Credit:
House House
The kind of “long shadow” situation that led to a bug House House resorted to using AI tools to fix.
Credit:
House House
House House said it didn’t disclose this LLM usage for Big Walk‘s Steam release earlier this year because Valve “does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage.” Indeed, Valve’s AI disclosure form for developers specifically notes that it is concerned with AI-generated content, not “efficiency gains” from “modern game development environments [that] have AI powered tools built into them.”
The IGF Awards make no such distinction for AI usage, however, which led House House to mention its AI-assisted bug fix in submitting the game for awards consideration. A version of that disclosure is being made public now because “it has become a matter of public interest,” House House said.
“This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” House House wrote. “We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalization 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 apologize that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.”
All or nothing
Learning of House House’s AI disclosure was particularly painful for some IGF judges who had previously felt a special connection to Big Walk. In a blog post discussing his feelings, IGF jurist Austin Walker called the game “an achievement” that was “remarkable” and “beautiful,” featuring puzzles that “capture a range of play that is largely abandoned by the digital form.” Fellow jurist Damon Reece shared in a blog post that the game is “seriously special to me” and that it gave him “a profound and powerful emotional reaction to being in a space that felt like home.”
But when it comes to IGF awards consideration, Walker and Reece were among those who said that even minimal use of AI tools overrode that deep and abiding respect for the work itself.
“We have our hands on the lever here,” Reece wrote. “This is pain that has to happen [emphasis in original] to try and steer our culture away from this. We need to choose to speak loudly and clearly on this, to prioritize human creativity and labour, to tell the culture and the world that this is unacceptable to us. To do otherwise is rank cowardice.”