Science & Tech Quote by Gary Gygax

Gygax is sketching a future where the computer stops faking the dungeon and starts running it. The first half is a wager on simulation: once AI can do more than rotate canned dialogue and scripted questlines, “RPGs” online might finally earn the name, responding like a living referee instead of a vending machine of content. It’s a pointed jab at the genre’s long-standing compromise: massively multiplayer worlds that advertise roleplay but often reward optimization, repetition, and grind because the game can’t truly improvise.

The subtext, though, is protective. Gygax helped build tabletop roleplaying around a human Dungeon Master’s judgment, flexibility, and social contract. By framing AI as “approximat[ing] Machine Intelligence,” he implies a threshold not easily crossed; the promise is real, but it’s also perpetually “not yet.” He’s granting technology its due while keeping the crown on the table.

The theater analogy does the real rhetorical work. Film can be spectacular, accessible, and widely distributed, yet it’s still not the same as live performance: the shared room, the unrepeatable mistakes, the feedback loop between players and facilitator. That’s Gygax defending “being there” as an aesthetic and cultural experience, not just a delivery method. In a moment when digital games were already absorbing tabletop language, he stakes out a boundary: better AI may make computer RPGs more authentic, but authenticity in roleplaying is also presence, friction, and human spontaneity.