didn't own. But if they had purchased the books, it was a whole subset of books that they had purchased and if they purchased the books, then it was fine, then it was fair use because they'd purchase. purchase the book. They're allowed to read it. And so it was a very interesting way to slice that. Yeah. So obviously, the legal system is struggling with this. You and I aren't going to answer it here,

but I do think there's a degree to which the genius out of the bottle. And I know that nobody likes to hear that phrase, but it is they're not going backwards. They are going, these things exist. So I do think some version of, I view it, I think there's like three tiers to the AI problem, right? There's a, the first tier is like an alignment problem, right, to make sure that these things actually don't go crazy and don't attack the world or stay aligned and stay useful and stay helpful and that they don't break the law, right? So finding ways to, finding really like what guidelines can we put in that says, hey, this is what's stealing in output? Let's not talk like input wise.

We can't really control it anymore. It's already been done. What does it mean to be stealing, to be doing output that's theft or output that's inappropriate? Can we regulate that? Can we get the models aligned with like our human values of what like, like, creative work should be and what's good work, what's bad work. And then there's this distribution problem because if the models are doing this well, then they are absolutely going to take people's jobs, right? No question about it. There's people will lose some areas are going to lose their economic value.

I believe that new ones will show up, right? Like I think I use this example of the podcast, but not the podcast on the panel, where if you, right now, if you want to make the wingspan the movie and do an incredibly cool, animated, wingspan game movie thing, right? All the birds are talking and doing their thing and running through. That sounds really cool to be, but you can't, you basically can't do it. It's going to cost tens of millions of dollars to do an animated fully feature-lized film. It's just not practical. But with these tools, if they evolve to some degree, you could actually do it for a couple

thousand dollars. Even today, you could do it for probably a hundred grander using these tools. And so you could make this form of art that wouldn't exist otherwise. And that to me is, I think there will be more things like that would be impossible because of current modern costs, but they're not here. They're not available today. That being said, I do think we, as these models get more and more powerful on, they make more and more money. I think we need to find a way to distribute that money to people so that we don't have to. Those that are creative, do want to do creative work, don't have to necessarily work for a living or earn that we can all be protected or at least helped as we transition into whatever this future looks like.

I don't know if that would be sufficient or something moving in that world would be sufficient to overcome the theft concerns that you have or that's a potential pass forward. It's not going to happen. It's just not. We're not going to create universal basic income for artists because we stole all their jobs. I think we didn't have universal basic income for everybody is kind of where I would need towards. I agree that we should have it, but it's not going to happen in the United States. Yeah. If you look at whatever there's a major structural,

change in how the economy goes. The power distribution and the amount of the state organization distributes rights and protections changes, right? All the way from feudalism. And then you have the Magna Carta and you have more power because the lords need to be able to manage the estates where the farming happens and they have to have some control. And so the king is forced to give some authority away

and some basic rule of law to the industrial revolution where obviously massive changes, massive disruptions, but the whole social welfare state gets formed during that time, right? The entirety of things that would have been unthinkable 200 years ago became the norm. And we spent the last 30 years trying to maintain the social welfare state as it gets dismantled. Yeah, that was a career before game design. And it does not make me optimistic. Yeah, no, fair enough.

I do agree that there's a lot of reasons for concern. I think by, I guess I'm just not willing to give up. It's all it comes down to. There's a part of me that wants to be optimistic and be like universal basic income could be an answer. I don't think it's the complete answer. I think it solves the displacement issue, but not the fundamental thing that I was talking about before. I want art in the world that is made by humans that makes me feel something that is communicating something from another person to me. that gets lost in a sea of anybody can make anything all the time

and like I want stuff to matter more. Yeah. But that's a different question. No, but no, we're 100% aligned because I told you that I said there's three things that we need to handle. And the last one is exactly aligned with what you're talking about. Like where does meaning come from? Like how do we have lives that are fulfilling and what does that look like in this world? So if we have a world of aligned super helpful AI tools that are doing a ton of things that are empowering us to do things,

they've taken away a lot of hard need to work or ability to work, right? And that's no longer how we define ourselves. Then how do we define ourselves? And I believe like creativity and art and games and competition is actually the answer to that. I think it's actually the main answer to that. Like where your ability to create cool things is you could, You don't have to worry. You talked earlier about how lucky you are, we are, to be able to do this for a living. It's like, what if anybody that wanted to do this could just do this, right? You don't have to worry about, you can make your game that's got a hundred players that really love it.

