Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely the human race — to activate the emergency brake.

Walter Benjamin

 

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) was a non-profit organisation which ran a month-long event, challenging participants to produce a 50,000-word manuscript. In 2024, the organisation announced that they would not only be supporting the use of AI in their upcoming write-a-thon, but that to not support AI in this way was classist and ableist. This was because those who did not have the capacity or time to write were given an equalising advantage through the use of this new technology.

The backlash was swift and contributed to NaNoWriMo ceasing to operate altogether. In the wake of this was a renewed discussion about our deteriorating relationship to creativity. In a now deleted post on Twitter (as he, like many, have left the platform), Elias Grieg argued:

AI presents itself as a hack to solve the issue of time and space (and therefore pay/fees/remuneration) in creative work, but only by destroying the notion that time and space are needed for artistic creation and production – by destroying the artist. This is not accessibility.

It is somewhat natural that people would seek a way to express themselves creatively in a society where our recreational time and disposable income are thinning. But as Grieg continued, what makes the AI “hack” so “pernicious and scabby” is that “it offers a false solution to a real contradiction”. Capitalism promised wealth to the masses, but for those in the global north who are able to enjoy some of it, it did not produce the time nor the capacity to enjoy it. People seek AI to fill the gaps they feel are growing in their day to day — to squeeze that extra bit from their dwindling time and attention — but it cannot truly satisfy the complex desire and necessity for creativity and play.

Another such casualty is the unsubtle push of AI into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of D&D, have gradually begun to adopt more and more AI artwork into marketing materials and books. While their motivations are clear — it is far cheaper to use AI then paying artists — it is more perplexing to see AI used in the playing of D&D. Used in this way, AI purports to hack your recreational time, allowing you to maximise it by smoothing over the nitty gritty. But the thing is, the joy of D&D is the nitty gritty.

While running a campaign, I found my players using ChatGPT to generate their characters descriptions and backstories only to not reference that lore but to fail to remember any of the details. But D&D, which necessitates the time and space Grieg references, created the environment for the players to build out their characters — at times in contradiction to the six paragraphs AI spat out. These characters were unserious, unsophisticated and yet, widely more interesting than their AI counterparts. AI promises to improve the productivity of work and leisure, but much of D&D thrives on being unproductive. 

Within Australia, we’ve seen a renewed discussion around productivity. The Business Council of Australia’s 2024 report on productivity notes Australia’s dwindling labour productivity while claiming that “Productivity is the primary factor which will define Australians’ future quality of life”. But which Australians? Greg Jericho notes that real wages have not met productivity growth in Australia in decades. We are no better off financially, and the conditions of climate change mean we are a lot worse off physically. This is indicative of what the economic understanding of productivity is: how much stuff or service can a worker provide divided by the time it takes.

Productivity allows for higher outputs, and larger revenue, but those outputs come at higher costs to the environment, and that revenue often stays out of the workers’ pockets. This is not to critique productivity as a whole. For example, the reduction in the time it takes to cook or communicate have incredible benefits to people; but it is productivity for its own sake, especially when it comes with a psychic or physical toll, that I want to focus on.

This understanding of productivity spills into the domestic and leisure space as we measure our days in outputs (“I had a productive day. I did [this]”), but one of the fallacies of this conception of productivity is how it fails to measure services and care work, and therefore day-to-day life.

Measuring the output of goods production is a simple exercise (we made forty pairs of shoes), but the “productivity” of the services industry becomes more difficult to evaluate as the commodity provided is often intangible and its quality subjective. How do you measure the performance of a firefighter? Similarly, is your day productive if you run around doing more chores, while lacking the necessary recreation to meet your body’s mental and physical needs? Care work is harder still as it resists becoming more efficient. This is because care work is nuanced, flexible and labour-intensive. While the introduction of some technologies has improved conditions and workflow, you cannot reduce the hours or resources of a carer and maintain the same level of service in the same way you can streamline the production of cars through automation. You cannot parent twenty-three out of twenty-four hours. Still, we see the attempts to functionalise care work to meet these productivity goals. In this regard, care is treated as something that reproduces a labourer for the next day of work, rather than meet their complex, non-economic, needs. There is a coercion to ask if our recreational activities will help you show up at work tomorrow, not if they fulfil us; and from this we engage in sedentary mindless activities (scrolling, watching tv, etc) to conserve energy, rather than fulfilling other needs at the risk of being tired/underperforming the next day. What makes D&D such an interesting activity is how it, like care work, resists efficiency, and how it embraces many of the behaviours we are often avoidant of.

