'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'
Developers House House told Aftermath via email that “LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs”, and that they “estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage”.
Meh, if that were enough to exclude a game from GotY awards, you’d end up with a very short list of mostly unknown games, half of which probably did use LLMs for those sorts of tasks and are just lying about it.
And honestly, if AI-debugging can replace having to spend days of horrible crunchtime fixing those bugs, I’m all for it! That’s what AI should do, making people’s lives easier and not replacing their creativity.
Nah, I didn’t imply anything of the sort. First up, I was never talking about “people who say they hate AI”, but game developers. Second, I never said or implied that they would be “embarassed”. They don’t disclose it because there’s no benefit to disclosing it, as should be very apparent here.
Let me spell it out as clear as possible: The vast majority of commercial game developers use AI in some ways. Most don’t vibecode, but using it for the kinds of things that House House did is ubiquitous. Modern development tools like Visual Studio use it in ways where you might not even realise that an LLM is behind it.
You don’t have to take my word for it: Look at the sites that were essential resources to get help with bugs before LLMs were around, like StackOverflow. Its usage has declined by over 99% since 2020. Unless you know of another place where people now ask all their development questions, I think we can both take a pretty educated guess of where they went.
I think the example cases they’ve provided are pretty good example of where an LLM can actually be useful. For example, if you need to find and fix a bug in third-party code, it can be an absolute pain, as just getting a basic understanding of an unknown codebase by yourself could take days or weeks. An LLM can analyze the code in seconds and if not fix the bug, at the very least point out locations where to look for it. It’s not necessarily about telling the LLM to overcome the technical challenge by itself, but it can definitely assist in it.
Except that’s covered in the article. It was able to provide some semblance of a solution and then they were able to hammer that into an actual solution. So the assistance provided by the AI, while not absolute, was demonstrably useful.
Considering their games have never used online multiplayer before, I’m guessing the bugs were to do with netcode, which is infamously tricky to get right, requires a huge amount of boilerplate and exception handling, but is mostly a solved problem; while being so tedious to debug and implement it causes programmers souls to leave their body. I think those are the kind of tasks LLMs are most suited for, actually
I personally know indie devs who released successful games who again know other successful indie devs and all of them vibe code. Virtually every studio uses LLMs these days and most studios have been using it since last year. Most of them are not upfront about it either.
I don‘t think they justify it that way. It‘s just the reality that you are competing against other studios who use everything they can get their hands on too. Developers are more lenient about that stuff in general because many of then copy/pasted stuff from Stackoverflow and the likes plenty times before. For them using a chatbot isn‘t that much of a difference.
The problem is that the rules in this game of capitalism are rigged to pit us against each other so we keep making egotistical, individual decisions. I think this is a prime example of that. It seems pragmatic to vibe code even when it makes things worse for everyone. Be it because AI causes mass layoffs or environmental destruction or because it funnels even more resources towards the overly rich.
I don‘t necessarily think the devs are at fault here. We need better rules and I think at least some of them would agree.
Then there is of course cuck coding or cuck development where you essentially tell Claude to take care of everything, including project management and assets while you take on the role of the „ideas“ guy (who usually never had an original idea in their life). That approach is messed up and I draw the line before that because nothing of value is created here. Just copies of copies of copies.
Honestly this ordeal is actually bigger than people think. because it stems from the IGF written statement from 19 of their 50 or so jurors.
IGF has a decision to make here and it isn’t a easy one. They need to either choose whether the jurors are allowed to hold that opinion, which marks them as a pure bias source which is not good for a jury that is meant to decide the final choice on your listings; say “yea that’s fine” and basically throw out any form of credibility that IGF has in it’s voting process like how TGA has been for years, or just not put 19 of their jurors on any category that contains a game that has AI in it (which isn’t super difficult as a category only has 7-10 jurors)
Personally I think that IGF is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type situation here cause either one of them is going to screw their publicity.
Why can’t they just come up with an actual definition of what constitutes too much AI use.
The problem here is they put out a statement without thinking about it, if they want to have a blanket ban on AI that’s their prerogative, but they really really should think about it before saying that. Alternatively they need to have a bit of a think about what they do and do not want to allow, and then right quite detailed documentation so everyone knows what’s up.
Firm agree that the blanket statement no compromise is the primary issue with it. Although, personally speaking, I don’t think it’s the role of the jurors to make judgment calls like that. I think that should be a statement that’s made by IGF as a whole prior to accepting money for submission.
Which is why I said that IGF is in a sticky situation here, because if they allow the jurors to make a public blanket statement like that it tells video game makers that the criteria for submission isn’t actually the criteria for submission, and that the jurors can at any point in time just decide to add restrictions onto submissions that will make it so they’re not going to win anything.
But if they step in, they’re gonna get burned at the stake by the Court of Public Opinion, which is AI bad.
The only reason this isn’t being ridiculed by the public is because it’s AI. If you hot swapped the topic AI out with any other subject, the jurors would have been under intense outcry. Like, this time it’s AI, but it could have very easily been, they don’t believe in Unity, so they’re not voting for any game that uses Unity Engine. Which is okay as a personal preference, but when your role is deciding game should be nominated out of a list that is already approved criteria, you shouldn’t be discrediting that game strictly because of a personal belief, you should be selecting the game based off of your experiences with said game. A restriction at that scale should be made prior to the submission process by the organization that is accepting the submissions not by the final stage of the awarding process after money’s been collected.
Meh, if that were enough to exclude a game from GotY awards, you’d end up with a very short list of mostly unknown games, half of which probably did use LLMs for those sorts of tasks and are just lying about it.
And honestly, if AI-debugging can replace having to spend days of horrible crunchtime fixing those bugs, I’m all for it! That’s what AI should do, making people’s lives easier and not replacing their creativity.