And that's fine because those people love it. You get to say something to them. And you don't have to be like making a game that appeals to it's going to sell whatever you've sold two million copies plus and a wingspan or whatever it is. That opportunity is a better world. And I think it is possible, right? In the same way that I, people, computers have been better than humans of chess for 30 years now, something like that, more than that.

But we still have more chess players in the world than ever. People still love playing chess as humans because we get to have our own space. We want to compete and compare to other humans. I get most of my materials and the things I buy are manufactured in a factory and they're mass produced. But I still love to have handcrafted art piece or a vase or whatever because I know that that a real person made this and I'm paying more for it and I'm happy to have that personal connection. Both those things can exist in the world. So I want to at least do whatever we can to move us in that direction where it's like creation is valuable for creation's sake, not because

your creation is better than what a robot could do or worse than a robot could do. But then that makes me question your argument that AI is going to make it so much easier because the part that's real is the part that has to come out of your brain. Yeah, but it's... The effort. Right? You're never going to solve that part.

Even if it spits out 500 cards at this, in response to a prompt, I have to think of the prompt. Yes. Yeah. We're aligned that we still want humans to have brains and use those brains to do to do things. But yeah, I just think it's overly optimistic that it does the heart. It's not, it's never going to do the heart part. Like, yeah.

Yeah, I guess it depends on what we mean by the hard part, right? So if we're using our terms, so the way I, when I think about the game design processes, I define us the core design. There's the inspiration, which is like, what am I trying to do? Where's this idea coming from? What's the soul of what I'm doing? Then there's put things into a frame and figure out how this is going to get represented. And then I brainstorm different ideas and different ways I can do it and how it might work. I prototype it, test it.

I learn from that testing and I circle it back again. And I do that until I run out of time, run out of money, or I've got the thing that I'm proud of. And I can like, one of those three things depending upon your situation. And so if we're talking about the inspiration, the idea and the hope and the this is my dream and this is the thing, and that's what stays human. Maybe a robot can help you with a bunch of the other substeps of that or make it possible that certain things could be done that couldn't. I'm capable of, I made a digitally printed game with Richard Garfield that every card is unique in one of a kind. Every deck is unique in one of a kind. and there's way more permutations of cards

than I could ever design in divinity. But I created the algorithm and the idea behind how this worked. And then the machine helps me make a game category that couldn't have existed otherwise. That's a world where, again, it's the old form of AI, algorithm, AI, not an I-L-L-L-LM. What's the difference?

With an L-LM, you would want to check all the stuff that it made up, right? Because it's non-deterministic. run your algorithm if you tell it the algorithm. But you've checked that the algorithm works. And you would still need to check that the LLM's algorithm works, right? Otherwise, it's spitting random stuff out into people's boxes that you're selling them and you don't even know if it works.

Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So you're saying if it's because... Of course, we should use algorithms. Yeah. Okay. And then so what about the case of... So because the LLM's output is non-deterministic, that's the problem case, because the algorithm is deterministic and I can check those.

In that particular case, yeah, in a lot of cases, like, I'm never going to put something out of the world that I'm not checking. And then if I have to check it, is it saving me time? Yeah. And wouldn't I rather do myself is where I land. Okay, what about the other case? I think I brought this one up, the one around the panel as well, but I was able to, for my mom's birthday, I was able to make her a, Broadway show, like a Broadway musical about her, using Broadway musical songs that told her life and all the things that, and she loved Broadway musicals. It's her thing.