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D&D is a game where players engage in group storytelling using a set of rules and game mechanics to complete tasks as you build a larger narrative. The players are guided through the narrative by a dungeon master who applies these rules and game mechanics selectively. The dungeon master provides verbal descriptions of scenarios and then asks the players to narrate their own actions (“You are locked in a room with wooden crates, that smells of oil. What do you do?”) and determines the difficulty by assigning a probability to dice (“a roll of ten or higher is needed to set the crates on fire safely”). D&D campaigns can range from a few hours to decades, as players deviate from the story, building new sub-plots to resolve. While there have been attempts to streamline the game — such as through AI — there is no formula or hack to the game. A dungeon master could keep players on the rails, playing through the story as written, but the joy of the game is the way in which players follow tangents. In this way, D&D is also nuanced, flexible and labour-intensive, and in this way, D&D’s quality deteriorates as it becomes productive.

The necessity to abandon the productivist mindset has never been more pressing. Capitalism creates a measurement of progress on the growth of profits. We identify this growth through GDP, measured either by a nation’s spending, income, or production; however, this growth comes from the exploitation of the global South, while also outsourcing its harms (pollution, climate risks, destruction of forests) extracted from it.

Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan estimate that only thirty per cent of global productive capacity is needed to end poverty and maintain decent living standards. The pursuit of growth has not only increased the output of products but decreased their quality such as the practice of planned obsolescence in which businesses purposefully design products to have a limited lifespan to encourage consumers to continually replace. Apple was sued (and lost) for purposefully slowing down the batteries of their older iPhone models to promote sales of their newer models. This process necessitates continued production of goods as we constantly, and unnecessarily, replace them. The culture of growth at all costs feeds the productivist mindset that stigmatises the “lazies” who would curb this growth.

Many of the contemporary benefits of work — the sense of purpose, recognition for your skills and sense of community — come from the void created through the destruction of non-economic life. This is not to say work cannot be all of these things, but our capacity to experience them outside of work is dwindling. Much of the public space has become more and more privatised, creating a smaller and smaller pool of spaces you can exist without cost. This is paired with the increasing neoliberal adoption of a productivist mentality in our private lives. We have seen an increasing pressure to monetise, or justify our activities based on their utility, over being an end to themselves. This is not a totalising pressure, nor universal, and with every coercive force there is opportunities for resistance. D&D is one such act.

D&D resists capitalism’s productivity and growth fetish. In many ways, the game is a shitty commodity within a capitalist system. Its intrinsic utility, its use-value, is quite great — it’s a fun game. However, its exchange value, what people will buy it for, is flagging. Since its conception in 1974, D&D’s various owners have been unable to create a sustainable business model. Cynthia Williams, CEO of Wizards of the Coast, has noted that

D&D has never been more popular, and we have really great fans and engagement. But the brand is really under monetised.

⁠While the intellectual property managed to produce a widely-successful film and multi-awarded video game, the company has struggled to see returns on the physical game.⁠

This is not a universal quality of tabletop games. Magic the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast’s flagship game, continues to bring in profits through the release of new trading cards, and, during the pandemic, Games Workshop earned £187 million in six months from the sales of figurine-based games like Warhammer. As a pen and paper tabletop game, D&D doesn’t require a single purchase, although typically a dungeon master would buy a set of dice along with the three source books: The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide and The Monster Manual. These books offer a compendium of game mechanics, world-building guidance, and creatures to inhabit the world. With these few books (or less) every dungeon master is capable of building their own campaigns and running the sessions by themselves. Should a dungeon master choose to buy one of D&D’s written campaign books, it would be enough to keep a group playing from days to years.

This is what makes D&D such a terrible business model. Wizards of the Coast have tried many times to monetise the creative elements of the game, but the community — with their communistic sharing of resources and ideas — have responded with organised resistance. This is not to say there is no money to make. D&D releases numerous campaign books a year, on top of dice and ancillary materials to the game. There’s also a large secondary market for many of things, along with “professional dungeon masters” who either produce episodic podcasts of their campaigns, or hire themselves out to do the labour of creating and/or running a campaign. However, the core function of the game is to encourage consumers to use their imagination, thus making the merchant superfluous.

