Big Walk, the game that was likely at or near the top of a lot of people’s game of the year lists, was made in very small part with the use of AI. This was not previously disclosed publicly or on Steam because, according to House House’s statement on the matter, “the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage.” And we’re only finding out about this now, long after the game has released to universal acclaim, because Big Walk was apparently at the heart of a fractious discussion about AI usage in development and the game’s eligibility for awards among the jury members for the 2027 Independent Games Festival.
Some jurors felt that a hard, no-exceptions line needed to be drawn in the sand, and made a public, signed statement to that effect. Others felt that considering how House House used the tech was worth consideration in determining Big Walk‘s eligibility. House House claims 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,” and it seems like some jurors felt that such limited use shouldn’t disqualify a game that was very likely in the running for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the IGF’s top award.
The discussions about this event at Kotaku mirror those playing out amongst gamers and developers on social media. But at the heart of it all, this sucks man.
© House HouseAsh Parrish: Where do you all come down on this?
Rebekah Valentine: As the person on this team who went to bat, hard, for this game, who loved it completely, who bullied you all so much to play it and wrote about it incessantly, I will start by saying: God damn it.
Ash: I have not played the game because I haven’t taken the time to round up friends to play it with. It was important that I make an effort to try because this game seems so special to everyone I’ve seen talk about it. This whole thing, not just how AI was used but how we found out about it, definitely removes that urgency.
Rebekah: I am not naive enough to believe that every game I play has zero AI touching it in any way. In fact, I assume many of them do. But I, and I think many others, made an assumption that based on the past stances of this dev team and their general attention to a lot of hand-crafted detail, AI would not even be a factor.
Carolyn Petit: I’m actually playing it right now with friends and it was certainly strange to emerge from our play session last night (for those who’ve played it, we just got the ski lift working!) and into the online discourse. My feeling is that the goal should be an expectation of zero AI usage on any level. It’s stolen labor no matter how you cut it. Does that mean I think House House should be crucified in the court of public opinion? Maybe not, but I do think we need to be clear about establishing and holding to that expectation moving forward, and I don’t think it should receive honors at IGF.
John Walker: I think it’s really important to recognize that of all the games we’ve loved this year, almost all of them will have used LLMs as part of the coding process. I hate that, and I wish they had not, and I appeal to developers to stop doing it. But of all of the games to do this, I suspect Big Walk did it about the very least. So I feel like this is a public flogging that will achieve demoralizing or demolishing a great studio and little else.
Ash: Then why not tell us up front and give consumers the choice? I think a lot of people would have been OK with the exact disclosure we were given today. That folks did not have that option to choose feels way worse than the fact AI was used at all.
John: I believe the reason why (and again, this isn’t my justifying it, but trying to sum up why it happens) is because…it’s what everyone does. You run the code through the tool to check for errors. Or you ask the tool to suggest a way to code to fix the issue. And because that’s the expected action of someone using the coding tools, it’s incredibly easy to forget this is the same world-destroying mechanism that powers the plagiarism art and military drones.
Carolyn: Right, but the fact that it’s what everyone does doesn’t mean we should be okay with it. If anything, it’s precisely why we need to be so clear about saying no.
Ash: And we’ve got people posting on social media that they’ve seemingly solved the exact problem House House ran into, without using AI.
John: I don’t know how much more clearly I can say that I don’t think we should be OK with it. I’m trying to answer the question, “Why was it used at all?”
Carolyn: But you seem to be taking an issue with people taking an issue with it.
John: No, I’m taking an issue with people trying to win an internet battle of virtue by trying to out-hate everyone else, and suggesting that there’s a better way to convince the vast majority of developers to not do this.
Carolyn: I don’t think we do that without deploying shame to some degree.
John: I find publicly shaming one of the least offending offenders in order to teach the world a lesson a really horrid way to go about discourse.
Ash: But wouldn’t you agree that having such a public discussion about how this whole thing has gone down is at least an attempt to signal, “Hey devs, you don’t want this to happen, so don’t do this”? Like this discussion is the way we try to signal this is not a thing we want and that devs should try to find another way around their problems. And maybe it’s an imperfect way, but it’s something.