“Everyone who says they hate AI is actually using it and embarrassed” is THE biggest cope I’ve ever read.
I guess so, but I’m not sure where you’ve read it because I sure haven’t written it.
That’s complete bullshit lmao you heavily implied it. You’re such a tool.
Nah, I didn’t imply anything of the sort. First up, I was never talking about “people who say they hate AI”, but game developers. Second, I never said or implied that they would be “embarassed”. They don’t disclose it because there’s no benefit to disclosing it, as should be very apparent here.
Let me spell it out as clear as possible: The vast majority of commercial game developers use AI in some ways. Most don’t vibecode, but using it for the kinds of things that House House did is ubiquitous. Modern development tools like Visual Studio use it in ways where you might not even realise that an LLM is behind it.
You don’t have to take my word for it: Look at the sites that were essential resources to get help with bugs before LLMs were around, like StackOverflow. Its usage has declined by over 99% since 2020. Unless you know of another place where people now ask all their development questions, I think we can both take a pretty educated guess of where they went.
Oh no, you misunderstood their comment. They said they never wrote it. Because they got an LLM to do it.
“Difficult technical challenges and bugs” is what I find AI is the worst at in my experience.
I think the example cases they’ve provided are pretty good example of where an LLM can actually be useful. For example, if you need to find and fix a bug in third-party code, it can be an absolute pain, as just getting a basic understanding of an unknown codebase by yourself could take days or weeks. An LLM can analyze the code in seconds and if not fix the bug, at the very least point out locations where to look for it. It’s not necessarily about telling the LLM to overcome the technical challenge by itself, but it can definitely assist in it.
Except that’s covered in the article. It was able to provide some semblance of a solution and then they were able to hammer that into an actual solution. So the assistance provided by the AI, while not absolute, was demonstrably useful.
I’d recommend reading the article.
Considering their games have never used online multiplayer before, I’m guessing the bugs were to do with netcode, which is infamously tricky to get right, requires a huge amount of boilerplate and exception handling, but is mostly a solved problem; while being so tedious to debug and implement it causes programmers souls to leave their body. I think those are the kind of tasks LLMs are most suited for, actually
You conveniently dropped “to help work through” here, so now it implies they let AI do the work.
I personally know indie devs who released successful games who again know other successful indie devs and all of them vibe code. Virtually every studio uses LLMs these days and most studios have been using it since last year. Most of them are not upfront about it either.
It’s like people are hearing the “everyone is doing it” refrain for the first time in their lives.
What a bad reason to justify anything.
I don‘t think they justify it that way. It‘s just the reality that you are competing against other studios who use everything they can get their hands on too. Developers are more lenient about that stuff in general because many of then copy/pasted stuff from Stackoverflow and the likes plenty times before. For them using a chatbot isn‘t that much of a difference.
The problem is that the rules in this game of capitalism are rigged to pit us against each other so we keep making egotistical, individual decisions. I think this is a prime example of that. It seems pragmatic to vibe code even when it makes things worse for everyone. Be it because AI causes mass layoffs or environmental destruction or because it funnels even more resources towards the overly rich.
I don‘t necessarily think the devs are at fault here. We need better rules and I think at least some of them would agree.
Then there is of course cuck coding or cuck development where you essentially tell Claude to take care of everything, including project management and assets while you take on the role of the „ideas“ guy (who usually never had an original idea in their life). That approach is messed up and I draw the line before that because nothing of value is created here. Just copies of copies of copies.
Honestly this ordeal is actually bigger than people think. because it stems from the IGF written statement from 19 of their 50 or so jurors.
IGF has a decision to make here and it isn’t a easy one. They need to either choose whether the jurors are allowed to hold that opinion, which marks them as a pure bias source which is not good for a jury that is meant to decide the final choice on your listings; say “yea that’s fine” and basically throw out any form of credibility that IGF has in it’s voting process like how TGA has been for years, or just not put 19 of their jurors on any category that contains a game that has AI in it (which isn’t super difficult as a category only has 7-10 jurors)
Personally I think that IGF is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type situation here cause either one of them is going to screw their publicity.
Why can’t they just come up with an actual definition of what constitutes too much AI use.
The problem here is they put out a statement without thinking about it, if they want to have a blanket ban on AI that’s their prerogative, but they really really should think about it before saying that. Alternatively they need to have a bit of a think about what they do and do not want to allow, and then right quite detailed documentation so everyone knows what’s up.
Firm agree that the blanket statement no compromise is the primary issue with it. Although, personally speaking, I don’t think it’s the role of the jurors to make judgment calls like that. I think that should be a statement that’s made by IGF as a whole prior to accepting money for submission.
Which is why I said that IGF is in a sticky situation here, because if they allow the jurors to make a public blanket statement like that it tells video game makers that the criteria for submission isn’t actually the criteria for submission, and that the jurors can at any point in time just decide to add restrictions onto submissions that will make it so they’re not going to win anything.
But if they step in, they’re gonna get burned at the stake by the Court of Public Opinion, which is AI bad.
The only reason this isn’t being ridiculed by the public is because it’s AI. If you hot swapped the topic AI out with any other subject, the jurors would have been under intense outcry. Like, this time it’s AI, but it could have very easily been, they don’t believe in Unity, so they’re not voting for any game that uses Unity Engine. Which is okay as a personal preference, but when your role is deciding game should be nominated out of a list that is already approved criteria, you shouldn’t be discrediting that game strictly because of a personal belief, you should be selecting the game based off of your experiences with said game. A restriction at that scale should be made prior to the submission process by the organization that is accepting the submissions not by the final stage of the awarding process after money’s been collected.