《矮人要塞》创作者 Tarn Adams 称游戏行业因 AI 与裁员陷入混乱

《矮人要塞》的创作者Tarn Adams在Gamescom 2026期间接受采访时表示，游戏行业正因AI的兴起和裁员而陷入混乱。他认为，尽管游戏行业在纸面上仍然盈利，但近年来却出现了大量裁员和工作室关闭的情况。Adams认为，游戏行业对AI的过度依赖和错误理解导致了这种混乱，许多高管对AI的过度追求甚至导致了对员工工作的不尊重。他比喻这种情况就像一首老歌，指出这种问题并非首次出现，而是自现代资本主义以来一直存在。Adams还表示，这种混乱不仅影响了游戏行业，也影响了其他行业，甚至可能对高管自身产生负面影响。

The game industry is—to use the lightest possible language—in an interesting spot. While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper, we've had a few consecutive years of brutal layoffs and studio closures, as well as all of the knock-on impacts that the advent of generative AI (and the subsequent and boneheaded insistence that it's the future) has had. Billions in spending, skyrocketing hardware prices, the whole kit and caboodle.

Which, once more, has exhausted Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams, who spoke to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens during Gamescom 2026: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don't see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it's on repeat] unless people do something else."

Adams says it's not just games that've been suffering, either: "I mean, everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis, right? They're just like, 'Yeah, but did you use AI on your commits?' And they're like, 'Oh well, I'm not happy with this guy,' you know. 'We'll probably have machines do the job'.

"It just reminds me of like a fucking Dead Kennedys song or something. It's just the same old shit. I mean, they laid off my dad from the sewage treatment plant because they didn't understand what his job was, and he was the computer guy there, and then they don't have a company anymore, so it's like it's the same shit."

He's not exactly wrong—it's not as if the current industry problems are unprecedented, or came out of nowhere. Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.

It's become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it's replicable at scale, or that it's even producing the same quality as the product they've actually been selling.

After all, if actual studies are being done into AI-induced psychosis that's impacting us serfs, there's nothing to say the executive suite is immune, either. Especially given that a lot of them don't even understand why others are put off.

"It's been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI," Adams says, before lamenting: "They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes."