// ARS TECHNICA — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Big Walk used AI to fix a bug. Now the indie gaming world is having a reckoning.
Any amount of AI coding is too much for many Indie Game Festival judges.
The last few years have seen significant debate over the widespread use of AI-powered tools in game development and the responsible disclosure of that usage to players. That debate has exploded into a full-blown controversy in the indie game development space this week, as Big Walk developer House House has publicly and belatedly disclosed minimal AI use in its popular co-operative puzzle exploration game.
This particular controversy has been brewing behind the scenes for months, as judges and jury members for the prestigious Independent Games Festival Awards discussed the issue in private discussion groups. But the debate started to break into public view on Monday when 19 members of the 50-plus-member jury released a signed statement outlining a stance “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.”
Noting “a significant increase in the number of submitted games developer with generative AI tools,” the group of jurors called out AI’s ecological, economic, psychological, and labor harms in rejecting tools whose use, they said, is still “not a foregone conclusion in our industry.”
The jurors also urged the IGF as a whole to “adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.”
Although the jurors’ statement didn’t name any specific games, by Tuesday morning, one critical darling in particular was increasingly being noted as a central part of the debate. In a statement provided to Aftermath (and added to the game’s FAQ page shortly thereafter), developer House House admitted publicly that “LLMs were used sparingly” near the end of Big Walk‘s development “to help work through some difficult technical challenges and bugs.”
That limited AI use—which House House says represents “well under 0.1% of Big Walk‘s code—stemmed in part from a thorny Unity engine bug that was slowing the game down with “infinite length” shadows during some game situations. After consulting with a Unity engineer who determined a fix “wasn’t possible,” House House said it consulted an LLM chatbot, which suggested a possible fix that the developers “had to modify… extensively” into the 10 lines of code that ended up in the final game (At least one social media user says the bug was indeed fixable with significant human effort, though).
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.”