ETC Insights: Why Human Creativity Remains Central to Game Design

In this ETC Insights Q&A, Chris Klug explores which creative skills endure across technological disruptions and why human judgment can't be automated.

The games industry is facing a wave of AI-driven tools promising to automate everything from concept art to dialogue writing, while simultaneously experiencing massive layoffs and studio closures. For early-career developers, the anxiety is real: which creative skills will still matter in five years? Which can't be automated away?

Chris Klug, a teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, has spent four decades answering a version of this question across multiple technological disruptions. From Broadway stages in the 1970s, to designing the award-winning “James Bond 007” tabletop role-playing game (RPG), to serving as Creative Director on EA's first massively multiplayer online game, “Earth & Beyond,” Chris has navigated every major shift in how stories get told through interactive media. His conclusion is that understanding your audience, making taste decisions minute-by-minute, and merging what you know with what you imagine remain irreplaceable, even as the tools evolve.

You've worked in theater, tabletop games, video games, and MMOs. What creative skills have stayed essential even as technology has changed?

I'll start with the biggest influence on my creative process: coming of age working in theater. There, we're trained to transform written scripts into temporary reality on a stage. We take the playwright's script as a starting prompt and bring our creative imagination to embody characters and realize locations. Those characters and locations are brought to life from what we know and have experienced, modified by our own aesthetic choices.

Every production of “Hamlet” is different from any other production of “Hamlet” ever produced, and yet it's recognizable as "Hamlet" from the very first exchange of lines in the play:

"Who's there?"
"Nay, stand and unfold yourself."
"Long live the King!"
"Barnardo?"
"He."

And so forth...

In real terms, we're all collaborating with Shakespeare on every performance of “Hamlet.” The tone and emotion with which those lines are delivered, the costumes the guards wear, the look and feel of those cold castle parapets — all unique to that new production. Every element imagined by any creative member of that production team is collaborative with William S., corralled within an overall aesthetic approach and audience expectations of that play, augmented by each creative member's own imagination. Put together, these elements combine to create an imaginary world that makes sense to the audience on that night in the theater. That last sentence — making sense to the audience — is the most important skill I learned.

How does storytelling and theater training translate to game development?

As a creative artist in either games or theater, you're always building on top of what you know about your prompt and layering onto that what you imagine. In theater, the prompt is most often the script. In games, the prompt can be many things: a sequel to an original game, new hardware recently delivered to the marketplace, an audience segment your company wants to reach, a new game mechanic the creative director has imagined, and so forth.

The essential skill in these art forms is to merge what you already know with what you imagine, creating something wholly original yet seemingly inevitable from the original prompt. Every team member must understand this skill.

Games are often seen as technology-driven products. Where does human judgment (taste, timing, decision-making) most strongly shape whether a game succeeds or fails?

Those elements are present in every minute of gameplay. My most influential mentor, Brett Sperry, said to me: "Never forget you are designing the game minute by minute. You are responsible for every single encounter the character has in the world." That's where human judgment lives — in those thousands of micro-decisions that add up to whether a player feels immersed or frustrated, engaged or bored.

How will AI change game development careers and the future of interactive media?

AI is a tool to help a creative individual assemble an entertainment product. It cannot create the final entertainment product by itself. Art comes from the creator's soul. Every game developer needs to know how to use AI as a tool, but the core skills of understanding your audience, making aesthetic choices, and designing experiences minute-by-minute? Those aren't going anywhere.