Ryan Dancey & AEG Part Ways Following AI Comments

Ryan Dancey, the Chief Operating Officer of boardgame publisher Alderac Entertainment Group, no longer works for the company, following statements on social media where he claimed that AI could make most of the company's board games, and that D&D and Magic: the Gathering were the only new forms of gameplay in his lifetime. After another poster on LinkedIn claimed that "AI wouldn't come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos because it doesn't understand the human element of fun", Dancey responded that he had zero reason to believe that AI could not do such a thing.

"I have zero reason to believe that an Al couldn't come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos. I can prompt any of several Als RIGHT NOW and get ideas for games as good as those. The gaming industry doesn't exist because humans create otherwise unobtainable ideas. It exists because many many previous games exist, feed into the minds of designers, who produce new variants on those themes. People then apply risk capital against those ideas to see if there's a product market fit. Sometimes there is, and sometimes there is not. (In fact, much more often than not).

Extremely occasionally (twice in my lifetime: D&D and Magic: the Gathering) a human has produced an all new form of gaming entertainment. Those moments are so rare and incandescent that they echo across decades.

Game publishing isn't an industry of unique special ideas. It's an industry about execution, marketing, and attention to detail. All things Als are great at."

- Ryan Dancey​

The Cardboard Herald, a boardgame reviews channel, responded yesterday on BlueSky that "As you may have seen, [AEG] CEO Ryan Dancey stated that AI can make games “just as good as Tiny Towns or Flip 7 or Cubitos”, completely missing the inexorable humanity involved.We’ve spent 10 years celebrating creatives in the industry. Until he’s gone we will not work with AEG."

Today, AEG's CEO John Zinser stated "Today I want to share that Ryan Dancey and AEG have parted ways.This is not an easy post to write. Ryan has been a significant part of AEG’s story, and I am personally grateful for the years of work, passion, and intensity he brought to the company. We have built a lot together. As AEG moves into its next chapter, leadership alignment and clarity matter more than ever. This transition reflects that reality.Our commitment to our designers, partners, retailers, and players remains unchanged. We will continue building great games through collaboration, creativity, and trust."

Dancey himself posted "This morning [John Zinser] and I talked about the aftermath of my post yesterday about the ability of AI to create ideas for games. He's decided that it's time for me to move on to new adventures. Sorry to have things end like this. I've enjoyed my 10 years at AEG. I wish the team there the best in their future endeavors.

I believe we're at a civilizational turning point. That who we are and how we are is going to change on the order of what happened during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; and it's past time we started talking about it and not being afraid to discuss the topic. Talking about AI, being honest about what it can and cannot do, and thinking about the implications is something we have to begin to do in a widespread way. Humans have a unique creative spark that differentiates us and makes us special and we should celebrate that specialness as we experience this epic change.

For the record: I do not believe that AI will replace the work talented game designer/developers do, nor do I think it is appropriate to use AI to replace the role of designer/developers in the publication of tabletop games. During my time at AEG I developed and implemented polices and contracts that reflect those views. It's important to me that you know what I believe and what I don't believe on this particular topic, despite what you may have read elsewhere."

Whatever your position on generative LLMs and the like, when the COO of your company announces publicly that all of the company’s games could have been made by AI, it’s a problem. UK readers may recall when major jewelry chain Ratners’ CEO Gerald Ratner famously announced that the products sold in his stores were “trash”, instantly wiping half a billion pounds from the company’s value back in the early 1990s. The company was forced to close stores and rebrand to Signet Group. At the time the Ratners Group was the world's biggest jewelry retailer. Ratner himself was forced to resign in 1992. The act of making a damaging statement about the quality of your own company’s products became known as “doing a Ratner”.

Dancey was VP of Wizards of the Coast when the company acquired TSR, the then-owner of Dungeons & Dragons. He is also known for being the architect of the Open Game License. Dancey has worked as Chief Operating Officer for AEG for 10 years, and was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company, second-in-command after the CEO, John Zinser.

 

[Professor Murder]

It was a large post on LinkedIn, the business platform, where he announced to the world that his designers were below average and incapable of exceeding what AI does.

The rest of leadership could back him and say that he was correct, eventually firing the human idiots they'd hired
OR
Fire the guy who thinks the humans who were working for him are below average.

LLMs are averaging machines -- a declaration that they're as good as your staff is a declaration your staff is average or worse.

More importantly from a business side, it is claiming the products you are currently trying to sell people are so mediocre that they could be exceeded by randomly generated materials. He name dropped actual games his company wants the public to buy. Beyond stupid.

 

[Morrus]

The dark hand of Social Media giveth, and taketh away!

Pretty sad that one tweet can end 10 years of labor, though.

He fared better than Gerald Ratner at least, who lost the world’s largest jewelry retail group.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Hard to keep your staff motivated when you tell them that robots would do a better job.

Indeed.

