[Riff] Stop The Slop in 2026 - With Tabletop.
AI slop is everywhere.
So much of our digital lives have been infested with the stuff, it’s hard not to feel like oversaturation was a checkpoint we saved on the societal game file years ago.
Now? It’s absurd, surreal even.
And it’s easy to have concerns about this enveloping and overwhelming us more, day by day.
An endless proliferation of spurious sentencing, insincere imagery and cyborg-style commentary. And algorithmic alliteration! (Yes Brady, we get it, you’re very cool and clever. Back to the point, please).
As I write this Riff (our moniker for non-review content on the blog), there’s evidence of it everywhere.
Open Instagram, and the vast majority of content thrown in my face are numerous rapid-fire short-form reels - many of them ‘Sponsored’ posts that are just Sora/GPT in not very clever disguise.
Facebook isn’t much better, either, and Zuckerberg’s dying-grasp bid to wrench some market share back from TikTok has seen both platforms turn into a micro-film gallery of AI-hell.
Seeking a bit of relief from both the increasing irreverence, rhetoric and irrelevant noise-to-signal ratio, I open up the Steam Store page to see what’s new. Hit the Discovery Queue and suddenly, you’re assailed with an endless ream of Unity asset-flip titles and reviews decrying the use of voiceover/text AI in a given title.
And whilst chucking something up on the silver-screen for mindless entertainment doesn’t necessarily guarantee I’ll run into AI-generated slop, the general molasses-like soupiness with which so many modern TV shows, movies and the like are written often honestly feels like it was cranked out the back-end of some LLM/AI video editing tools.
Where to turn, then?
I guess I’ve got my music, and I’m more than thankful for platforms such as Bandcamp taking a much harder stance against the spread of AI-generated artists. Allegedly this is still a problem on Spotify, but I haven’t used that app in a while.
Especially with the restlessness of my ADHD and what feels like neurodegeneration in owning a smartphone for a huge portion of my adult life, there’s not much chance I’ll be as adept in just laying on bed listening to new tunes as I was say, in my teens.
Speaking of music - there’s always my trusty guitar and bass(es). And whilst I’ve been far too burnt on, well, everything for a good while to play much, I’m glad to report there’s been a gradual return back to daily practice.
You can only practice so many hours a day, though, until you start risking yourself injuries such as repetitive strain injury, carpal tunnel and in some cases, focal dystonia.
Enter tabletop. Whilst not a hobby that’s going to replace the same per-weekly hours spent in other hobbies, creative pursuits and generally entertaining myself, I’m glad it’s one I picked up after decades of avoidance.
In fact, I’ll go one step further and elucidate a number of reasons why I think tabletop (RPG’s, board games, wargaming, mini’s-painting, etc) is not only a vital alternative for myself in avoiding slop-intake - the industry itself is an important bulwark against the overall encroachment of OpenAI et al further and deeper into our daily lives.
We Don’t Appreciate Yer Kind ‘round Here, LLMs:
If there’s any community of publishers and hobbyists out there who are notoriously known for details-orientation and ability to fine-tooth comb a product - it’s tabletop enthusiasts. I’m sure anyone who’s ever played or ran more than a few tabletop RPG’s or pick-up skirmish games has experienced Those Guys - rules-lawyers.
Whilst having the potential to cause major disruption to the flow and dynamics of a good session, most groups will generally find themselves with at least one other player aside from the GM/DM who has a fervent grasp on the mechanics.
This extends outwards beyond the table and into the community writ-large. The most basic perusal of game-mastery/TTRPG focused subreddits like /r/rpg and /r/rpgdesign, for instance, demonstrate how salient mechanics and their fun, form and function are in terms of importance. Game-masters aren’t as concerned with a product having flashy art as they are concerned about whether a system’s internal combat/social mechanics are promoting/interrupting good gameplay flow, party cohesion and the like.
Heck, I literally just opened up the former subreddit for a quick squiz, and this essentially proves the above point - the very first post is titled ‘Being a good GM is mostly a soft-skills problem’. One of many discussions in the space about interpersonal skills and how these impact the staying-power of a group irrespective of which system everyone decides on playing.
Heading to the reviews/forum sections of DriveThruRPG, WarGamesVault and the like, you’re far less likely to catch people querying if the products’ creator is an LLM than you would, say, on the endless stream of ‘faceless Youtubers’ dominating that video-sharing platform.
