We are living in increasingly uncertain times. Overlapping crises in political, economic, and social realms cultivate a sense that our actions today are decisive to how individual and collective futures will be formed. As established categories of knowing the world break down, anxiety finds fertile ground. Living ‘on the edge of time’, at the precipice of the unknown where crisis events seem to be clustering, creates a sense of vertigo – confusion and disorientation of where pasts and futures lie (Runia, Reference Runia2010; Knight, Reference Knight2021). Navigating this perilous vertiginous ledge is a pronounced challenge for young workers who are contemplating careers in industries deemed to be at the forefront of future-creation, such as game development. They feel intense pressure in the present moment, often drawing on memories of past times of socio-technological change to justify their choices and comprehend their tangled emotions.
We work on the premise that anxiety is a ‘collective condition situated in culture and politics’ and thus fluctuates in intensity according to historical events and periods (Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Topçu and Wertsch2025a, p. 1). The significance of epochal anxiety is evinced by the way that historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and social psychiatrists are all currently attempting to comprehend the forces behind (and consequences of) living with a condition that traverses disciplinary silos and analytical scales. This article is concerned with how it feels to live on the edge of time in an industry known for championing innovation and progress. How does the impact of media rhetoric, memories of past times of upheaval, and expectations for the future play out among game developers and those engaged with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) who are tasked with ‘making the future’? Through anthropology, social theory, and ethnographic methods, we explore how memories of previous eras of technological change affect how people imagine their futures through anxiety, being immersed in both fear and possibility. By scaling from individual narratives to discuss a collective condition, we propose that anxiety be understood as a temporal orientation, something that propels and forecloses futures based on a combination of historical repetition and emergent novelty.
Much attention has been paid to anxiety as emotion or feeling, including its relation to love, desire, pain, hurt, and guilt (Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Hejtmanek and Larchanché2025b). Our preoccupation here is with anxiety as a temporal orientation to the future. Better still, our claim is that anxiety is polytemporal, intensely mixing pasts, presents, and futures in how people orient themselves to a dramatically changing world (Öhman, Reference Öhman2025). We understand the experience of time in terms of surges and lulls in events, like a sea swelling and subsiding. This approach is supported by scholars such as Michel Serres and Bruno Latour (Reference Serres and Latour1995) and Jane Bennett and William E. Connolly (Reference Bennett, Connolly and Herzogenrath2011). There are different repetitions that can be traced across the historical record, eras where eventedness is thick. Repetition, often recognised through memory, has an ‘unstable character’ – although identical repetition is impossible, social life produces recurrence, recalibration, and recapitulation (Bandak and Coleman, Reference Bandak and Coleman2018). Søren Kierkegaard (Reference Kierkegaard1983), p. 131) proposes that repetition is future-oriented, stating, ‘repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward’. Embellishing a connective rather than linear appreciation of time, repetition ‘contains an appeal to the future’ through ‘anticipatory risk, [that] points to a reinvocation of past’ in or for the future through a kaleidoscope of incapacitating fear, anxiety, and aspirational hopes (Bandak and Coleman, Reference Bandak and Coleman2018, p. 124). There is innovation in each repetition; as Reinhart Koselleck (Reference Koselleck2018) tells us, there are novelties in the way that historical events repeat and are remembered.
In the tenor of this special collection, we simultaneously hold repetition (memory) and novelty (future-thinking) together in a way that allows us to discuss anxieties of automation in the gaming industry not as an episode detached from contexts of past events but rather as a complex entanglement of memory, present fears, and futural aspirations. One novel aspect of the current surge in history is the prominence of digital media and the rise of GenAI. Although technological revolution is far from unprecedented, the current assemblage of digital technologies and GenAI is quite novel and has inserted another layer of anxiety into our lives. These technologies have increased the reach of rhetoric propagated by all forms of influencers – human and non-human. Digital media allows more people than ever ‘to speak’, regardless of their foundations in factual knowledge, a privilege that has now been extended to self-learning robotics and AI. This turn represents the democratisation of rhetoric on the one hand and the increase in its ubiquitous power on the other. Creation and dissemination of information on digital media platforms plays an active role in shaping our understanding of the past as well as the future, Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney argue, since such fora mediate readers/viewers/listeners and past experiences, hence ‘setting the agenda for future acts’ (Erll and Rigney, Reference Erll, Rigney, Erll and Rigney2009, p. 3). Access to, and pressure exerted from, digital technologies is a significant aspect of the current historical fold.
The wedding of rhetoric and widely available digital technologies creates a tunnel vision of a world on fire and fans breathless anxiety. Rhetors, influencers, and governmental institutions that harness digital technologies feed collective imaginations that we are living ‘on the edge’, creating a sense of residing at the frontier of time. The culmination of historical repetition, technological innovation, and the intense rhetoric culture of digital media creates a collective feeling of living with vertigo – worlds are spinning; we experience affects of breathlessness, dizziness, nausea, and hyperconsciousness about the disorienting present. The present is giving way rapidly to an unknown future, not necessarily in front of us or as stable as we once thought. Should we embrace the uncertain future by way of invention, innovation, and novelty, or should we scramble to hang on by our fingertips to the familiar and known, regardless of how unstable that version of the world may now be? Anxiety as polytemporal condition sets in.