I have no musical talent whatsoever. So there was zero chance that I was going to be able to pull this off. But I had the ideas. I came up with some of the lyrics. I iterated with the machine, but an LLM made the song and I worked with it to get to what I wanted. And then it made her day. She still listens to it now years later is what her favorite gifts I've ever got. that's not something I could have done without an LM. I couldn't do it with an algorithm. I could do it. It's something that brought joy to someone else

was a meaningful thing that I made for her and I came up with the idea of. But it's mediated by a tool that leaves uncertain output that maybe stole a lot of musical notes and ideas from people in the past. How does that fall in your rubric? I have multiple levels of reaction to that. So one level is like, sure, whenever for your mom, like personal use,

at it. Level two is how good was it really? But I'm sure she appreciated it because it was personalized, right? I'm going to cut to a clip. I'm going to cut to a clip of that song now in the podcast. Let the audience decide.

The number three, which we haven't touched on at all, was like, how much energy and water did it take to create this thing for your mom? It's true for many presents that you could have given to your mom, but we have not talked about the environmental impact, the data set are ridiculousness

that's happening right now. If this trade has left the station, we've got to get on top of that. Or that people are speculating right now AI is going to destroy us all because it's hacking and whatnot. AI's going to destroy us all because it's going to melt the planet.

Yeah. Yeah, so we'll say a couple things that says we'll ship to that part of the topic. I think one, the data around the water usage, I think that issue is is way overblown, right? Like some of the older data centers, like from a long time ago, we're not efficient with water.

The modern data centers are efficient with water. Per square acre data centers use far less water than growing almonds or having a golf course. It's not close. That issue is something that I think the news has blown up in a way that's not healthy for the discussion. And anybody is welcome to dig in and do the research on

because I dug into it. So that one, I think is a red herring. I do agree with you, however, about the energy concerns, right? Like, there's an exponential increase in the amount of energy that people want to use because they really want to use these tools, right? Now, the same, I don't know if you remember when they had these conversations around, like, how much energy Google search takes because that was like a hot subject for a little while

and how much they're doing with their data centers. But we've gotten over that because Google searching is so useful and it's a little bit per thing. For what? And the same. Yeah. And then, and I think the name is true here, right? The creation of that song, I did look it up, and it was not counting the training of the model, which is a different piece to whatever it takes, but the actual usage of it and doing the thing

was like less than a few minutes of watching Netflix on a high-definition TV, right? It wasn't, it's not a lot per, you do a query or an art piece or whatever. I have an article on my substack, I'll link to, which has links to all the research on us. You invited me on to talk about wingspin pocket, and I did not come prepared to argue. Oh, yeah, no. You're right. You're right. I don't know. I can't argue back. But it's a concern and we're using it more and more. Yeah, I agree. And that's not, yeah, apologies for getting more into the details. I think we have to have a new. I agree we have to have, be careful about energy usage. I agree we need to have enough renewable energy to support things. So we support that there. And again, I appreciate you diving into this stuff with me because I think, again, I want everybody to have a good discussion on it. I am not. I don't claim to have all the answers.

I do think there are real risks, as we've talked about. I do think there are real concerns. I think the energy concern is absolutely a massive concern that we do need to be paying attention to. So we're aligned there. I think then let's just to shift it back into kind of the game space, the design space. I want to, my goal is to,

and I think yours is as well, is to empower people out there to be able to make games and do more good creative work. You help with the Tabletop Game Designers Association. And I think, I know you found that it's, or you're part of the, You're part of the founders of it, right? I'm one of the founders, yes.

Yes, okay, great. You're one of the founders of it. So that is a really great organization, which I would like to talk about in a little bit more detail. So let's shift into what that is as a resource and how that helps to empower people. Yeah, so the Tabosop Game Designers Association, we've got just under 500 members, I think, right now

in just a few years of being active. And we've got a bunch of different things going on I think one of the most practically useful things that we've got is that if a member has a contract offer from a publisher, we will look at that for you and point out where it diverges from what we think a good contract would look like. It's not a legal review in the way that a lawyer would do it, but we've got certain things. We've come up with a rubric of this is what we would love to see in a contract. And we will tell you, whether those things are in there or not,

sort of coach people on how they could go back to their publishers and ask for more. So that's a big piece of it. We're working on a model contract that we'll be able to share with everybody, including publishers who have asked us for, we want to do a good pro-designer contract, give us the language. So we're working on that. What is it?

