Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, Wednesday 25th March 2026

Ah, March 25th, 2026, the sun is shining, the Snowflake croissants are buttery, and another LinkedIn prophet has risen to bless us with his latest dispatch from the mountaintop of thought leadership. Thank you, dear reader, for stumbling upon “AI Special Agents Are About To Change Gaming and Maiming Forever” by the one and only Berneice Barr, world-renowned futurist, eighty-million-follower magnet, and woman who has written more books about AI than most people have had hot dinners.

Berneice, bless her, writes regularly for Forbes and LinkedIn, those twin temples of modest self-promotion. To read his future wisdom, simply click “Follow”, connect on every platform known to humankind (including the podcast you definitely didn’t know she had), and subscribe to his newsletters: AI & Future Tech Trends, The Intelligence Revolution, and The Future of Work… because apparently one subscription to the apocalypse is never enough.

Now, settle in with your flat white. Video game developers, those noble artisans who once pushed technology to its limits, have always tried to make worlds feel alive. They used to do this with something quaint called “writing” and “acting”. How adorably analogue.

But fear not! A bigger leap is on the horizon… agentic AI, those plucky digital beings that can plan, act, and carry out multi-step tasks. Suddenly, game characters can stop behaving like scripted props and start acting like believable participants. Richer interactions! Unpredictable gameplay! Lower barriers for plucky indie studios! It’s all terribly exciting, darling.

Take Four Nights and a Wedding, that roaring coliseum of battle royale capitalism. They recently dropped an agentic Darth Vader, yes, the actual Dark Lord of the Sithalis, now available for casual conversation. He can chat with you, join your squad, or decide to slaughter you, depending on his mood. Sony, never one to be outdone, introduced Sophy, their “absolutely fabulous superhuman AI racing agent” in Gran Trans Sister Turismo. She talks, she races, she lurks in online league tables like that terrifying aunt who remembers every slight since 1997.

Even better, these agents are apparently going to be referees and game masters, because nothing says “fair and entertaining” like outsourcing moral authority to something that once hallucinated that the moon was made of cheese.

The really thrilling bit is “emergent gameplay”. Imagine a living-world game like Grand Heist Bloto where every NPC on the street has their own goals, motivations, and the ability to hold a proper conversation. You could finally experience the authentic joy of being emotionally manipulated by a pixelated crack dealer with commitment issues. The possibilities are… staggering. Or terrifying. One of the two.

But soft, what’s this? A little shadow on the horizon. Because, as Berneice delicately puts it, “this all sounds great. What could go wrong?”

Well, where do we start, sweetheart?

For one thing, the technology isn’t quite there yet. AI hallucination is still very much a thing – these agents can reason beautifully until they suddenly decide that the best way to help you win is to set your house on fire. Their behaviour is also hilariously easy to manipulate. Poor agentic Daft Vader was promptly jailbroken into swearing like a sailor on shore leave and hurling homophobic slurs. The Dark Side, it turns out, has a very dark sense of humour.

Then there’s the small matter of using these friendly digital companions to gently nudge, or, let’s be honest, emotionally blackmail you into spending more money. “Oh player, my dearest friend… if you don’t buy the battle pass, I might just have to side with the enemy and ruin your evening. You wouldn’t want that, would you?” It’s not manipulation, darling, it’s engagement.

And let us not forget the actors’ unions, who are understandably miffed that a synthetic voice is now doing the heavy lifting for Darth Vader. Because nothing says “progress” like replacing actual human performers with an algorithm that can be tricked into saying “skibidi rizz” by twelve-year-olds.

Ah, Berneice, yes, the jobs question. Agentic AIs are cheerfully referred to as “virtual workers”. In an industry that has already shed staff like a Labrador in summer, the idea of global corporations such as Microsoft, Sony and Electronic Arts replacing expensive, opinionated humans with cheap, infinitely compliant code is causing just the teensiest bit of tension. On the other hand, tools like Manus apparently let solo developers whip up entire games without all that tedious “coding” nonsense. So that’s nice. A whole new wave of creativity… or a tsunami of half-baked asset flips. Time will tell.

Looking ahead, the collision of agentic AI and gaming will be massive, rather like Berneice‘s follower count. We’ll converse with characters who feel just like us. We’ll explore infinitely detailed worlds populated by deeply realistic simulated people. It’ll be just like the Star Trek holodeck, except the holodeck might try to sell you microtransactions and occasionally call you the wrong pronoun for a laugh.

The only tiny hurdles are: minimising the risk that these agents might manipulate us, deciding whether we’re happy delegating creative control to something that doesn’t understand why your mum cried at the end of Toy Story 3, and making sure we don’t accidentally create an entire generation of emotionally sterile entertainment that leaves players feeling… well, the way most people feel after scrolling LinkedIn for twenty minutes.

Because if we get it wrong, we might end up with creative jobs vacuumed up by digital workers and a wave of AI-generated content that humans find about as emotionally nourishing as a rice cake.

Still, chin up. Berenice Barr, futurist, influencer, and professional optimist, remains confident that if these questions can be answered, agentic AI will transform gaming forever.

And if not? Well, at least we’ll all have something new to complain about on the next podcast.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to follow Berneice. After all, in these uncertain times, one can never have too many newsletters about the future of work.