On the edge of the future: automation anxiety, generative AI, and memory in game development

Automation anxiety is reshaping British game development at a moment when generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is being positioned as both creative catalyst and labour-displacing threat. Grounded in anthropology and in dialogue with social theory and memory studies, we examine how developers experience “life on the edge of time” in a sector tasked with future-making amid intersecting constraints and expectations. Through paired ethnographic vignettes, we contend that anxiety operates as a temporal orientation, one that is fundamentally polytemporal: a condition that folds together industry memories of past technological surges, intensifies present pressures, and animates competing projections of what comes next. We show how automation anxiety exceeds individual experience to function as a collective, industry-wide condition, revealing how industry memory operates as both repetition and interpretive resource in moments of technological upheaval. By situating automation anxiety at the intersection of media rhetoric, collective memory, and technological innovation, the article advances a sociocultural account of anxiety as a polytemporal orientation capable of both constraining and catalyzing possible futures.