Wizards of the Coast is well known for its real-world games, which include the classic tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering, but the company is also actively evolving a digital strategy. The goal is to embrace new audiences and new ways of working, while staying true to a long-loyal audience who values human creativity at the heart of innovation.
Generative AI is revolutionizing the games industry by enabling developers to craft personalized experiences, automate repetitive tasks and improve accessibility. To expand the ways both new and existing players can engage with their favorite games, Wizards is collaborating with Google Cloud partner Datatonic to implement generative AI proof-of-concept projects that will enable developers to improve efficiency and create new ways for players to learn to play. (Not to be confused with using GenAI for art or illustration -- Wizards has made it clear to all artists and writers contributing to the franchise to stay very clear of using GenAI tools.)
Wizards has been building applications on Google Cloud since 2020, such as SpellTable, the first app designed and built solely for playing tabletop Magic: The Gathering remotely, and using BigQuery to glean insight into player analytics and more. The partnership with Google Cloud aims to unlock new value from Wizards proprietary data. The company is putting three initial proof-of-concept projects into play: developing a model GenAI learning tool for new Magic players, democratizing data access to improve business intelligence across the organization and increasing productivity for engineering teams.
"GenAI will help empower the creation of new experiences that simply wouldn't be possible otherwise, breathing innovation into our games, both new and old, while keeping human ingenuity at the center," says Scott Neumann, VP, digital gaming head of technology at Wizards of the Coast.
"Scalable infrastructure and an open data ecosystem that can deliver high-quality, clean data to optimize analysis and insights is critical to realize the full potential of generative AI and build truly living games," adds Jack Buser, director for games, strategic industries, at Google Cloud. "With Google's GenAI, Wizards of the Coast is improving player experiences, creating exciting new gameplay possibilities and attracting new audiences."
Three transformative use cases for generative AI
Magic the Gathering for everyone
To help new players, the dev team is in the process of building a GenAI learning resource, trained on Wizards proprietary data. Players will be able to query the tool in real language about all aspects of gameplay, from questions about specific card interactions and card categories, to deck building and strategy.
"The goal is to break down the barrier to entry, which will open the game up to a whole swath of players who could otherwise be intimidated by some of its complexity," Neumann explains. "It's a way for us to learn how to build and eventually deploy AI in player-facing form and also see how players respond to it and interact with it."
To answer player questions quickly and accurately, Wizards connected BigQuery Vector Search to perform retrieval augmented generation. Running semantic search over the gameplay rules documentation retrieves the information relevant to the player's question, and then feeds that to the large language model (LLM) to generate a response.
Democratizing data access for business intelligence
Wizards of the Coast doesn't just intend to bridge data silos; they also want to make insights easier to access by leveraging Google Cloud's expertise in operationalizing AI models and creating secure cloud environments to build a secure GenAI application -- one that allows business leaders across disciplines and functions to derive insights quickly and easily from even the most complex dataset, without the need for technical expertise.
"Not everyone can create a dashboard or write SQL," Neumann says. "We hope everyone, from engineers to analysts, will be able to easily query the dataset for the information they're looking for, just by using natural language."
Boosting development productivity for engineering
With a customized code generation application, Wizards is reducing repetitive programming tasks and accelerating routine reviews of changes to the codebases of projects. This will help engineering teams keep pace with content teams and iterate more quickly during development giving game developers more time to focus on critical aspects of their craft.
"The goal is to help our teams keep up with increasing player expectations and exceed them, meet the required rapid pace of content creation without feeling overwhelmed, and most of all, stay creative," Neumann says.
The technology powering GenAI transformation
To launch and conduct these experiments in GenAI, Wizards of the Coast is working with Google Cloud to build a secure, cost-effective Google Cloud environment suited to operationalized AI models, which also bridges the gap between the Hasbro and Wizards tech ecosystems.
"It's not just a matter of providing AI, like our own Gemini model," said Jack Buser, director for games at Google Cloud. "We know that game companies need security and flexibility in how they deploy AI. That's why we take a holistic ecosystem approach to how we provide AI."
Google Cloud is also working closely with stakeholders and devs to actually implement these GenAI proof-of-concept projects, along with the help of Datatonic, helping companies to unlock new value from their data, and develop impactful AI use cases.
Datatonic has developed a range of GenAI solutions, including in the gaming industry, with a focus on providing next-generation player experiences, says Valentin Cojocaru, head of data science at Datatonic.
"If we can optimize efficiency for development teams and remove a lot of the repetitive manual tasks, teams can focus on innovation," she explains. We're thrilled to make Magic: The Gathering more accessible to new players and ensure it is done safely, with guardrails."
They're still in the process of building out and perfecting the technology, Neumann adds, but this is just the start.
"I am confident that it's only a matter of time before we see these types of generative AI applications in various forms, either directly in our games, or in companion apps and other ancillary experiences," he says. "The experiment is a good step toward making these player-facing in-game features a regular part of our game experiences. That said, our games are built on the innovation, ingenuity and hard work of dedicated and amazingly talented people. While we may experiment with AI applications, it in no way changes our stance on the use of GenAI in art and creative content. We believe that human ingenuity is at the heart of creativity, and we require artists, writers and creatives contributing the Magic TCG and the D&D TTRPG to refrain from using AI generative tools in creating final products."
GenAI and the future of the gaming industry
As the scale and complexity of games continues to grow, so will the need for ways to address it at scale and meet player expectations. GenAI will be the tool that changes the paradigm for the better. For instance, hand-crafting a giant, visually complex 3D world -- building a thousand elevation- and climate-appropriate trees to populate a mountain, for example -- is an extremely time-consuming process. However, GenAI can do the heavy lifting with procedurally accelerated workflows, all directed by a creative, experienced human at the helm, and under the guidance of AI oversight and governance committees.
"GenAI will primarily help empower the creation of these new experiences that simply wouldn't be possible otherwise, opening interesting opportunities to breathe new innovation into games," Neumann says.
