Early in Big Trouble in Little China, Jack Burton – truck driver, sometime philosopher, man who talks loudly in situations he doesn’t understand, surveys the chaos of Chinatown and offers a confident assessment of his position.
He has absolutely no idea what’s going on. But he is very, very sure about it.
I see a lot of Jack Burton in the games industry’s relationship with AI right now. The official tone is confident. The grip on the situation is not.1
I see articles repeatedly reach for the “AI Wild West” metaphor, and whilst I can see the goldrush point, I’m not sure it’s the metaphor for most people inside the tech industry.
Wild wests are about chaos and individual heroics. About riding in fast, staking a claim, getting out richer or dying in the process. They suggest the right move is boldness, that the main risk is being too slow to grab your piece. As I say, it’s not lost on me; the startups, the hype, the anti-hype cycle.
But as a professional developer, it’s not what I’ve seen, if I’m honest with myself. It’s less wild west, more Ellis Island. Less riding in, more arriving at. Less land grab, more: where exactly am I, and what do the local customs mean?
What AI is doing to the games industry isn’t a frontier opening up. It’s an emigration. And that changes how you might want to think about it.
The Familiar Confidence of People Who Don’t Know Yet
I have more experience than I would like of meetings where senior people in games have talked confidently about their AI strategy. Efficiency gains. Pipeline improvements. Tooling. Competitive advantage.
Some of it is real. Some of it is theatre. And quite a lot of it is people performing certainty about things that are genuinely, structurally uncertain. Because that’s what rooms like that reward.
The honest conversations happen elsewhere. Because the honest conversations involve talking about not knowing, and figuring out, and being wrong, and trust. They don’t tend to air the same way.
William Gibson has a line that gets quoted often enough to have become wallpaper, but it earns its place here: the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Some studios have found their footing with AI tooling. I assume. I’ve not met any employee who has confidently declared they’re absolutely smashing it. Most are still looking for the ground. The gap between those two groups will grow but you wouldn’t always know it from the meeting. I’d argue something similar happened with the shift to platform-first development. That one crept up on us in plain sight too.
The truth is: most people in games don’t know what this means yet. Not the artists watching generative tools improve every quarter. Not the producers trying to build plans around pipelines that may look completely different in eighteen months. Not the studios confidently announcing AI strategies that nobody quite knows how to execute.
That’s not a criticism. It’s just honest. Uncertainty at this scale is genuinely hard to sit with, especially in an industry that runs on conviction, on pitching, on making the case that your project is worth the risk.
But naming it matters. Because the response to a wild west is very different from the response to an emigration.
The Map You Carried Doesn’t Work Here
Cards on the table, I’ve never actually emigrated. I’ve had the privilege of talking to a lot of people who have, though, which is likely why the metaphor occurred to me. When you emigrate, really emigrate, not a holiday, but move your life, the skills and credentials you accumulated somewhere else don’t automatically transfer.
I know a parent from my kids’ school; a Romanian accountant who by all accounts was very good at her job. Sharp, thorough, the kind of person whose instincts for detail were built over years of real work. She moved here and found that her qualifications didn’t transfer in the way she’d hoped. Not because the skills weren’t there. They clearly are. But because the system she arrived in wasn’t set up to recognise them easily – the credentials were in the wrong format, the local context was missing, the right boxes weren’t ticked. She didn’t arrive with lesser ability. She arrived without the right paperwork. She’s working, but in a role that doesn’t come close to using what she actually knows. The expertise is intact. The environment just can’t see it yet.
That’s what I see happening in AAA right now, especially for the people whose craft is most visibly adjacent to what AI can now do. Artists. Writers. Certain categories of programmer. Their instincts are still good. Their judgment is still valuable. But the specific application of it – the pipeline, the tools, the workflow – is shifting in ways that feel disorienting precisely because they used to feel solid.
The temptation, understandable, human, is to cling harder to what you know. To assert the value of the old way louder. Or alternatively, to panic-learn every new tool in the hope that currency will save you.
Both responses make sense. Neither is quite right. I wrote recently about stepping off the map, about what happens when you leave familiar structure behind and rediscover what you’re actually capable of. This is related, but it’s not quite the same thing. That was a choice. What’s happening in AAA right now is something the industry is having done to it.
What Actually Travels
What survives emigration isn’t usually what you might expect, apparently.
It’s not always the professional credential. It’s not always the specific skill. What travels is something harder to name: how you think about problems. How you build trust. How you navigate ambiguity. The taste you’ve developed. The judgment you’ve earned. The cultural knowledge of how creative teams actually work – their rhythms, their politics, their unofficial hierarchies.
In games, that looks like: the producer who knows that a technically sound plan still smells wrong. The director who can articulate what’s wrong with something before they can explain what would be right. The senior engineer who understands not just the code but the human systems around it.
None of that evaporates. It does, however, need to find new expression.
The emigrant analogy is useful here because emigrants, the ones who actually build a life somewhere new, don’t succeed by pretending they’re still home. And they don’t succeed by erasing where they came from either. They succeed by integrating: bringing what they know, learning what they need, and finding the places where their particular way of seeing adds something the new place didn’t already have.
The Language Problem
Every emigrant faces a language problem. And I don’t mean this literally – I mean the vocabulary of competence.
In your native context, you know how to sound authoritative. You know the shorthand. You know which questions are smart and which are basic. You know, instinctively, how to signal that you know what you’re talking about.
In a new context, you lose that. And losing it is uncomfortable in ways that go beyond mere inconvenience- it touches something about how we understand ourselves professionally.
I think this is part of what generates the surface confidence I keep encountering. When you don’t yet speak a language, you have two options: admit it, which is uncomfortable, or speak anyway and hope the gaps don’t show. Many rooms reward the latter. The games industry prizes conviction and creative authority and so risks being particularly susceptible to this.
The braver thing, and in the long run the more useful thing, is to say: I don’t know yet. I’m learning this. I’ve arrived somewhere new and I’m finding my feet.
That takes a different kind of confidence. Not the confidence of expertise, but the confidence of someone who knows their own value even when its application is temporarily unclear.
On Who You Are vs What You Did
There’s a distinction worth making explicit, because I think it’s where a lot of the anxiety in games right now lives.
What you did – the specific pipeline you mastered, the tools you specialised in, the workflows you built your career around. Some of that is going to change. Not all of it, and not all at once, but some of it. Pretending otherwise isn’t useful.
Who you are – how you solve problems, how you build relationships, what your taste tells you, how you navigate complex creative and organisational systems. That doesn’t change. That travels.
The mistake is treating those two things as the same. Hearing “your pipeline might change” as “your value is gone.” Or hearing “AI can generate that asset” as “your artistic judgment is obsolete.”
The asset is not the judgment. The code is not the thinking. The output is not the person.
This is, I think, the most important reframe available right now. It is also the one that gets least airtime in the confident talk about strategy and competitive advantage. It connects to something I explored in an earlier piece on readiness and displacement – that being in transition doesn’t mean being deficient. The same logic applies here, at industry scale.
What Emigrants Do
So what does the emigration actually ask of us?
First, I think it asks for honesty about the discomfort. The industry is not fine. Many people in it are anxious and uncertain, and performing a confidence they don’t feel. Naming that isn’t weakness, it’s the beginning of a more useful conversation.
Second, it asks for curiosity over defensiveness. The emigrants who build good lives are the ones who approach their new context with genuine interest: What do the locals know that I don’t? What can I learn from how they do things? Where does my way of doing things offer something they don’t already have?
Third, it asks for patience with yourself. You cannot learn a new culture in a week. You cannot develop fluency overnight. Some of the discomfort is simply time and the answer to it is continuing to show up, continuing to learn, and resisting the urge to perform being further along than you are.
And finally (perhaps most importantly) it asks you to hold onto who you are while you find out where that fits. Because the emigrants who lose themselves trying to fit in risk giving up something that made them really valuable before they got the chance to recognise it.
Closing Thought
The wild west framing is exciting. It implies opportunity, speed, individual heroics. And it’s not completely wrong… there are land grabs happening. Some people are moving fast and claiming territory.
But I don’t think that’s the most useful frame for most people in most studios.
The more useful question isn’t: How do I stake my claim before someone else does?
It’s: I’ve arrived somewhere new. I don’t have all the answers yet. What do I bring with me that matters? And what do I need to learn?
That’s not a wild west question. It’s an emigrant’s question.
And right now, I think it’s the right one.
Footnotes
- It’s worth noting that Jack Burton is, by John Carpenter’s own admission, not actually the protagonist. Wang Chi drives the plot, saves the day, and gets the girl. Jack’s main contribution is showing up, staying loud, and occasionally shooting at the ceiling. He succeeds, but as the sidekick, not the hero. There’s probably a message there. ↩