Typically criticism is constructive, with consumers either pointing out mismatches, omissions and errors, or clarifying their own misunderstandings.
Now try to get one over on that community by requesting ChatGPT spew out a micro-RPG, with some DALL-E artwork. I guarantee that, in the absence of double-checking and human editorship for review, it’s extremely likely the hallucinated end-result won’t stand up to the average hobbyists’ scrutiny.
In a day and age of AI’s omnipresence in media, we’re buffeted by a relentless tide of the stuff. The advantage of this being that (at least at our current technological juncture with machine-learning) low-effort generated material is often readily and easily spotted, called out and denigrated.
Tabletop designers and players as a community are also very grassroots, community-focused and defensive of their creative allies.
Search long enough on the above platforms and spot something with cover art that looks ripped straight out of an image-generated hallucination? You can best believe it’s only a matter of time until someone’s pointed this out with fierce directness, even shared around to maximise the calling-out factor.
Whilst I’m sure you’ve all seen examples of TTRPG material that felt like a rapid-fire, low-effort creation, it’s infinitely less likely to be faced with anywhere near as much of a wall of slop in any open TTRPG/tabletop marketplace.
Art is treated as sacrosanct within this medium, which is often heavily bolstered and improved upon by the work of visual artists, writers and the like - to promote products used effectively by mashing together a pastiche of stolen work through data isn’t just unethical in this space, it’s heresy.
2. It’s Real By Design - And So Are The Benefits:
Whilst the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns shifted a lot of tabletop gaming into the online space, the overarching sentiment hasn’t changed - this is an organic hobby, whereby the process is sharing and collaborating on something emergent in real-time between others (or yourself, as is the case with increasing numbers of solo RPG’s).
Logically, unless you’ve got a chatbot logged in as a player on Discord (or a GM using GPT mid-session) you by default have entered into a space that is free from LLM interference. You’re interacting with humans across a table or on a screen, in real-time, having real conversations. Even if those conversations are about very imaginary things.
I’ve been meaning to do a longer podcast episode on more of the various benefits of the hobby, and that’s certainly in the works for some future where time and energy allow.
Until then, why not take a quick peep at what the research shows around engaging in this tangible, socially-focused form of entertainment?:
A study by Corbella-Gonzalez et al in 2025 focused on the additive benefits of bringing youth together in community-based settings for social gaming. Whilst the present study was focused on outcomes related to video gaming, the authors noted that hobbies such as tabletop gaming are ripe for positive outcomes from the get-go, in often requiring physical presence together and/or private online social environments.
Over here in Australia, a study conducted through James Cook University found the self-obvious to us players from an eight-week trial utilising DnD for improved social contact - the hobby acted as its’ own mediating form of self-regulation, improved social cohesion/skills, self-esteem/self-concept, building informal networks and a sense of relatedness/identity. Key in our increasingly atomised and individuated times, where loneliness has been declared a global health epidemic.
The Atlantic recently did a deep-dive into the prosocial aspects of board-gaming as a hobby. Again, I’m being Captain Obvious over here by way of their results, but findings showed the very activity required to participate (shared risk, uncertainty, negotiative elements of play such as bluffing, winning/losing, co-operation, agreement on rulings) is in and of itself an act of strengthening both social skills, prosocial behaviour and potentially also an avenue of social support not available otherwise.
(I can provide my own analogue - no pun intended - here. I live in a regional area of South-West Victoria where demographics lean much, much more heavily to an elderly population, and working families. Bereft of pretty much every option that feels relevant otherwise (bridge club certainly doesn’t), the regular board gaming group I attend at our FLGS in Geelong has been one of a few social lifelines that have kept me going, in a region infamously difficult with regards to forming new community connections/ties. Hi board-games group! Y’all rock!).
Improved cognition - something we could all use a bit more of in our current assailment from behind the humanised barricades holding back the slop-tide. Moya-Higueras et al conducted a randomised-controlled trial in 2023, to assess if modern board and card games had an impact on executive function (a key deficit for folks like myself). Surprise, surprise: results found global improvements both in-vivo (in media res, if you gamers would prefer) and post-hoc functioning with regards to attentional control/retention, judgment, planning and general cognitive performance.
