Xbox just announced Copilot for Gaming, an AI-based assistant that can help you do many things related to play: recommend games, give hints, advise strategy and couch in multiplayer sessions. At first sight, this is an interesting technology. Copilot for Gaming can assist you in a game by helping you get unstuck, overcome obstacles, make decisions, and, in general, become more successful. The drive to push AI into gaming is understandable: AI is the hottest thing right now. However, such a push reveals something concerning. People behind it seem to not understand gaming. To showcase this, let's review Xbox podcast hosts' claims and address them.

In the podcast, the hosts claim, "Gaming is the only entertainment where you can be stuck." That's untrue. Try reading Kafka. Of course, if "reading" for you means only perceiving letters and words on paper or screen, then it is not a problem. However, reading is also understanding the text, interpreting its meaning, applying this meaning to yourself and empathising with characters. Yes, you can get stuck at those. It is the same with gaming: it is more than just a linear progression from level to level, from stage to stage. Being stuck is not only about lacking the mechanical skills to beat a boss in Elden Ring. It is also about being too afraid to go through the Medical Bay in Alien: Isolation or being too uncomfortable to continue playing This War of Mine.

They say Сopilot can help you "improve your skills". Indeed, AI assistants can make you better at whatever you are doing, though there is no guarantee that this will happen. This is known as an "irony of automation": when you delegate something to a machine, you stop practising it, and without practice, you can not become better. However, getting better at playing is part of a good game. Discovering new possibilities and figuring out mechanics and limitations is fun. At least for myself, it is more fun than being told what to do by AI.

Copilot can recommend what to play and how to play it. Instead of looking through forums, Discord channels, or asking a friend, you can launch Copilot, and it will help. In other words, Copilot can replace the social aspect of gaming - playing with your parents, children, and friends, asking others for recommendations. Interestingly, during the podcast, the hosts were saying a lot about how they love this kind of experience, and now, they want to replace this experience with AI. They claim that Copilot can better connect you with online communities and friends, but immediately after, they show how it allows you to do without others. Why? I guess because it is a new hot technology, and they want to push it. But behind this push is not greed, as many would probably think, but flawed thinking, which is much worse.

Of course, using Copilot in your gaming experience is voluntary. Many will say: just don't use it. I disagree. The problem is not the existence of such a tool but the underlying philosophy. It is how decision-makers approach game design and development and how they think about entertainment.

From the design perspective, employing AI to help you solve in-game problems points to a user-centred approach: focus on usability, meaning users should be able to reach their goals efficiently. This is a proven software design approach, but not game development, for one simple reason: the player's goal is usually not to finish the game but to experience it. You can employ user-centred design to some parts of a game, for example, menus and control schemes, but not to the gameplay. By using Copilot, you turn interaction with a game into a usability problem. Imagine a base-building crafting-survival game in which building complex structures happens with the push of a button. Fun? In fact, you don't need to imagine. If you want to see games which use a user-centred approach, look at mobile gaming: press a button to finish a quest, press again to get a reward, press another to beat the boss, and so on. In that sense, Copilot for Gaming is a new time-saver, convenience tool, and exp-boost that bypasses players' strive for mastery and exploration. And the fact that higher-ups in a big corporation think this is a good idea is concerning.