The indie game community is in disarray over AI and Big Walk

Some Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors published a statement yesterday saying they would not vote for games that use generative AI in “any capacity.” Soon after, the developer of indie hit Big Walk has published a statement saying it “sparingly” used AI in the “final stretch” of the game’s development to “help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs.” According to the jurors’ statement, a copy of which was posted by Austin Walker, while this year’s IGF entries have been “incredible,” there has been “a significant increase” in the number of games “developed with generative AI tools,” leading to “fairly intense discussion and disagreement” with no “universal consensus.” The statement includes a list of beliefs, including that generative AI has “negative effects,” that AI-generated code is “not an exception to these harms,” and that use of AI tools is “not a forgone conclusion in our industry.” IGF jurors that signed include Telling Lies and Immortality creator Sam Barlow and Celeste composer Lena Raine. The jurors say that the statement doesn’t speak for IGF as an organization or for all IGF jury members, noting that some voiced concern about being able to safely sign “without professional blowback.” [Media: https://bsky.app/profile/austinwalker.bsky.social/post/3mzvyqaxnzc2w] One contentious title was apparently Big Walk, the co-op adventure game from Untitled Goose Game developer House House. In a statement to Aftermath and posted on its website, House House said that “In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code—we’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage, and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.” House House said its “primary use case” of LLMs was “to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code,” including fixing an issue with shadows by modifying LLM-suggested code. House House noted it turned to the “LLM chatbot” after researching the problem “extensively” and even speaking to an engineer at Unity. The studio said it disclosed its AI usage as part of its IGF submission, though it has not disclosed AI usage on Big Walk’s Steam page because “the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage.” “This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” House House said. “We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as ‘inevitable’. We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.” House House didn’t have an AI policy in place when it developed Big Walk, which it described as a “failure,” and said it will “work to have a more comprehensive policy going forwards.” Barlow said after we published this post that Big Walk was not the “impetus” for the IGF’s discussion, but it became the “tricky edge case — well what about this minimal use of AI, what about when your favorite game, or team uses it?” Barlow added that “This is not a call to boycott a certain game, or to economically hurt a team — this was about a single award’s show of many and what that award should mean to reflect our ‘indie’ alternative to mainstream and larger scale game development.” Walker also shared a long blog post that’s worth reading about his position on AI and the IGF awards. [Media: https://bsky.app/profile/mrsambarlow.bsky.social/post/3mzy3znrbds2s] Update, November 10th: Added posts from Barlow and Walker.