After a few years of retirement, Warhammer 40,000, Necromunda, and Blood Bowl designer Jervis Johnson is working on a number of new tabletop games. In partnership with Mantic Games, Johnson recently announced his involvement in the Kickstarter tabletop game DreadBall: All-Stars, a sci-fi football miniatures game.
A reimagined version of the original DreadBall game, this new version is designed as a gateway tabletop game that features pre-assembled miniatures and simpler rules to get players “straight into the action”. With Jervis at the helm, the new game benefits from decades of game design experience, and decades of human experience of how board games are played and enjoyed.
In an interview with FRVR, we talked to Johnson about numerous topics, including his views on artificial intelligence in the tabletop space. Recently, Games Workshop CEO Kevin Rountree announced a blanket ban on Generative AI to “respect human workers”, a decision that the former Warhammer designer agrees was the right move to make.
“I think it’s the right move for a lot of companies to be perfectly honest,” Johnson told us. “I haven’t had a lot of experience with AI because I don’t use it. It’s not the way that I work, and I’m old so I don’t have to. It’s a newfangled kind of thing that I didn’t really get involved with in the first place.”
“We’re going to be spending decades getting this stuff out again after we’ve used it a lot and found out its actually a bit rubbish.”
Jervis Johnson on the use of AI in game design
Johnson explained that AI “can do stuff that’s perfectly good on a middling kind of way, on the low-end, generally”, but they have yet to see “anything generated by AI where I think ‘that’s really impressive”. While many online in the AI sphere seek happiness in claiming the technology will rip away jobs from creatives, Johnson clearly doesn’t see it.
As a designer who has worked on some pretty pricey products—let’s face it, tabletop gaming is a pretty expensive hobby at times—Johnson sees AI as something that hurts design rather than helps it. “I think that if you’re going to do stuff at the top end, do properly interesting, creative stuff, then AI doesn’t help you. It’s a hindrance basically because it allows you to be a bit lazy and not put in the effort.”
Johnson explained that Games Workshop’s massive success with Warhammer 40,000 wasn’t only due to hitting the perfect set of circumstances for release, but also it was only possible due to months of hard work from a lot of talented designers, writers, artists and more. “There was a lot of work involved there, a lot of thinking, and thought, and meetings, and planning, and discarding ideas. I worry that, with AI, what it does is it just cuts that out and shortcuts to kind of an average answer.”
“Most of the stuff that I’ve seen doesn’t seem to actually quite match up to the hype,” Johnson continued. “I saw a great quote recently saying that AI is going to be like the asbestos of the internet and the computer industry. That we’re going to be spending decades getting this stuff out again after we’ve used it a lot and found out its actually a bit rubbish.”
Johnson explained that AI would only really be a viable technology is it can be “thoughtful”. Right now, the technology regurgitates existing material and slaps it together. Johnson’s work on Blood Bowl in an undeniable influence for DreadBall, but even with Johnson’s own involvement in DreadBall: All-Stars, that series is completely different due to both human intent in design, and also decades of learning how to design games, whether that’s Warhammer 40,000 or something different.
AI in gaming, largely video games, has been a hot topic as of late with groups like Larian Studios blanket banning AI for workers after backlash for fans. Alongside the global RAM outages and the huge water cost that AI datacenters siphon up, many generative AI critics point to the fact that its datasets are made up of stolen, copywritten material.
Johnson’s decades of work are likely a component of multiple AI LLMs, a fact that doesn’t bother the designer all that much. “You’re right, the stuff I’ve written will be out there,” he said, “I think that’s fine because there’s an interesting thing that as a creative person… there’s a quote I use a lot which is “artists steal, amateurs merely copy”.
“I think this is very true that there really aren’t many terribly many new ideas out there,” he continued. “You know, Blood Bowl, what it did was it took ideas that were there, but the game mechanics and stuff for First Edition were lifted pretty much straight from Warhammer and stuff. Youtake ideas and you move them around and put them together, but what raises you up is the intent that you use those ideas and the thought that you use those ideas with.”
So far, tabletop gaming has yet to be riddled with AI generated content like other industries, but the technology keeps popping up. In Warhammer communities, AI-generated “fan” content is often slopped around, and it simply isn’t any good.