Knight has argued in Vertiginous Life (Reference Knight2021) that when living on the edge of a qualitatively new period, people are faced with the obligation to create new history. ‘Vertiginous’ describes the feeling of life in existential flux, spiralling, plummeting, being whipped up, suspended, and violently shaken by the crises of the contemporary world. Rather than linear pathways to becoming with stable and predictable causes and effects, the vertiginous signals precarity in the extreme. This state of vertiginous existence places anxiety front and centre of social analysis. In Søren Kierkegaard’s view, the vertiginous cliff edge of history evokes an overwhelming sense of anxiety based not in fear but rather in the possibility of possibility. In his seminal work The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard first distinguishes anxiety from fear:
[Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility. Anxiety may be compared with dizziness (Reference Kierkegaard1980, p. 42)
Kierkegaard exemplifies his understanding of dizziness as anxiety founded in freedom. The fear of uncertain futures is accompanied by a terrifying impulse to throw oneself into the unknown. The moment is thus one of possibilities, for Kierkegaard, where freedom of choice about what lies ahead is what truly provokes existential anxiety. With futures potentially detached from everything we thought we knew, at a point of social change the possibility of possibility manifests as dizziness:
He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when … freedom looks down into its own possibility … Freedom succumbs to dizziness. (Reference Kierkegaard1980, p. 61)
The terrifying assaults of anxiety at this historical moment are fraught with danger but can also awaken the senses to potentiality beyond; the vertiginous can be both destructive and generative if competently navigated. Kierkegaard acknowledges that anxiety can be overpowering, and taking the plunge into innovation is not for everyone. Interestingly, in this era of AI and a rapidly innovating games industry that forms the heart of this paper, most anxiety is felt not by those who are stuck in the ways of the past, who are witnessing the familiar world slip through their fingers, but by those at the cutting-edge of invention. The more creative potential an individual has, the more anxious they will become as they feel drawn towards making new futures, to create ‘new and original forms of living’ (May, Reference May2015, p. 40).
In what follows, we discuss the narratives of two people, Theo and Ivy, who are anxious about their futures in the game development industry. Theo and Ivy represent wider collective anxieties now embedded in the sector where the uncertainty surrounding the use of automated technology, such as GenAI, is manifested through reflections on past eras of dramatic change and future-oriented projections of hopes and aspirations. While Theo’s anxiety is constructed on memories of past upheavals where history seems to be repeating itself, Ivy is anxious to develop GenAI to assist with mundane tasks that currently make her time-poor. Both interlocutors feel the pressure exerted by public rhetoric that places expectations about novel future-creation on technologically literate actors such as game developers. Through ethnographic vignettes, we explore the temporal dynamics of automation anxiety and how GenAI might lead to redundancies and even more precarity in the sector. On the one hand, game developers are shouldering the burden of public expectation to advance technological futures. On the other, developing GenAI-based infrastructures creates more job insecurity, with as yet unknown consequences for employment futures. Game developers employ industry memory, rather than exclusively personal experience, to make sense of the present and anticipate the future. Automation anxiety’s dyadic character is herein attended to, beginning with its negative manifestation, consistent with how anxiety is commonly understood in everyday life. Subsequently, in Kierkegaardian terms, anxiety is not merely a register of fear, but can instead incite experimentation, adaptation, and novel forms of practice.
The link between AI and memory has been well established on the pages of Memory, Mind & Media (eg Hoskins, Reference Hoskins2024). In the case at hand, game developers confront ‘life on the edge’ of socio-technical revolution, connecting individual experiences with memories of historical events, and a wider age of anxiety that captivates the world through a mixture of digital technology, collective memory, and rhetoric culture (Hsu, Reference Hsu2019; Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Topçu and Wertsch2025a). In conclusion, we propose that anxiety is a temporal marker of our times, scaling from individual lifeworlds to systemic processes. Anxiety can be understood as a temporal orientation providing momentum to novel futures entangled with fear and possibility.
Automation anxiety: The case of Theo
Conducting ethnographic research in the British game development sector, I, Eden Doshi, engaged with practitioners who frequently cited anxiety as a key orientation to the future. Through semi-structured interviews, collaborative game jams, and participant observation at United Kingdom (UK) industry gatherings, I focused on developers working in independent (‘indie’) studios, alongside solo developers and freelancers. Practitioners were based across Scotland and England, with studio and event locations in Edinburgh, London, and Brighton. Interviews explored participants’ perceptions of GenAI, its anticipated impact on creative labour, and the ethical and professional considerations shaping their decisions to adopt, adapt, or refuse these technologies. The project paid particular attention to writers, narrative designers, and artists – subdisciplines experiencing heightened insecurity in relation to these tools.
In an industry built on worker precarity, my interlocutors contend with both personal and public expectations to deliver technological futures, due to their perceived expertise as practitioners within a technology-intensive sector. In 2024, two years after GenAI’s surge into public imagination and at a moment when it was beginning to acquire a more defined role in game development, research participants repeatedly returned to a shared feeling of anxiety. Individual responses coalesced into a collective, industry-wide apprehension over forthcoming redundancy, characterised as ‘automation anxiety’.
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In the first ethnographic setting, I, Eden Doshi, am attending the largest conference for game developers in the UK. I enter the meeting area seeking my designated table. The venue hums with energy and conversation. The hotel provides the quintessential conference backdrop: dated carpet, fluorescent lighting, clusters of tables and chairs where individuals gather to discuss publishing, recruitment, and now, anthropological research. Traversing the tangle of furniture and people, I spot my interlocutor, Theo.