It is D&D’s reliance on imagination and inefficiency that makes it such an excellent form of play. This in turn is what makes D&D feel so unnatural in adulthood.

Play is difficult to define, because it is in many ways so broad yet specific. While someone may find gardening a form of play, others would describe it as work. Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan reluctantly add parameters such as “Voluntary” “Apparently purposeless” “Freedom from Time” and “Improvisational potential.” It might be helpful to understand it as unstructured activity for enjoyment; while “structured play” exists, it functions as a tool of learning and development — it is this desire to functionalise play that I am pushing against.

In its most basic pen-and-paper form, D&D fills this understanding of play almost perfectly (perfection would be to abandon the framework altogether and just improvise stories). While the experience of D&D can be improved with further technological assistance — visuals, sounds, computers to organise notes — these have the potential to add additional structures and limitations to the playing of D&D. Premeet Sidhu and Marcus Carter note how the minimal structure of D&D is what separates it from video games limited by the necessity of code and storage. This leaves D&D more open in their view to facilitating “transgressive play”. That is the way in which players subvert, break, or even step outside of the rules and mechanics of the game to achieve a more “ideal” play. Of course, ideal play is not always desirable or needed, and transgressive play can still be achieved even with additional structure. But while integrating technology and visuals such as maps can improve D&D without functionalising it, it also removes some of the potential for players to build those visuals within a shared imagined space. This also reflects on the dungeon master, and how they choose to exercise their power over the imagined space — be it authoritarian, permissive, or collaborative. In this way, the more supports, structure and mechanics added to the game, the more solid it becomes, and what makes play so extraordinary is how fluid it can be.

Play is a state of being we relegate to childhood as culturally we place a greater emphasis on “seriousness” in adulthood. Brown and Vaughan note that “Play has an important role. Play is present not in just the human society, but in the animal world”. They note the polar bears that don’t “play-fight” are not no worse hunters, however, “what they can’t do – what they never learn to do – is to socialize successfully’. They also note the value in imagination, and how play allows us to simulate life and “experience situations we have never encountered before and learn from them”. How “we can learn lessons and skills without being directly at risk”. Play prepares us for social interaction and imaginative thinking. The cultural pressure to abandon play comes at costs:

Our work or other responsibilities often demand we set play aside. But when play is denied over the long term, our mood darkens.

We are being coerced to deprive ourselves of our ability to experiment, to be creative, to step outside of reality, and to be social; all of these things resist standardisation, which make us bad workers.

The desire to mould people into ideal workers has gone through various phases, from the initial transition to capitalism to the rise of Taylorism or scientific management. Taylorism further standardised every element of the workplace, leaving less space for creativity, improvising or innovation. While work will never be play, these processes removed the elements of play from work, as well as extending its organising principles to housework, childrearing and sexuality. The way capitalism deprives the worker of creative, cognitive, or social input in their work is what Marx termed “alienation”: as the worker is no longer connected to their labour, this exists outside of them, under the control of the capitalist. We see the effects of alienation in and outside the workplace as Donald Winnicott put astutely in Playing and Reality:

In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.

D&D’s transformative potential is that it offers people an opportunity to imagine alternative worlds and inspire creative pathways to manifest them. Its reliance on imagination to fill its world is what we’re depriving ourselves of in the learned helplessness that is our neoliberal condition. D&D is a space to play, to formulate, to waste time. We need more spaces to come together and imagine other worlds. D&D offers to restore the elements of the social we have been losing: recreation, creativity and community. Artificial intelligence is the next process of moulding us into good workers, stripping workers of the final vestiges of these qualities, of consulting a human being of their thoughts, their expertise, their art. Elias Grieg’s rant not only cut through the false promise of AI, but its place in demobilising workers, and stifling movements for change:

AI is here being used as a means of avoiding necessary industrial action, lowering professional standards, mystifying the provision of inferior work by way of a gleaming, ultimately fraudulent Silicon Valley apparatus. What it’s doing to art it’s doing to everything else, too.

Our survival instinct is to persist and adapt to the world as it changes around us, to adopt the next technological solution. But instead of surrendering to this next level of misery, I propose we pull the break on this locomotive, find some dice, and waste some time together.