A group of jurors for the Independent Games Festival has sparked intense industry debate after issuing a public statement declaring they will refuse to vote for any submitted game that incorporates generative AI in any capacity. The Independent Games Festival, widely considered a major milestone for independent game developers, offers nominees invaluable publicity, festival showcases, and a shot at prestigious industry honors. This year's developing controversy immediately threw House House, the acclaimed studio behind Untitled Goose Game, into a difficult position regarding their upcoming title, Big Walk.
Key takeaways
- Nineteen IGF jurors signed a statement refusing to vote for games using generative AI in any capacity.
- House House utilized LLM chatbots to research and fix third-party code issues for Big Walk.
- The studio estimates that well under 0.1 percent of the game's code connected to LLM usage.
- House House gracefully acknowledged that lacking an internal AI policy was a failure on their part.
The Stance of the IGF Jurors
The Independent Games Festival utilizes different panels of jurors for every award category, drawing from a pool of roughly 50 individuals according to developer Austin Walker, who signed the statement. While the 19 signatories do not necessarily form a majority of the total judging pool, their exact distribution across various award panels remains unclear. Furthermore, the statement notes that additional jurors privately support the strict stance but chose not to sign publicly due to fears of professional blowback. The jurors' directive explicitly addresses AI-generated code, arguing that programming is an artistic discipline whose labor deserves the same respect as any other part of game development.
Developer Sam Barlow, another signatory to the public statement, addressed the situation on social media, clarifying that Big Walk was not the original impetus for the debate. Instead, the discussion stemmed from a large number of submissions making much more egregious use of generative AI tools. However, because the strict criteria established by the jurors made no exceptions for AI-assisted programming, Big Walk instantly transformed into a tricky edge case for the upcoming awards cycle.
House House and the Big Walk Dilemma
House House had transparently disclosed its limited AI use as part of its official IGF submission, though the studio had not previously made that information public. According to an official statement published on the House House website, the primary use case for large language models during development involved using chatbots to research stubborn issues encountered with third-party code. As a specific example, the developers cited a persistent bug involving Unity's culling of shadow casting that neither their internal programmers nor a Unity engineer could solve. After posing the question to an LLM chatbot, the system suggested a potential fix that House House programmers modified extensively before it finally worked.
The studio estimates that well under 0.1 percent of Big Walk code was connected to its use of LLMs, and asserts that generative AI was never employed in any other capacity. House House acknowledged that it sometimes incorporated modified snippets of AI-generated code into the final product. While digital storefronts like Steam do not currently require developers to disclose chatbot usage or AI-generated code snippets, the strict criteria of the IGF jurors' pledge classifies this assistance as falling under the forbidden umbrella of generative AI usage.
Reactions and Industry Implications
The controversy underscores broader concerns about the hidden ethical costs of generative tools, including the reality that chatbot capabilities rely on past work used to train models without the consent of original creators. The statement from the jurors warns against the normalization of such tools under the assumption that their adoption is inevitable. To their credit, House House accepted the complex situation gracefully, admitting in their public statement that their lack of an internal policy governing AI usage was an organizational failure. The studio ultimately stated that it supports the ongoing work of those attempting to limit the harms that generative AI causes to the video game industry and the broader world.
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