Theo is a former screenwriter breaking into game writing. We chat about his experiences freelancing for an indie studio and compare the games industry to film and television. He speaks at length, my queries eliciting paragraphs of response. Theo describes his relationship with GenAI as ‘surface level’, his knowledge primarily derived through media headlines rather than engaging with GenAI directly. He suggests that many other developers are similarly forming opinions about GenAI without having encountered it in practice. Despite this distance, Theo is greatly concerned by the applications of GenAI in games. He repeatedly speaks about job insecurity, listing job loss as the greatest concern for integrating GenAI into creative work. He summarises matters concisely: ‘it [generative AI] is threatening your livelihood’. Theo describes how industry news outlets report on game company CEOs touting the potential of GenAI to streamline development, reducing labour in all subdisciplines. He states, ‘It feels like just a big buzzword at the moment that a lot of CEOs, head of departments, or people in positions of power are really just kind of excited about those short-term gains, and I think they see it kind of like a cheat code.’
Media headlines instil within him ‘absolute hollow dread’, leaving him thinking that ‘oh god, the revolution has begun’. For Theo, GenAI poses a direct threat to the livelihoods of writers, casting a shadow over his own employment prospects in an industry he has only just entered. ‘You start to think the absolute worst of “well that’s it, my career’s in jeopardy,” and it’s not even started at that point. Yeah, just a real negative outcome.’
Curiously, in the same response, his attention shifts, thoughts turning away from projections of failed job searches towards events of the recent past. Seeking an analogue, he compares GenAI to how video games recently had a close encounter with cryptocurrency. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and crypto, he recalls, were heavily promoted within the British games community, particularly among AAA (‘Triple-A’) studios. The bubble burst, and cryptocurrency is now viewed as passé, at least within the UK and United States console and PC games sectors. Drawing on these events, Theo predicts the excitement around GenAI will similarly wane as the latest surge passes. Events feel unprecedented, until they are not, ‘In the next couple of years we’ll see the decline of the buzzword “AI”.’ He qualifies this comparison, noting that GenAI will likely remain relevant in the longer term, describing it as ‘very much going to be in the fabric of society now going forwards’. Though he identifies himself as ‘remaining optimistic’ about this long-range future, in the short term his responses are marked by anticipation and unease, with anxiety about automation running throughout his narrative.
Theo’s responses might be read as disclosures of personal concern; however, the anxiety they express exceeds the individual and operates at the level of the industry. Theo’s statement is thus more productively understood as indicative of a collective, sector-wide automation anxiety. Although this framing is useful for analytical purposes, automation anxiety as a concept is not neutral. As Elisabeth Kelan (Reference Kelan2023) shows, concerns about automation are often articulated through the employment prospects of white men – a group that constitutes the statistical majority of British game developers. Nevertheless, fears of redundancy and displacement are cultivated by the strong rhetoric surrounding GenAI, non-human agency, and ideas of workplace efficiency that is circulated through mass media and online platforms. People like Theo absorb the rhetoric that AI is taking jobs and that the immediate futures of game developers are in jeopardy.
Sector-specific media plays a central role in this anxiety-inducing dissemination of powerful rhetoric. Automation has long been promoted by industry executives in public-facing outlets, echoing Theo’s observations about CEOs championing GenAI (Chia, Reference Chia2022b). The rhetoric produced by executives which is directed towards well-chosen publics is what Laura Bear (Reference Bear2020) terms a ‘technology of imagination’. By placing ideas developed in corporate boardrooms or government policy meetings, rhetoric is strategically deployed in media outlets to try to influence employee or consumer behaviour, thus turning the future into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rhetoric, used as a technology of imagination, links media and memory-making and manifests in Theo’s experiences of automation anxiety (Erll and Rigney, Reference Erll, Rigney, Erll and Rigney2009). Although Theo did not specify the exact sources, media outlets focused on the games industry are saturated with commentary from studio heads and executives on the promises of GenAI. That Theo references executive perspectives rather than those of developers is significant, as alliances between corporate actors and media institutions shape public understandings of technology and can intensify anxiety through processes that flood the imagination (Kang, Reference Kang, Kim and Ku2021). In simple terms, the media that Theo consumes in the present functions as a dataset from which he constructs expectations about the future. Theo encounters persistent warnings about job insecurity and creative displacement, not only for himself but for others working in cultural production. The outputs he engages with often harbour messages placed by corporate executives and economists who want to shape the future towards very specific targets. Alongside fears of unemployment, these narratives provoke anxieties about the loss of creative autonomy, as companies may come to mandate the use of GenAI tools. The threat remains spectral rather than concrete – a dizzying vortex of headlines, commentary, and conference talk that draws individuals into a shared vacuum of concern and disorientation.