I literally attended a training session last week and again yesterday because we are now required to use AI to generate our epics, features, stories, and to prioritize them. Basically my job and the jobs of my peers who had to be on that call. And they wonder why we weren't all excited to "embrace AI".

 

[Micah Sweet]

He fared better than Gerald Ratner at least, who lost the world’s largest jewelry retail group.

Getting fired is getting fired, from the perspective of the fired person I think.

 

[Morrus]

Getting fired is getting fired, from the perspective of the fired person I think.

Ratner lost more than a job. He lost his own company and empire, and hundreds of millions of pounds. He ended up with a national slang term named after him! It was one of the most epic examples of self sabotage the business world has ever seen.

 

[kenmarable]

This isn't the first time that Dancey has stumbled his way into a major controversy. A few years ago, he had to apologize about his comments about Elizabeth Hargrave's comments about sexism in the tabletop industry. Perhaps Dancey should learn that not everything needs to be commented upon.

Board game executive apologises for sexist reply to Wingspan creator’s criticism of industry sexism

An AEG executive has apologised for sexist reply to a Twitter thread from Wingspan's creator discussing the lack of women in board game awards.

www.dicebreaker.com

Dang! I hadn't seen that before (I don't follow much board game news), but as thankful as I am for him championing the OGL into reality, between MBA-brain thinking (pejoratively) that nothing matters in game development but marketing to actually publicly posting that "females of the West" are not trained to handle criticism , we could sure use a lot less of people like him running things! Yikes!

Such an unforced error. Beyond the backwards, archaic thinking, they were just such reckless decisions for someone trusted with that high of a leadership role.

 

[GMMichael]

A few years ago, he had to apologize about his comments about Elizabeth Hargrave's comments about sexism in the tabletop industry.

 

[Von Ether]

It does feel like we are rapidly approaching a time that human art/creativity will only continue if people make the conscious choice to support it.

I don’t see any reason why ai couldn’t create a board game if given some parameters. It can spit out a video game after all and it can teach itself to play both board and video games better than humans (chess and go).

And given humanity’s history of supporting causes with their buying power I won’t hold my breath.

If movie theatres manage to survive another 10 years and people have the choice between spending $30 a ticket on a human made product or $5 on a movie entirely made by ai, I suspect many will opt for the $5 movie.

We already have AI music toppings the charts. The next 5-10 years is going to be very messy and I have no idea what society will look like on the otherside.

Today the CBC had a piece about our best hope being to nutter maternal instincts in AI so it will be nice and take care of us: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/geoffrey-hinton-maternal-instincts-9.7094116

Not loving being the screaming baby in that analogy

You can also make a book by piling sentences into it. One of the biggest problem at the moment is not that AI can make things. it is that the bean counters, not the artists, are deciding when AI content is "good enough," is how much money they saved, not if it was actually great product. When slop is easy to make, people will churn out slop by the tonnage to make a few bucks.

Best example is that many short story magazines have stopped taking open submissions due to the sheer volume of people - and bots - submitting AI stories. And it's not because they have too much time figuring out if the story is AI, it just because there is so much of it burying the human made stuff.

And the people doing the submitting probably know their AI stories are subpar but don't care . They are just hoping to score a buck and probably prove a point that's not realistic yet.

 

[Dire Bare]

It was a large post on LinkedIn, the business platform, where he announced to the world that his designers were below average and incapable of exceeding what AI does.

I don't think Dancey's intent was to slam AEG's designers specifically . . . but rather AI, in his opinion, can create games just as well as humans, not just within AEG but industry wide. He used AEG games as examples, because those are the games he is likely most familiar with.

I disagree with Dancey's opinion, but I think it's a fair opinion for him to hold. Very stupid to tweet though. Career suicide, and deservedly so. He definitely pulled a Ratner!

Dancey seems to be a tech-forward guy. His inspiration for the OGL back in the day was open-source software. And his opinion on AI in creative endeavors saddens me, but does not surprise me. He's getting a lot of vitriol on Redditt for it, excessively so, IMO.

Thanks for the OGL Ryan, hopefully you land on your feet after leaving AEG. And hopefully you'll think twice before tweeting next time.

 

[Dire Bare]

You can also make a book by piling sentences into it. One of the biggest problem at the moment is not that AI can make things. it is that the bean counters, not the artists, are deciding when AI content is "good enough," is how much money they saved, not if it was actually great product. When slop is easy to make, people will churn out slop by the tonnage to make a few bucks.

Best example is that many short story magazines have stopped taking open submissions due to the sheer volume of people - and bots - submitting AI stories. And it's not because they have too much time figuring out if the story is AI, it just because there is so much of it burying the human made stuff.

And the people doing the submitting probably know their AI stories are subpar but don't care . They are just hoping to score a buck and probably prove a point that's not realistic yet.

That's my fear, that civilization ends buried in AI-generated slop. Art, news, all content. I already feel that I can't trust anything that comes across my social media feeds.