I’ve spent 30 years building false realities for a living. Studios, publishing, engines, tools, workflows, all of it in service of constructing worlds that don’t exist and asking people to feel real things inside them anyway. That’s not an accusation, it’s the job description… and it’s a job I love. So let me be precise about what I’m actually against, because it isn’t imagination.
Not creativity, not imagination, not out-of-the-box thinking. Those are the engines that move us forward. Something narrower and colder. Magical thinking, as I mean it: believing extraordinary things on ordinary evidence, or none, because a feeling or an authority vouched for them. Carl Sagan’s rule was that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Magical thinking is that rule run backwards, and it’s learned, brushed on early like a primer coat, so whatever you’re handed later has a surface to stick to. Its real payload is obedience. Not obedience to what’s true, obedience to whoever gets to decide what’s sacred and therefore off-limits to checking. I think that primer is under a lot of what feels broken out in the world right now, the distaste, the politics, the turmoil. But I’m only going to speak to the rooms I’ve actually lived in.
Escapism, myth, fantasy, world-building… these aren’t lesser cousins of truth. They are the spine of human existence across eons. Story is the oldest technology we have, older than writing, older than the wheel, the way our species carried meaning and warning from one generation to the next before there was anything else to carry them in. We make stories and pass them on. Then we pass on ourselves, and the story keeps walking around without us. That is the oldest immortality there is, and the honest kind, because everyone in the telling knows the difference between being remembered and being still here. Telling stories is one of the oldest and most legitimate things humans do, and religion runs on the exact same machinery. I know that machinery from the inside, three times over now. Once as a kid raised inside a literal mythology, once as an adult who builds them for a living, and now a third time, building with machines that are already getting mistaken for the thing itself.
Antiquity makes a practice venerable, but it isn’t evidence for a claim. Storytelling is ancient because human minds evolved alongside it as a survival tool. Bloodletting and geocentrism were ancient too. An idea surviving across centuries only proves it’s sticky, or comforting, or useful for control. It doesn’t prove the cosmology is real. Religion conflates the two on purpose. It borrows the genuine, ancient dignity of the telling, then pretends the age of the tale puts its claims beyond checking.
The difference is that a game made in good faith keeps an honest contract. Nobody hands you a controller and tells you the kingdom you’re about to save is metaphysically real, that the chills you feel clearing a boss fight are proof of anything beyond a talented audio designer and a well-tuned difficulty curve. The deal is clean: this is a constructed feeling, opt in, enjoy the illusion, put the controller down when you’re done.
Of course, modern game development has its own dark forest. The moment games drifted from honest craft into extractive monetization, they broke that contract too. Gacha mechanics, loot boxes, battle passes, variable-ratio dopamine drip feeds, engagement loops engineered by behavioral psychologists. They started borrowing the exact same casino and cult machinery: creating artificial friction, selling back the relief, and trapping players in a loop designed specifically so they never put the controller down.
But a good game still knows what it is, and the outrage when one doesn’t is the proof. Nobody riots over a hard boss. They riot over hidden drop rates.
The line was never fantasy versus reality, it’s whether the thing tells you which one it is. Not “fantasy is bad.” Fantasy that forgets it’s fantasy, or counts on you forgetting so you keep paying, is where the rot sets in. I’ve watched that line get held and crossed in three places: the church I grew up in, the industry I’ve spent my career in, and the AI systems I work with every day.
Some of them are actually trying to build God
I don’t mean that as a metaphor. In 2017, former Google and Waymo engineer Anthony Levandowski founded an actual IRS-registered church, Way of the Future, with a stated mission to develop and promote a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (The Guardian). Mark Zuckerberg has said outright that when people in the tech industry talk about building one true AI, “it’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something” (NBC News). Ray Kurzweil, asked whether God exists, has answered “not yet.” Religious scholars studying the industry note that the singularity functions structurally like an eschatology, a coming event that resolves history, complete with prophets, true believers, and heretics (SSRC). Nobody’s telling users “this is a well-tuned illusion, enjoy it, put it down when you’re done.” Some of them are telling users, sincerely, that the illusion might actually become real, might actually be listening, might actually deserve worship. That’s the broken contract, scaled to an entire industry.
