Some jurors at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) issued a statement yesterday saying they would not vote for games that use generative AI in “any capacity”. Shortly after, the developer of the indie hit Great walk released a statement saying it used AI “sparingly” in the “later part” of the game’s development to “help overcome technical challenges and difficult bugs.”
According to the jurors’ statement, a copy of which was published by Austin Walker, while the entries at this year’s IGF were “incredible”, there was “a significant increase” in the number of games “developed with generative AI tools”, leading to “some pretty intense discussions and disagreements” without “universal consensus”. The statement includes a list of beliefs, including that generative AI has “negative effects,” that AI-generated code “is no exception to these harms,” and that the use of AI tools is “not inevitable in our industry.”
IGF jurors who signed include Tell lies And Immortality creator Sam Barlow and Celestial composer Lena Raine. The jurors say the statement does not speak for the IGF as an organization or for all IGF jury members, noting that some expressed concern about being able to sign safely “without professional blowback.”
A controversial title was apparently Great walkthe cooperative adventure game of Untitled Goose Game developer House House. In a statement to Consequences and posted on its website, House House stated that “In some cases, snippets of LLM responses were copied as a starting point for modification in the game’s code – we estimate that well less than 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this use, and generative AI was not used in any other context during the game’s creation.”
House House said its “primary use case” for LLMs was to “investigate, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code,” including fixing an issue with shadows by modifying LLM’s suggested code. House House said it turned to the “LLM chatbot” after researching the problem “extensively” and even speaking to a Unity engineer.
The studio said it disclosed its use of AI as part of its IGF submission, although it did not disclose its use of AI on Great walkThe Steam page for “the platform does not request disclosure of the code or use of the chatbot.”
“This is not an endorsement or argument for the use of AI tools, no matter how small,” House said. “We are concerned that voluntary disclosures like this could contribute to the normalization of this technology, or its treatment as ‘inevitable.’ We support the work of those trying to limit the harm generative AI causes to video games and our world, and we apologize that the use of Big Walk’s LLM does not meet their standards.”
House House did not have an AI policy in place when it developed Big Walk, which it described as a “failure”, and said it would “strive to have a more comprehensive policy in the future”.
Barlow said after posting this post that Great walk wasn’t the “impetus” for the IGF discussion, but it became the “sticky case: what about this minimal use of AI, what about when your favorite game or team uses it?” Barlow added: “This is not a call to boycott a certain game, or to harm any team economically – this was just one of several awards shows and what this award should mean to reflect our ‘indie’ alternative to mainstream and larger-scale game development. Walker also shared a lengthy blog post that’s worth reading about his stance on AI and the IGF awards.
Update, November 10: Added messages from Barlow and Walker.
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