Carolyn: Yes. I also think the statement from some jury members was great. And I don’t think we can ignore that this one hurts more than some disposable top-to-bottom AI slop on Steam because of how well-received Big Walk is and because of the dev team’s commendable stance on things like BDS.
© House HouseRebekah: It’s a really complicated thing to think and talk about and I have a lot of conflicting thoughts here.
On one hand, I share Carolyn’s opinion that I want zero AI usage on any level. And I want the industry to take steps toward that. I think the IGF judges’ statement is a great move to that end, and I support it. More groups, more award shows, should make such statements and stick to such convictions.
I also think I see a bit of what John is saying here and why he’s saying it. I think that House House has generally demonstrated itself to be a group of thoughtful developers (see: the BDS boycott), and their statement now reflects this. This, as Carolyn says, makes what feels like a betrayal more hurtful. But I also do believe them based on past actions when they say they feel not having a policy about this is a failure and that they are going to address that. A lot of the public response I’ve seen to this has been to deem the whole game as slop, to condemn them utterly, and treating this as an irredeemable offense. It sounds like some of the behind-the-scenes discussion on IGF was like that too. And I don’t really agree with that. I’d rather this open a discussion publicly about why they felt this was necessary and help both House House and other devs in their position come around to better ways of doing things. What I’m afraid will happen instead (and what some seem to be doing already) is that they’ll just get deemed a slop studio and that’s that. Meanwhile, hundreds of other, bigger studios with far worse morals will skate on by without ever disclosing anything.
Again, to be clear, I don’t think we solve that problem by not talking about it and by not shaming it. I reiterate that I am really upset and betrayed by this, a problem that was so easy to avoid! I just wish there were a better way to have industry-wide conversations generally. Bluesky, Twitter, and social media in general don’t seem to be it.
John: I too want zero AI use!
Rebekah: I also want to recognize that I’m feeling both betrayed by them and maybe a little defensive of them because I loved the game so much. And also that my own view of discussions on social media is incomplete and not reflective of the broader consensus. I’m not a dev. This stuff is hard, man. It’s easy to say I’m anti-AI. The more I try to put it into practice though, the harder it is to do, because this crap keeps popping up everywhere, unexpectedly, unasked for, unwanted.
Ash: And that’s only the stuff we know about. And I think my genuine disaffection comes from the lack of disclosure.
John: I wonder if any of us manages not to have AI be in at least 0.1 percent of our lives. Every time I search something in the Chrome taskbar and forget it’ll be a Gemini screed of gibberish, but with a useful link. Or when I click on the “chat now” button on the medical site I use, and have to fight past the AI to get to a person.
Ash: I mean that’s a structural issue, isn’t it? Some of us would, if the structures undergirding our lives would allow us, choose to be totally AI-free. We should have at least nominally more power over that in our leisure time, no? Or we could attempt to exert more power over that if developers allow us to make that choice.
Rebekah: Like as a journalist, if I’m struggling to answer a question, there are a lot of things I’ll do to get an answer. Ask people. Research primary sources online. Read newspapers. Send emails, make calls, talk to experts, look into communities. Asking Claude or ChatGPT or whatever doesn’t even occur. Like, it never once enters onto my list of, “this is a potential way to find a solution.” So I have questions about why it was even a consideration for them at all.
But also, so many people in my life use ChatGPT without even thinking about it. Like, it’s a non-issue to them, not remotely controversial. I don’t know these devs personally, I don’t know what they know about the harms it perpetuates. I feel like they should know based on their previously stated politics, but, people are inscrutable!
I guess at minimum we can say they know now. I will expect a disclosure on their next game confirming no AI was used. If I do not see that disclosure I will not buy it. Not because I adamantly refuse to play any game with even a drop of it in there ever, but because given their past actions I cannot trust that a game with no such disclosure did not use it in ways I do not anticipate or am not comfortable with.
John: Again, I’m just thinking about being a developer using the tools developers have access to. They are all riddled with AI. Try avoiding that shit in Photoshop.