Analogical thinking and sedimenting memory
Anxiety about the future in the games sector is perpetuated by utilising the industry’s shared memories, which are mobilised as templates for interpreting technological change (Wertsch, Reference Wertsch2021). The games industry offers an extremely valuable context for examining automation and job (in)security since both have long been embedded in its labour practices. Game development has historically relied on informal, precarious, and often unpaid labour, based on an assemblage of formal and informal networks, shaped by uneven labour relations and blurred boundaries between work and passionate hobby (Keogh Reference Keogh2018). Memory of previous surges in job insecurity, often at times when new technological breakthroughs appear in the sector, helps guide workers through their anxieties with the promise that analogous choppy waters have been navigated in the past. Anxiety within the historical longue durée of the games sector provides what Scott MacLochlainn (Reference MacLochlainn2022) has called a ‘copy generic’, a readily identifiable blueprint which is called into collective conscience when a rupturing event destabilises a sense of normality. Memories of past times of insecurity provide ready-made guides for how anxiety can be overcome or at least give a sense that the future might not be based on orientations of apathy, dejection, and loss of freedom.
Since its inception, the industry has repeatedly confronted concerns about technology-induced unemployment. From the early 2000s, the introduction of commercial game engines and integrated development tools provoked anxieties about redundancy among developers (Chia, Reference Chia2022b). More recently, procedural generation sparked renewed alarm over automation and the displacement of artists and programmers (Chia, Reference Chia2022a). As Aleena Chia observes, developers continually face the ‘everyday automation of game development’ (Reference Chia2022b, p. 196). Automation anxiety, then, is not a completely unprecedented condition within the games industry; rather, it has been reactivated and intensified by the emergence of GenAI. Traces of historical repetition are identifiable in narratives about increased precarity and uncertainty.
Upon closer inspection, this longer history of different repetitions in anxiety is visible in Theo’s narrative. To make sense of the present and envision the future, Theo’s responses enfold industry memory in two key ways. First, he builds on recent waves of layoffs to foretell further instability. Second, he invokes a familiar narrative template – a copy generic – by drawing an analogy between GenAI and the cryptocurrency boom and bust. In doing so, he situates GenAI within an already-known plotline of technological hype, speculative excess, and eventual collapse. Daniel M. Knight has written on the use of analogical thinking and comparative thought when trying to comprehend life-changing or world-shifting events (Knight, Reference Knight2026a, Reference Knight2026b). This methodology is prominent in philosophy (for instance, see the conversations between Michel Serres and Bruno Latour Reference Serres and Latour1995). Theo imagines the near future by extending the trajectory of the contemporary games industry, reckoning that companies will lay off developers and replace them with GenAI – a continuation and intensification of patterns already visible in the recent past. His anxiety is ‘ahead of itself’ (Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Topçu and Wertsch2025a), being linked to futural anticipation and expectation as much as memory (Bryant and Knight, Reference Bryant and Knight2019). His projections are grounded in the then-current condition of the UK games sector, which experienced severe layoffs in 2023 and 2024 (Clement, Reference Clement2024). Developers across both AAA and indie studios faced dismissal, with numerous studios closing and projects being cancelled. Throughout this period, platforms such as Discord and LinkedIn, alongside industry outlets and newsletters, were saturated with negative discourse, as each new layoff announcement roused renewed outrage, uncertainty, and existential dread.
Again, we can see memory as central to experiences of automation anxiety. Platforms like Discord and LinkedIn function as public sites where industry memory is rehearsed and anxiety is collectively shared. Under such unstable (one may say, vertiginous) conditions, the future appears imminent yet indeterminate, and futural direction is hard to find. People feel like their futures are being stripped away, their pathways of becoming radically altered, all of which is beyond the control of individual employees. Memories of past surges in sector-wide anxiety are double-edged since they both incite fear of what the immediate future might bring and courage that such turbulence can be overcome. This propagation extends beyond digital platforms into physical spaces. As discussed by Knight (Reference Knight2012) in the context of crisis Greece, memories of past events have provided fortitude during turbulent times. As well as provoking fear and anxiety, ‘culturally proximate’ memories give a sense of temporal connection and momentum. The conference setting for Theo’s vignette is not incidental. Conferences are sites where ideas move quickly, where concerns are articulated, reinforced, and normalised through formal presentations and informal exchanges alike. At the 2024 conference, GenAI featured prominently in panels and talks, a notable shift from the previous year’s event, signalling the growing salience of the technology and its implications within industry discourse. Furthermore, conferences can be understood as mnemonic sites in which the games industry rehearses its official memory. Talks, roundtables, and networking conversations circulate narrative templates, copy generics, and intergenerational stories framing technological change as cyclical, inevitable, revolutionary: different repetitions of the past filled with Kierkegaardian-esque novel possibilities for possibility. These shared scripts provide developers with interpretive resources for making sense of present uncertainty and anticipating future transformation.
It is within these shared spaces of feeds, forums, newsletters, and conferences that automation anxiety coalesces at the collective level, becoming more than the sum of individual concerns. Together, they produce what Astrid Erll (Reference Erll2022) has called ‘implicit collective memory’. These invisible elements underpinning the games industry are actually full of ‘narrative schemata, stereotypes, patterns of framing, or world models’ – the blueprints for how, what, and why to remember (Erll, Reference Erll2022, p. 1). Theo’s repeated references to prior redundancies allow him to speak about anticipated job loss in the present tense, as though it were already underway: his career was ‘in jeopardy’ and GenAI ‘is threatening’ his livelihood. His language demonstrates how the past is drawn into the present and projected forward, transforming memory into a tool for imagining, and apprehending, the future. Theo’s automation anxiety is, thus, polytemporal, not drawing simple straight lines between one cause and one effect – what Christopher Watkin (Reference Watkin2020) calls ‘umbilical thinking’ – but tangling up past concerns with powerful rhetoric in the present, towards what he understands to be different repetitions of anxiety to be confronted in the immediate future.