Are there top? Are there top? And we do webinars and things like that. We've got meetups at different conventions. So trying to do. a lot of networking among designers and sharing information. Yeah, those are some of the big ones. I would say also just in terms of, like,

we put out a little position paper recently over. When you talk about games, don't just say who it's published by. Name the designer. Like, don't say, Wingspan by Stone Meyer, the word by kills me. Wingspan is not by Stonebrier Games, right?

I am the author of the work. And you could also say who the publisher is. That's great. All credit to them, they did great work as the publisher. But please also mention me. Yeah. No, I think that's, I think that's right. It's nice to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's great. And so what it's great work that you're doing is being able to support designers out there or being able to solve a lot of the challenges that come from, you know, yeah, and people don't know how to negotiate a contract. I actually had my attorney on the podcast a while back to be able to be able to solve a lot of the challenges that come from. You know, yeah, and people don't know how to be a lot of the podcast a while back to be. all the time. Here's how we do this. Here's what we talk about. Here's our gods. Because, yeah, you just don't know. My former life was actually going to law school and before I became a game business center. So I know, I know enough to be dangerous and I know to hire a lawyer. I need one. Man, it's funny how much that was almost my entire life was law and really contracts. And now it's my least favorite part of my job. It's really funny. I was really close. Yeah,

I really did. I really did. But yeah, that's why this is part of why, yeah, I try to really inspire other people or help other people have an easier path because my transition over to being a game designer was not easy and then starting a company going independence and all of that also very difficult so I like to share that and so I love that you've created this membership and that's just ttgda.org I think if people want to go to check that out. The other thing that really warms my heart to see on the Discord is people asking for other designer's experiences with certain publishers when they're about to consider a contract to offer because I feel like that's, there's a whisper network. You hear about publishers that you

don't want to work with. But if you're a brand new designer and you don't have the connections to hear those things, then you can end up working with people that you would rather not work with. And there's no way to know because we don't want to say it publicly and sound like jerks that there are some people that are just better than others to work with. And I love being able to get that information to people who need it. Yeah, no, I think that's wonderful. And it's an interesting thing because in this industry, it's a very close-knit community with a lot of the people that are in it.

I've been, again, having done this for 20 years, as like friends that I see it every show. And your long-term reputation matters a lot more than any specific deal or game or private contract because it does. Ribble serve. People talk and people know who's good to work with and who is in and when things go bad,

who is it that's going to be honest and upright and who isn't. But you're right. Yeah, somebody new coming in doesn't have all that context. It doesn't have all of that, that sort of knowledge and protection of that network. Do you also connect people in any way to help them either connect them to publishers or graphic designs or other resources? Is that part of the network? What you guys do? I've been trying to figure out the best way to do.

Carport Edison has a great publisher directory. So a lot of times you just push people to that. We would like to have a publisher directory, but it's a lot of, work to set it up and I'm not sure it's worth re-designing the wheel. Recreating the wheel. Yeah. And UnPub does be dating events and stuff. So we've been trying to find the holes in the ecosystem where people aren't already doing the things and contracts for a big one. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. I think definitely, yeah, helping that connection. So you do, you have a convention meetups that, do you have any coming up that are conventions I might be at?

we're definitely going to have one at packs unplugged. I've been working on getting that set up. I think Jeff Engelstein is organizing some stuff at BGTCon. Those are the next two that I am thinking of right now. Okay, great. I am excited to have more time. I'm going to be playing Wingspan Pocket again right after this. I am excited to see what are the things you have.

I will check out the other game that I haven't had a chance to play yet, Saddell. And I am grateful for our friendship for you being willing. to talk to me about the controversial things as well as all the fun things. I do enjoy, again, just like I respect you very much and I enjoy what you're doing for the industry. And thanks for taking the time. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Game design is a craft. And like any craft, it gets better with structure, feedback, and repetition. You're able to learn better when you're surrounded by like-minded people who support each other and lift each other up. The think like a game

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