Ash: And I’m saying if, because of the structures they’re forced into, devs are required to use AI in the process of their development, I can understand and possibly forgive its use. But you gotta tell me so I can make that choice myself.
John: It’s even harder, because Steam directly tells them not to declare its use in coding.
© House HouseRebekah: That is another thing that’s worth mentioning though. Unity’s stuffed with AI crap. And Unity, critically, was apparently very unhelpful to them when they asked for assistance solving their coding problems. Unity I think deserves a big ol’ pile of heat for its role in this as well.
Carolyn: This is why I think that if we don’t set a very clear expectation of no AI use, it will just continue to seep into everything even more and more. So yes, that means putting pressure on Unity to not build it into their tools, and if they continue to do so, it means pressuring devs not to use Unity. And so on. Obviously the people with all the money at the top of these institutions want it employed so they can save money on labor. We have to tell them that’s not gonna fly.
John: Someone said to me today that going after the developers is like going after smokers, and that we should instead be going after the companies that release the poison. I see their point, but also think you have to explain to smokers why smoking is so incredibly dangerous to them and those around them. But to take their point, it would be far more effective to shame Valve into including coding AI declarations than to pressure each individual developer into publicly shaming themselves.
Ash: I understand AI’s ubiquity makes that hard, but if we want to get rid of this shit or at least discourage its use, we gotta draw the line somewhere. But I agree that Unity, Valve, etc needs to come up more in this discussion.
Rebekah: This is not to remotely take the blame off House House, but for this to work we need to find ways to get more AAA studios on board, and I don’t know how we do that. Not to say we should throw our hands in the air and give up, I just don’t know where to begin pressuring major companies. Boycotts famously are not meaningfully impactful at the AAA level. I would really like to see people organize around finding solutions to that.
Ash: I think it means getting a developer like House House to say “Because of this, we’re gonna use Godot going forward.” Which I understand is incredibly easy for a non-developer to say. But we gotta coalition-build here. And having these arguments might be a baby step toward something like that.
Rebekah: It does. I want to encourage folks to participate in these conversations at the community level and find ways to organize around it and affect change within their groups, whether that’s devs, consumers, media, whatever. Arguing on social media about it is cathartic but ultimately not super helpful. And also I certainly think reaching out to House House directly (and politely!) via official channels to tell them why this was hurtful will make a difference.
Ash: I think they know pretty well at this point.
Rebekah: Sure, but again I think there’s a difference between a lot of people yelling on social media and emailing them for comment, and someone who loved their game emailing them to tell them how this personally affects them
John: I was in a room with many indie developers on Saturday, and this discussion was had, and people calmly but passionately explaining why they refuse to use any AI at all was really affecting, and clearly influencing others who might “compromise” here and there.
Ash: Coalition building! Seems maybe silly to ask, but is this game still your GOTY Rebekah? Carolyn? John?
John: I’m afraid, as a misanthrope, I’ve not played it.
Carolyn: I’m just playing it now. It was definitely shaping up to be on my list (probably not at the top but on the list somewhere), but now I’ll have to give it some thought.
Rebekah: I honestly don’t know what to do about it. It certainly calls into question whether the idea of “GOTY” describes some sort of award or honor I am conferring on something for excellence, or if it just describes the best thing I played this year.
I cannot deny that it remains the best thing I played this year. The best experience I had. I’d be lying to myself and everyone else to pretend it wasn’t. But I also am not going to sit here and say this hasn’t changed how I now look back on that experience, nor do I feel comfortable showing up to a Kotaku GOTY discussion to loudly go to bat for it as something deserving of a website-wide honor. Then again, how many other things that we’ll argue for this year used AI in their development, and we don’t know about it?
Where I sit right now is that I will probably pitch a piece solely on Big Walk for end-of-year discussions talking both about what it meant to me and why it was the best thing I played, and also how that’s changed now. But as it stands I don’t want to fight for it to win something that’s seen as an “award.” My feelings may change in either direction in the next few weeks. This is still pretty fresh.
Ash: I still want to play it with y’all though, I think it’s worth at least that.