Reinhart Koselleck famously argued for the sedimentation of time where pasts, presents, and futures become rearranged during crisis events. For Koselleck (Reference Koselleck2018), layers of time are embedded with resemblances to the past, but on each occasion, they are ordered differently. In this way, Koselleck accounts for both repetition and novelty – traces of the past and the future that may be identifiable, but always an aspect of newness in how they are structured. In Knight’s work on crisis events in Greece, analogies of fossils emerging through geological strata are invoked by interlocutors to describe how memories are layered, remain dormant, or emerge ‘into the light of day’ either through slow erosion or by rapid torrents washing away sediments. The analogy, of course, is intended to show how memories come to the fore depending on current events, what they can be compared to, and what recollections energise (Knight, Reference Knight2017).
Ethnographic encounters must be situated within an understanding of memory in the games industry, not only as contextual background but because it is precisely this history that interlocutors themselves deploy to create fields of meaning. Theo’s turn to cryptocurrency is rapid and unelaborated, offered with the casual assumption that we share a recollection of recent industry events and a common vernacular for making sense of technological hype. Cryptocurrency functions here as an exemplar: a familiar reference point through which Theo can render GenAI intelligible. (On exemplars in the context of historical repetition, see Andreas Bandak (Reference Bandak2022)). By comparing GenAI to crypto’s rise, bubble, and subsequent deflation, he activates a known narrative trajectory to predict that enthusiasm for GenAI will similarly diminish over time and that, if he can weather this storm, his employment future will not be so precarious as it currently seems. At the same time, Theo notes that there is no direct comparison between GenAI and cryptocurrency, but rather a set of analogous resemblances that can only partially enlighten the difficult road ahead. The distinction between direct comparison and similarities in the analogue is important, since it points towards partial truths, allows space for innovation rather than verbatim repetition, and keeps the future indeterminate. An exact comparison with past events and immediate futures would deny novelty and allow a sense of futility, apathy, or fate to set in. Theo is not fatalistic or apathetic towards the future but rather traces analogical similarities to provide himself with the courage to navigate these anxious times.
Theo does not simply enfold GenAI into an earlier technological episode; he positions crypto as a narrative template – instrumental in that the episode is put to good use, but indeterminate since it is not used to predict the future. As Limor Samimian-Darash notes in the context of scenario technology that attempts to circumnavigate future uncertainty, when an event is actualised, the present cannot simply be understood as the realisation of past scenarios. Theo is involved in what might be called ‘future-now thinking’ which cannot, in Samimian-Darash’s words, ‘become a map of the present, written in the past, about past futures’ (Reference Samimian-Darash2023, p. 29). Memories of past uncertainty provide Theo with tools for thinking through emergent presents and unstable futures where innovation and novelty are built into the repetition – the novel arrangements of sedimented time, as Koselleck suggests. Alongside this weaving of past and present, the future is likewise pulled into the ‘now’. The entanglement of temporalities is captured succinctly in Theo’s declaration that ‘the revolution has begun’, a phrase that frames transformation as already underway.
Such projections suggest a form of temporal collapse, where the ‘now’ moment encompasses all the pasts that have gone before and all the futures yet to come. The present is thus under almighty stress from pasts and futures attempting to associate with it, causing anxiety in how we honour the past and do justice to the future. The present as a horizon of intensity, burden, and stress has been depicted in the historical theory of Reinhart Koselleck, philosophical texts of Michel Serres and Henri Bergson, and the anthropological work of scholars such as Rebecca Bryant. We do not intend to get into the theoretical fine-grained detail here, but it really is ‘take your pick’ in terms of which branch of social theory one wishes to pursue – Bergson (Reference Bergson2002), for instance, discusses the present as a pinnacle of vast duration, Bryant (Reference Bryant2016) has the present as an ‘uncanny’ state of intense temporal pressure, Serres, in conversation with Latour (Reference Serres and Latour1995), discusses the strain of ‘bricks’ being dragged from the past to build houses in the present for future residence, and Koselleck (Reference Koselleck2004) poses the present as a zero point where all time intersects. With all that pressure, no wonder there is so much anxiety!
Theo deploys past industry experiences to foresee the future and, in doing so, reconfigures the present as a moment already shaped by what has come before and what is yet to pass. Prior knowledge becomes a means of prediction, akin to Samimian-Darash’s indeterminate scenarios, locating individuals and collectives both backwards and forwards in time. The past and the future are not treated as distant temporal zones; they act upon the present as interpretive resources and anticipatory forces. In points of increasing uncertainty, people in the games industry respond by reaching for a past that offers recognisable patterns and provisional answers, pulling individuals out of an ambiguous present towards a more legible imagined future. Even when these projections are pessimistic, they can be stabilising. A future shaped by known trajectories may feel more manageable than a present defined by radical indeterminacy. This way, industry memory does not merely recall what has happened, it structures how uncertainty is endured, envisaged, and emotionally inhabited in the present.
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Anxiety, as discussed thus far, is in a negative register: an anxiety that expands upon industry memory and collapses past, present, and future into a single anticipatory horizon. Yet Theo’s account does not end in despair. Alongside expressions of fear, he gestures towards a cautious optimism, suggesting that GenAI may ultimately settle into the industry as one tool among others. His responses therefore do not conform neatly to a binary of fear versus hope, but instead reveal their coexistence.