Taking it a step further up the processing ladder, SmoothieWars examined the studies as we are now. Findings from several larger studies indicated not only the above general improvements, but also a particular uptick in higher-order strategic/planning processes, which often activated or inhibited subroutines related to inhibition, monitoring, flexible responses (both with respect to the game and the social dynamic), etc.
Honestly, I could be here forever listing the myriad studies that point out what any good tabletop hobbyist has discovered and innately knows in more plain language - tabletop gaming is (in varying forms) like a workout for the brain, a fun social activity and one in which virtues like patience, mutual understanding, cooperation, turn-taking and more are sharpened for the outside world.
We largely arrive at these benefits due to hours upon hours of painstaking construction, revision, playtesting, retesting, more revision, etc etc with regards to tabletop design. It’s not only the scrutiny publishers are aware of in selling a gaming product; the intent is also design something that either broadens and builds on existing titles/engines or brings a completely novel theme, mechanic or other aspect (literally) to the table.
Large Language Models like ChatGPT aren’t able to engage in pretty much any of the above processes. Instead, statistical-likelihood as to whether the words spat out in any chain of sentencing is about as far as one gets in terms of logical rationale in constructing, say, a tabletop ruleset. Moreover, LLM’s are through this very process prone to hallucinations, or irrelevant data added through this probability-crunching.
From start to finish, the creation and release of any tabletop product is intertwined with peer review, creative problem-solving and generation of new ideas at the forefront. As a necessity.
Need I add the even more obvious fact that it’s a finished product often either plonked down on a table or loaded up on say, Tabletop Simulator or apps like Discord? Unlike even video-gaming, where people often participate in co-op/PvP titles that are being fiddled with and modified at the point of play, tabletop isn’t anywhere near as lenient or even amenable to unfinished products - outside playtesting, of course.
3. To Tabletop, You Need Flexibility:
Pulling back from all the heavyhanded jargon-speak for a minute, I’m going to tell you more of what you already know, but moreso in my own words.
Of any hobby I participate in, I’d actually say tabletop is without a doubt the most challenging. When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I was assessed by a neuropsychologist and underwent a bunch of intelligence/neuropsychological testing (we were really trying to rule out some thankfully not-diagnosed coulda-been-misdiagnoses at the time). I’ve always sucked hard at mathematics, like REAL hard, and to see people playing something that seemed numbers-centric was a reason I avoided the hobby at the time.
Now having dove into tabletop and board gaming more seriously (as seriously as one can define what’s still a leisure pursuit) since around about 2016, I’m regularly forced to confront a lot of sensitive cognitive and psychological demons every single time I play.
The fact is, heavy-crunch tabletop systems and things like super-heady Euro board games don’t typically get along well with my way of thinking. I’m much more associative, pattern-recognition, big-picture, right-brained artsy auDHD - I didn’t cop much of the stereotypical Big Bang maths-and-science-whiz.
But, like with most other avenues in life, I’ve both deliberately chosen and found myself in many situations where I’ve just had to simply like or leave it. Take for instance Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. I never had any interest in it, and it wasn’t my first system played. Probably about the 4th or 5th, actually.
I’d spent a lot of time baulking at what to me was a pretty heavy ruleset and far too much number-crunching, so I largely stayed away. Didn’t help that the first couple of attempts from mates’ well-meaning relatives were back in the early aughts, with editions that make 5th look freaking laughable comparatively in terms of complexity.
Enter - Deano! Aka Dean Underhill, and his/our group. That’s right, the same Dean who writes for ISC now. Entering into a very early session of his campaign in late-2018/early-2019, my only other 5e experience prior had been a session of Adventurer’s League that went badly. Like, really really badly. Bypassing all that - it was Dean’s power of narrative craft that belted a trebuchet right through my walls of cynicism around fantasy roleplaying and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. Helped that the narrative was also metal-as-fuck from the get-go too.
Over time, playing in a supportive group (with players who were either more experienced in the system/TTRPG’s in general) helped accommodate me in the space and lean into my creative strengths. Being in a group dynamic where everyone was sharing the load with regards to helping Dean/players look up rulings, remind me about XYZ mechanics (ad nauseum and to this day, lol) really helped. Some flexibility was ultimately required, though - no one deserves to be perpetually babysitting a player through every roll in every session. There’s some degree of unspoken expectation that players ‘do their bit’ and help lighten the DM-load, going off and doing their own reading, research, querying the community etc. And so I did!
