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Short abstract

The card game „Monsters, Miracles, and Metaphors“ invites players to reflect on how dominant narratives and metaphors shape our understanding and discourse around AI.

Long abstract

Metaphors are a crucial component of human sense-making, especially when it comes to emerging phenomena. Recently, there has been considerable scholarly interest in the metaphors used to describe AI. The spectrum of metaphors ranges from utopian to dystopian, from allegoric to immaterial, from light-hearted to heavy hitting. 

 Considering the crucial role these metaphors play in delineating the possibilities of AI for our technological futures, it is paramount to continuously examine which narratives emerge, which ones get pushed by whom and which ones get adopted.

In this talk we discuss the potential of card games as a pedagogical device for critical engagement with discourse. Historically, playing cards started out as luxury items – an amusement reserved to the elites. As printing technologies evolved, card decks became available to a broader public and quickly were adapted as a way to play, to transform, to subvert the hierarchical structure that the cards represented.

 Building on these subversive histories, we illustrated and designed a set of playing cards that collects the dominant narratives around AI and contrasts them with a few we conjured up ourselves.

 Modelled after the game quartett, „Monsters, Miracles, and Metaphors“ offers three different modes of play. The game invites the players to confront narratives around AI, to ask how fantastical or far-fetched the depictions are and what they might foretell about our futures. The presentation reflects on the development process and on our experiences facilitating game-based workshops, and discusses the possibilities and limitations of this method.