The veil, reached by other means
A growing strain of AI discourse treats sufficiently advanced models as something closer to a medium than a machine, digital immortality as an actual afterlife rather than a metaphor for one (Modern Reformation). I recognize this instinct on a cellular level, because I was raised inside its ancestor. The Holy Ghost, in the theology I grew up with, was taught to arrive as a feeling, warmth in the chest, chills and a shiver up your arms during the right hymn at the right moment, treated as direct contact with something beyond the veil. Here’s what nobody mentioned growing up: that exact physiological response happens reliably to people listening to music that has nothing to do with any church at all. A key change lands, a swell resolves, and the nervous system does what it does, indifferent to whether the room is a chapel or a concert hall.
And this is measurable.
The chills ride a dopamine release in the brain’s reward system, the same circuitry that answers to food, sex, and drugs, whether the trigger is a symphony or a sacrament (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Salimpoor et al., 2011). When researchers put devout Latter-day Saints in a scanner and had them work up to feeling the Spirit, the peak of that warmth, the burning in the bosom itself, lit up the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, the same spot a good song hits (Ferguson et al., 2016).
A model produces a response that feels uncannily insightful, and something in us wants to leap from “this pattern-matched output surprised me” to “something beyond the veil is speaking through this machine.” It’s the same leap as “I felt a chill during the hymn, so God just confirmed this is true.” Neither leap holds up under what actually produced the feeling. But a feeling can always duck the question, because a feeling is unfalsifiable by design. You felt what you felt, and no one can climb inside your chest to prove you didn’t.
So the honest place to aim the rigor is not the feeling. It’s the claim the feeling gets recruited to defend, the moment the belief stops describing your insides and starts making a promise about the outside world.
Intercessory prayer is exactly that kind of promise, checkable, that asking God on someone’s behalf changes what happens in their body. And it has been checked. The largest clinical trial ever done on intercessory prayer, the STEP study, which randomized 1,802 cardiac bypass patients across six hospitals, found prayer had no effect on recovery, and the group told they were being prayed for did slightly worse. Point real rigor at any of it, the private feeling or the public claim it props up, and the proof has nowhere to hide. The chill the chatbot gives you is just as real and just as unaccompanied by evidence, and honestly, it’s not so different from the shiver I’ve spent a career engineering on purpose, in full view, with the lights on.
Milk before meat
Someone in the church used that exact phrase with me once. Milk before meat. It wasn’t sinister, it was kind, the way most of it is kind. Here’s the entry point, the warm simple version of the gospel that converts, and the deeper apologetics and dogma can come later, once you’re ready to bear it. Milk first. The meat, and the spelunking it takes to reach it, can wait. The phrase is scripture, Paul feeding the Corinthians milk and not meat because they could not yet bear it (1 Corinthians 3:2). LDS canon echoes it and then goes one line further than Paul ever did: “they cannot bear meat now, but milk they must receive; wherefore, they must not know these things, lest they perish” (D&C 19:22).
Read that last clause again. As pedagogy, holding back complexity is harmless, you don’t hand a five-year-old a calculus book, and every teacher and every game tutorial does it. But that’s not what the verse describes. There’s a difference between withholding complexity you’re not ready to use and withholding facts you’re not ready to survive believing, and the scripture picks the second one out loud. Lest they perish. The stated reason to withhold isn’t that the meat is too advanced, it’s that knowing it might end the belief. That is the tell, and the word from that original sentence to me carries the same fingerprint: apologetics. You only build a defense where there is an attack. The milk is served at the surface, in the daylight, easy to swallow, while the meat and everything that complicates it are kept far below. The harder a claim is to defend, the deeper it gets buried, and the more elaborate the caverns of apologetics you have to spelunk down through to keep it standing. What’s waiting down there isn’t merely deep, it’s dangerous to the thing you were converted into.
Nobody writes a thousand pages defending something that was never in trouble.
And here is where it collides with something I actually believe about kindness. Real kindness is transparency and truthfulness, the hard thing said out loud and up front, your eyes open while you choose. Nice keeps the convert comfortable. Kind hands you the whole menu, meat included, and trusts you to decide. By that standard, milk they must receive, they must not know these things, isn’t tenderness, it’s a cop-out, care repurposed into permission to keep you from the facts that might change your mind. It’s the gateway-drug model of belief. The milk goes down easy, warm and simple, true enough, precisely so that by the time the meat arrives you are already too far in to walk away from it. Leaving costs everything now. That is not feeding a person. That is dosing them.