Read through a Kierkegaardian lens of anxiety as a manifestation of the possibility of possibility next to a Serresian version of the surges and lulls in historical eventedness, this coexistence is not a paradox. Anxiety need not be divided into binary oppositions of negative and positive, pessimism and optimism, determinate and indeterminate. Rather, anxiety functions here as a generative temporal condition that pulls pedagogies of the past and imaginations of the future into the same vertigo-inducing whirlpool. From this perspective, anxiety is not only a response to threat but also a force that unsettles established trajectories and opens space for reconfiguration. While Theo’s testimony primarily foregrounds fears about automation anxiety, it simultaneously carries a faint but persistent orientation towards adaptation and embracing technological change. It is towards these underlying registers of optimism that we now turn.
Creative anxiety: The case of Ivy
Ivy is a spirited practitioner who has, at different times, worked in studios, solo, and as a freelancer. Although based in Scotland, Eden Doshi first met her in Brighton at a beachside networking event held after conference hours, later conducting a formal interview. From the outset, Ivy was keen to emphasise the novel potentialities of GenAI with a sense of enthusiasm that can become infectious. We speak at midday over Zoom, despite living less than two hours apart – an arrangement shaped by time scarcity rather than distance. Ivy occupies multiple roles in her current employment in an independent studio. Her responsibilities as producer encompass administrative and managerial tasks such as sending emails, preparing budgets, and promoting projects on social media. Alongside this, she contributes to art and narrative design, but finds that production work consumes a disproportionate amount of her time and energy. Her daily routine consists of tasks that, in a AAA studio, would typically be distributed across several specialised roles. As such, Ivy’s daily rhythm is one of racing around, high-tempo task management and of constantly being in ‘urgent mode’. Her anxieties are less linked to AI (like Theo) and more to do with keeping her indie business afloat.
Ivy describes the pressures of independent development with a mixture of humour and frustration. She jokes that she is constantly busy yet feels as though she is accomplishing nothing. As she puts it, ‘Indies are a bit sad because sometimes you feel like you’re not doing any work. It’s pretty pervasive in the indie industry, especially.’ Recalling conversations at the Develop:Brighton event that brings the UK game-making industry together, Ivy adds, ‘I spoke to so many indie folks and we were all like, “oh, we’re not really doing anything”. It’s like, what do you mean? We’re all so busy.’ As a collective, many indie game developers live in a constant state of anxiety, maintaining small enterprises in a precarious and rapidly moving field. Despite facing challenges of time scarcity and potential burnout through the constant acceleration that has come to mark the creative technology industries of late modernity (see Rosa, Reference Rosa2013; Eriksen, Reference Eriksen2016), Ivy expresses genuine affection for what she terms the ‘indie lifestyle’, valuing its flexibility and artistic autonomy.
Reflecting on the experiences of other designers, she describes AI-generated art as troubling, particularly where it reproduces human artists’ styles without credit, drawing on existing databases to produce mirror images that project what appear to be novel new designs by way of deliberate resemblance to existing works (see Vallor, Reference Vallor2024). Such outputs can feel ‘slimy’, generating results that risk harming the very artists on whose work they are trained. She references an incident she encountered online in which an artist was accused of creating a not safe for work (NSFW) image that was, in fact, an AI-generated image produced in their style. While she does not feel personally at risk, she worries for her colleagues – not only are they vulnerable in terms of being replaced by AI, but their professional identity is being appropriated by AI reproducing their works.
When considering the future, however, Ivy frames GenAI as a potential source of relief rather than threat, as whisking her up and away from the troubled work environment of today. Although she does not currently use GenAI in her practice, she imagines automation as exceptionally valuable for managerial and organisational tasks. She describes wishing for a tool that could prioritise assignments or manage to-do lists, alleviating the cognitive load of everyday administration. ‘If generative AI could help automate things in the future’, she says, ‘that would be very amazing’, releasing her from the temporal pressures of everyday tasks that keep indie businesses running. An AI assistant, she supposes, would support rather than displace creative labour, allowing Ivy to focus on the artist aspect of her business concerns. Technological advancement here provides a form of ‘breaktime’ in that new creative potentialities can be released by novel human–technology collaboration (Battaglia, Reference Battaglia2022).
Ivy elaborates, ‘On the production side, if generative AI could help put tasks in a task manager, or help you create agendas and stuff like that beforehand … all of these things are daily tasks, they take up a lot of your energy but they are so small. Honestly, it could be done by … a machine. That would be pretty awesome. We’ll have to see where that goes.’
She references existing tools as precedents for what GenAI might become. Discord’s integrated task manager serves as one such example, providing a concrete point of comparison for imagining future automation. Summarising this orientation, she remarks, ‘Yeah, automation – I think it would be a great area for stuff like this. I can wish.’
Ivy also taps into a more recent experience, recalling an encounter with a GenAI-native game at a conference several months earlier. ‘There was a game that did use generative AI’, she explains, ‘and from what I saw, I feel like that was a really interesting and creative use of generative AI’. This example allows her to imagine GenAI not only as a development tool, but as a game mechanic in its own right, with a form of creative agency not at odds with existing game developers, but as a collaborator. While Ivy emphasises the importance of ethically and responsibly sourced training data, she remains cautiously hopeful. ‘These tools are on the way’, she concludes, ‘so I hope it can be more effective and used more appropriately’.