Looking towards my own campaign, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wracked with constant, constant impostor syndrome about being a game-master. I can read, re-read and re-re-read any core-book, watch as many how-to-play videos on Youtube (a modern blessing) and the like as many times as humanly possible, to the point of being ridiculous, and working memory will still inevitably and regularly crap out on me in the moment. A combat mechanic etched into the hippocampus, a brief mental image of a social mechanic, all and sundry locked away from normal recall by virtue of my busted frontal-lobe.
I’ve been blessed to have experienced and patient players in my group, and for their flexibility in letting me stumble arse-over-tit pretty much every session, I thereby feel motivated to give back as a GM. You can ask them (Elodie and Dean have both played in my sessions, the former even for quite some time across a campaign!) if you’d like, but I feel pretty comfortable in my capacity for creating fun, fleshed out worldbuilding/setting, and adding creative embellishments to make what we’re all essentially sitting down for at the end of the day - fun. I mean, they haven’t packed up and left just yet…
But in knowing my own strengths and weaknesses, both in tabletop RPG’s, board-gaming and wargaming, I can accommodate myself. Particularly in my choice of games to run as a GM. Hence why if you look back on our previous canon of Tabletop content, it leans pretty heavily towards titles such as those in the Year Zero Engine (Mutant Year Zero, Alien, Forbidden Lands etc) and just more accessible, light-to-medium-crunch systems. If I know I don’t have a calculator-like capacity for maths nor a reliable working memory, I’m setting myself up for failure in considering something like, say, Phoenix Command. Although I’d argue pretty much anyone who isn’t a physicist or a machine might be doing similar where that one’s concerned - according to the Internet, it’s a pretty friggin’ egregious ruleset at the best of times.
Conclusion:
So how then does this experience relate to AI, and indeed AI-generated content?
Well, easy. Whilst there are some tools that use AI or other forms of procedural generation, some of which I use a lot in my craft as a GM (Dungeon Alchemist reportedly uses AI for generating rooms, just not AI content-theft), I can’t say I’ve ever relied on ChatGPT, Perplexity or any of the others for anything related to the hobby. Maybe aside from throwing ideas-shit at the wall to see what sticks in terms of dot-point ideas I didn’t think of, but that’s about it.
That’s a trend you’ll find common amongst the tabletop crowd, and not just due a general anti-AI stance. For time immemorial, the hobby has had all manner of generators, random tables, internal mechanics and a whole slew of resources with which to add RNG-spice into any encounter or situation, irrespective of genre. More importantly, however, are adages such as those espoused by The Alexandrian - ‘prep situations, not plots’. Whilst there is such thing as derailing a session (or indeed, an entire campaign), it’s often exactly situational changes borne from dice-rolls, player actions, DM improv and the like that develop the ongoing narrative - irrespective of intentions, plot, or other factors. Where this differs from, say, something random belched forth from an LLM, is that it typically arises from our engagement in the system - not crunching statistical likelihood and scraping Internet data,
Likewise, no AI (not even this false-advertising ‘agentic’ nonce doing the rounds during OpenAI’s increasingly death-saving-throw-ass gasps) is going to have the same flexibility as any one person, let alone a group. AI won’t, for instance, wave off my stammering about not finding a very specific and niche combat rule and just insist we go with ‘rule of cool’ on this round since I’m busy. AI won’t provide me a laughing, smiling face, a frown of consternation/concentration, the myriad of emotional markers inflected by voice, facial expression, body language. It can sure try to generate me some pathways to ‘play’, but it’s doing so out of sheer probabilistic inference, not from both the logical prowess nor creative freedom of the human spirit.
I don’t see a community as doggedly punk-rock both about tabletop and larger societal issues as this one just kind of laying down and taking it with the relentless AI steamroller (just have a look at the many causes and charities promoted by indie-publisher bundles in itch.io, for example - one or more of which I’m planning on doing a deep dive on soon for some reviews!).
If anything, tabletop gamers, publishers and the broader community represent a staunch bastion of human input, human collaboration and human relatedness/fun.
Until we’re all stuck in those battery-bank pods from The Matrix whilst GPT 9001 depicts a life more realistic than ever thought possible? I don’t see slop taking any kind of reasonable hold in my nerd-space. Not on my watch, and not in my games.