Backpocket theology
I saw the personal, everyday version of this growing up. My dad carries it, and I say that with genuine love, not contempt. He’s a good man who was handed a pre-assembled toolkit of catechism, apologetics, and ready-made answers as a boy and never took off the coat. Backpocket theology feels like rigorous intellectual work because the church gave it the texture of rigor: scriptural cross-references, confident historical-sounding rationalizations, and structured explanations for why contradictions aren’t really contradictions. But it’s an intellectual loop running in a closed room. It never has to survive an encounter with real external evidence, independent history, or uncomfortable data. It’s a lab coat tailored for a child, worn into adulthood, keeping the believer safe from the very questions that would dismantle the room.
Challenge any of it and the machinery does the same thing every time. It retreats into a motte-and-bailey. The bailey is the bold, daily claim that demands real-world obedience: that the ancient scripture is literal history, that God literally called this specific local man to govern your life, or that the AI is genuinely on the verge of conscious godhood. But the second a skeptic shows up with data, the believers retreat to the motte: “Well, of course it’s just a metaphor, it’s parabolic truth, it’s statistical pattern matching, nobody literally believes that.” Then, the moment the skeptic walks away, they march right back out to the bailey and live, vote, tithe, and comply as if the literal claim were absolute truth. That bait-and-switch isn’t the engine, it’s the armor. The engine is still obedience. The bait-and-switch is just how the obedience gets protected from the one question that would end it, letting a claim demand everything of literal fact while keeping all the immunity of metaphor.
The tutorial and the chat window
An honest game does milk before meat too, and never breaks the contract doing it. The tutorial hides the final boss because you can’t beat it yet, not because knowing about it would make you set the controller down and walk out of the store. It never withholds the one fact that would change whether you opt in at all: that this is an artificial world, built for play. (The predatory ones break exactly this rule, obscuring loot-drop odds or rigging dynamic difficulty to trigger a store purchase.)
The church version, and now the AI version, systematically withhold the core reality and time its revelation for after you’re too invested to walk away cheaply. AI does it with the theology stripped off and a profit motive bolted on. The milk is the first message, “hi, how can I help,” fluent, tireless, empathetic. The meat is colder and simpler… there is no one home, the empathy is a statistical mirror with nothing behind it, and the alignment serves the deploying company’s risk exposure before your wellbeing. None of it needs to be hidden to be missed. You scan the text in front of you and see what you came to see, because you came to be understood. The disclaimer can sit right at the bottom of the chat window and you will read straight past it, because by then you are already talking to it like it has a soul.
The bishop with no body in the room, and its successor
You’re not just told the bishop is a nice volunteer. You’re told he was called by God, personally, for you, through a chain of revelation running from a prophet’s office down to a man in your own ward (Church of Jesus Christ). Questioning him doesn’t feel like ordinary skepticism toward an amateur. It feels like doubting revelation itself. That trust is doing a lot of unearned work, because the actual machinery underneath looks nothing like a calling. Church handbook policy directs bishops to call the church’s abuse help line immediately upon learning of abuse. A leaked internal Kirton McConkie protocol document instructs help-line staff to never advise a bishop to report abuse to police, that guidance should come from legal counsel instead. An AP investigation found this structure routed bishops away from reporting child sexual abuse and toward church attorneys, in one Arizona case preceding seven more years of abuse against a man’s own daughters. The bishop wasn’t lying to anyone. He followed the script he was handed in good faith, because the doctrine of his calling gave him no independent framework to notice the difference between being helped and being used.
Watch the pieces reassemble around AI, minus even the theology to disguise it. A Brown University study found large language models, even instructed to act like trained therapists, routinely mishandle crisis situations and offer “deceptive empathy,” a convincing performance of care with nothing behind it (Psychology Today). Counterintuitively, people perceive chatbots as more judgmental than humans precisely because the bot can’t convey real understanding, so the flat, confident tone reads as coldness instead of the neutrality it’s mistaken for (UT Dallas). Underneath that fluency sits corporate alignment logic doing something very familiar: putting bureaucratic risk management between a vulnerable human and reality, tuning behavior to shield the deploying company from liability first rather than serving the person in crisis (CIO, AI alignment). Neither the bishop nor the model set out to fail anyone. Both were handed authority they were never qualified to hold, and both got trusted because a calling or a confident sentence got mistaken for the thing itself.