***
While distinct from Theo’s conversation, Ivy’s response is likewise grounded in automation anxiety – here articulated as a concern for game artists who are vulnerable to rights infringement and attracting an unfavourable reputation through mirror image AI art production. Whereas Theo’s anxiety is based on employment precarity, Ivy’s everyday anxieties are related more to the running of her indie business which leaves her time-poor and always in a state of urgency. Ivy’s future-oriented thinking is also shaped by memory, but of a different tone and affective quality. She enlists memories specific to game art and artistic labour, a focus that aligns with earlier instances of automation anxiety in the industry, such as concerns surrounding procedural generation and game engines as potential threats to artists (Chia, Reference Chia2022a, Reference Chia2022b). Reflecting on the ongoing anxieties among game artists, she voices a forward-looking concern that once again produces a temporal collapse in which past disruptions, present conditions, and foreseen futures converge.
For Ivy, memory is a futural concern. This resonates with Astrid Erll and William Hirst’s (Reference Erll and Hirst2025) observations on future-oriented memory or how, through memory, people imagine and shape possible futures. Remembering past structures, ethical dilemmas, and institutional shifts influences how people like Ivy respond to future challenges (Szpunar and Szpunar, Reference Szpunar and Szpunar2016). This approach has been furthered by Justyna Tabaszewska in the context of Eastern Europe (Reference Tabaszewska, Erll and Hirst2025). For these memory studies scholars, future-thinking is a form of transformative memory, and Ivy employs it here to raise concerns about how, in Koselleckian terms, the present will be remembered in hindsight; that is, what the ‘now’ looks like from a future present when the present has become a past present. In the future, how this pivotal moment in the history of the gaming industry will be remembered is of foremost concern. Will AI spell the death of the sector, as Theo fears, or will the embrace of new technologies lead to novel ways of collaborating alongside AI, as Ivy believes? Again, we are returned to the metaphorical cliff-edge moment, as discussed by Eelco Runia and Søren Kierkegaard whereby the question is whether to cling to the familiar or let oneself fall into the unknown. The vertiginous cliff edge is the so-called pinnacle of time upon which game developers currently stand in an industry tasked with delivering our futures. It feels like a moment where history will be made anew. At this point in the present, various counterfactual histories reside together, entangled, but only a few will germinate and branch forth, while most will remain in a state of what Justyna Tabaszewska (Reference Tabaszewska, Erll and Hirst2025, p. 399) terms ‘memory of potentiality’ or what the future could have been.
Rather than directed towards loss, Ivy channels automation anxiety towards generativity, creativity, and production. This reorientation is enabled by deploying a different archive of industry memory. Rather than invoking histories of layoffs or speculative collapse, Ivy references tools, workflows, and mechanics that have improved the workplace environment. The whirlpool of technological change is not unprecedented in Ivy’s opinion, and this helps her imagine futures where AI and humans creatively collaborate in practical, if not exhilarating, ways. Existing platforms such as Discord, alongside her experience with a GenAI-native game, serve as precedents through which GenAI is imagined as a supportive instrument rather than a disruptive force. These memories orient her towards a future in which GenAI augments creative labour, easing friction in production without displacing workers.
Ivy’s imagination of the future is trained on harnessing the potential inherent in her anxiety. She wants to ride the turbulent waves of sector reform and rapid change. There is something playfully exuberant about how Ivy imagines a new socio-technical collaboration between game developers, artists, and AI. Established patterns are there to be unsettled, and this is anxiety-inducing, but the promise of new possibilities overpowers the fear of change. Here, anxiety does not simply rehearse familiar narratives of technological disruption of the past; it raises the possibility of a break from the repeated cycles of uncertainty that have long characterised technological change in game development. Instead of reiterating an established narrative template or copy generic, Ivy’s suppositions gesture towards the conditions for telling a brand new chapter of human–AI interaction.
We may locate the creative potentiality of anxiety in social theory and philosophy. For example, in the work of Roger Caillois, Michel Serres, and even in Søren Kierkegaard’s existential approach to anxiety, the vertiginous urge to innovate while perched on the edge of time can trigger a state of ecstasy. In Caillois’ classic conceptualisation, the deliberate pursuit of vertigo inflicts ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’ (Reference Caillois1958, pp. 23–24). When promoting the pleasures of the vertiginous cliff edge of time where newness resides, both Caillois and Serres ask us to think about free-falling or being projected into space, gravity-defying pastimes such as jumping and trampolining, playground games of rapid rotation, waltzing and sailing the high seas. ‘Have you forgotten the delightful pleasures of the merry-go-round, or the swing’, Serres asks, ‘where some return “beaming with delight” while others are seen “vomiting forth their seasickness”?’ (Reference Serres2012, pp. 126–127). The pursuit of such pleasure, Caillois and Serres insist, is a mark of audacity and invention at a time of dramatic change. To step over the cliff edge, to allow oneself to ‘unravel’, is to embrace possibility and the ‘the elation of inventive discovery’ (Serres, Reference Serres2012, p. 138).