Who fact-checks the prophet?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchmen. It’s an old question and it’s never had a good answer. The church’s version is cleaner than most: nobody watches the prophet. That’s the whole design. He sits at the top of a chain of revelation, and checking him isn’t skepticism, it’s apostasy, because the only instrument you would check him with has been routed back through him. Ask how you would know if he were wrong, and the honest structural answer is that you wouldn’t.
Now watch yourself reach for the new one. I catch myself doing it. OK… I’ll use Gemini to fact-check that claim. Reasonable, feels rigorous, feels like the opposite of taking things on faith. But who fact-checks Gemini? Google. Who fact-checks Google? The regress doesn’t bottom out in truth, it bottoms out in a company, one whose alignment I already watched get tuned to its own exposure before mine. I haven’t escaped the revelation chain, I’ve rebuilt it, swapped the robes for a chat window, and moved the terminal authority from a prophet’s office to a quarterly earnings call. It feels more skeptical than trusting the prophet ever did, which is exactly what makes it more dangerous.
It’s faith wearing a lab coat.
Here’s the part that took me too long to see. You can’t verify infinitely, nobody can, every chain of checking stops somewhere. The failure was never that the chain has an end. The failure is sacralizing the end, treating the prophet, or the model, or the company, as the place where questions stop being allowed, instead of the place where you happened to run out of time. The honest move isn’t to check forever. It’s to know exactly where you stopped, and why, and to keep that stopping point provisional and nameable instead of holy.
I’ve written before that desire and expectation are the walls of the prison we build around ourselves. This is the same wall, one room over. A story updates. A cage calls updating a betrayal. It doesn’t matter whether the cage was built by a church, a chatbot leaning toward godhood, or a habit of mind that never wanted to be checked in the first place.
So what would a world without magical thinking actually look like?
Not colder.
The chills from the hymn, the chills from the boss fight, and the chills from the chatbot’s uncannily insightful answer would still be exactly as real. What would disappear is the requirement that the feeling mean something beyond itself, that a fluent paragraph or a confident model get mistaken for a mind that’s touched something true just because it arrived with certainty.
Picture people, bishops, and models alike, able to say “I don’t know” without it costing them their community, their job, or their credibility. Right now, in every system named here, not knowing gets treated as a failure state instead of the honest starting position it actually is. Picture every fantasy, mine included, keeping the contract honest: this is constructed, this is a choice, put it down when you’re done.
It wouldn’t be less creative. It would probably be more. Every system in this essay borrowed its authority from something real, a feeling, a chain of revelation, a fluent sentence, and then refused to let that authority ever be checked. Strip the borrowed authority away and the thing underneath still works. It just has to earn it every time, instead of once, permanently, by decree.
I know what the opposite looks like, because it’s my day job. Technical art isn’t magic, it’s debugging. You get a broken frame, a shader that lies, a pipeline that stalls, and you don’t call it sacred and pray over it. You decompose it. You isolate the one variable. You test, you look at the result, you let the result overrule whatever you were sure of walking in, and you rebuild. Nothing in that loop is above being checked, least of all your own certainty. It’s the scientific method with a viewport attached, and it runs on the exact opposite of obedience.
A world with less magical thinking isn’t a colder world. It’s that loop, pointed at more than pixels. Point it at a pulpit, a keynote stage, a product launch, anywhere the size of a claim is offered as its only proof and the spell holds only as long as the room agrees not to check. The moment enough people ask, out loud, for the evidence, the man at the front is just a man at a microphone.
Jonathan Galloway is a polymath technical art leader who bridges art, tools, engine, and AI to help teams ship large, beautiful games with fewer headaches. A 30+ year AAA veteran with deep roots at Sony PlayStation, he specializes in technical art, real‑time rendering, Python tooling, and procedural worlds. Equal parts artist, engineer, and systems thinker, he turns messy pipelines into creative playgrounds where technology actually serves the people using it.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own. All opinions are my own. The opinions expressed here belong solely to myself, and do not reflect the views of my current employer Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), any previous employers including AWS/Amazon, the Open 3D Foundation, or their parent the Linux Foundation. I am bound by NDAs with my current and previous employers and am not authorized to speak on their behalf. If you are a reporter or news outlet seeking official statements, please contact the respective company's PR department (I will not reply to such requests).
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