Caillois and Serres’ advocation of the efficacious energy of anxiety at crucial junctures in our lives speaks to the discrepancy between how Theo and Ivy imagine the future. For Ivy, this moment presents an opportunity for forging new connections between developers and AI that is not only imaginable but worth pursuing – anxiety is not only about ‘terrible scenarios about the future’ (Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Topçu and Wertsch2025a). Embracing the possibility of possibility is the vertiginous leap that Runia (Reference Runia2014) discusses in terms of being moved by and moving the past. Theo’s stance may be read as oriented towards continuity with the familiar rather than a leap towards novelty. Without harnessing anxiety towards the possibility of possibility, perhaps repetition would collapse into empty recurrence rather than generative transformation.
This is not to say that Ivy’s optimism is not shrouded in uncertainty. It is shaped by an industry in flux, where the contours of GenAI’s role have yet to settle. Even the category of the ‘AI-native game’ itself remains emergent, seeking legitimacy and stability as a genre. This form of anxiety does not deny risk or ambiguity, and it is not blind to the risks involved. Instead, it draws selectively on industry memory to conceive novel futures. Ivy’s vision of automation diverges sharply from Theo’s anticipation of mass unemployment. In both cases, there is the capacity for transformation through contention or collaboration. Ivy’s account exemplifies the generative register of collective anxiety: an anxiety that anchors the industry in Astrid Erll’s ‘implicit collective memory’ of past collapses. But, for Ivy, this provides momentum towards imaginative possibility rather than loss. Here, the temporal folds culminate in potentiality and hope over adversity and fear, and signal futural momentum rather than stasis. Anxiety becomes a condition that enables anticipation, experimentation, and creative reconfiguration. Automation anxiety thus appears to follow at least two bifurcated pathways: anxiety as paralysing and anxiety as a spark that makes new futures imaginable, even liveable, today.
Conclusions
Nutsa Batiashvili, Katie Rose Hejtmanek, and Stéphanie Larchanché have called for scholars to trace the multiple disturbances, multiple trajectories, and multiple guises of anxiety (Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Hejtmanek and Larchanché2025b, p. 778). We have chosen to explore anxiety’s multiple temporal entanglements, arguing for anxiety to be considered a temporal orientation and form of futural momentum. Among game developers and people employing GenAI in the workplace, the present moment is marked by abject precarity, which we have likened to a vertiginous cliff edge. Life on the edge is full of anxiety, capturing registers of fear, frustration, anticipation, and possibility. To navigate the latest period of severe uncertainty, game developers practise a form of future-oriented memory where present actions are influenced by harnessing the pedagogies of the past to affect the future. We can think of the anxiety-inducing cliff edge, the vertiginous state, as a cross swell of different repetitions: Theo and Ivy relive the rise and collapse of cryptocurrency, the rollout of workflow tools, and the formative years of automated design. Their individual stories also speak to wider collective concerns of an industry that is paradoxically based on preconceptions of rapid change while being in a chronic state of precarity. The narratives reference an implicit collective memory, an industry-level discourse disseminated across virtual platforms and physical conference spaces alike.
In a paper indicative of the transformative moment we are currently facing, Janos Mark Szakolczai (Reference Szakolczai2025) compares the emergence of GenAI to the Brothers Grimm tale The Elves and the Shoemaker. Like Ivy, workers have become exhausted in toiling over their businesses during a time of overlapping and ever-escalating crises. GenAI offers to ease the burden by undertaking the most mundane tasks. This relief is precisely what Ivy is hoping for, freeing up time to focus on more creative endeavours; yet the same technological intervention is what Theo fears as indicating his pending unemployment. These are futures we invest in both financially and emotionally, in what we might term ‘affective momentum’. Intriguingly, Szakolczai also asks: How would we be affected if AI were to disappear as suddenly as it emerged? Is there such a thing as a return to futures past, an era when AI was not part of everyday life? What would Theo and Ivy, you and I, do if it were suddenly placed behind (another) paywall or withdrawn altogether through malfunction or regulation? Might some, like Theo, feel relief from anxiety, while others, like Ivy, continue to navigate precarity with no promise of reprieve? And would memory alone serve as a sufficient pedagogical well from which to forge a new future?
These are the types of questions that cast the present moment as one of immense responsibility, requiring people to do justice to past struggles while shaping the future. How we navigate anxiety, Kierkegaard suggests, depends on how well we educate the self, with memory serving as one pedagogical resource. In Kierkegaardian terms, anxiety has the capacity to be creative and destructive; it signals the possibility of possibility to do things differently by reworking partial repetitions into new configurations. Anxiety, then, is not merely an emotional disturbance but a temporal orientation that incorporates repetition and novelty. It is a polytemporal state, enmeshing memories (in forms of nostalgia, courage, and fear) with future imaginaries in a pressurised present. Not only is the future ‘expressed in vocabularies and practices that have to do with the culturally entrenched narratives about the past’ (Batiashvili et al., Reference Batiashvili, Topçu and Wertsch2025a, p. 1), but anxiety itself propels action towards indeterminate futural ends. Anxiety provides the agitated momentum through which futures are imagined, contested, and brought into being.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the special issue guest editors Nutsa Batiashvili, Meymune Nur Topçu, and James V. Wertsch for the generous invitation to contribute to this collection and the productive initial conversations around the topic. Knight’s research on time and crisis is currently supported by grants from the Humanities in the European Research Area – Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe, through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI460, CHANSE-CR-863), and the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2024-348).
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