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 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.”

The big walkback

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 ‘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 ‘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 ‘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 ’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 . 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 [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.”

This isn’t the first time AI usage has noticeably affected game award judging. Last year, the Indie Game Awards (which are completely separate from the IGF Awards) rescinded awards for after the developers admitted that some in-game textures were made using AI tools (these were later patched out).

“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” they said at the time.

We all make mistakes

Since House House’s public disclosure, the anti-AI contingent of IGF judges has found plenty of support from disappointed fans and industry observers. In the last few days, the game’s Steam page has been bombed with over 400 negative reviews, though Steam’s anti-review-bomb tools seem to be limiting the impact on the game’s overall “Very Positive” reception there.

But others feel House House’s relatively minimal use of AI here is being blown out of proportion. They say it’s important to differentiate between games that use LLMs as a last-resort technical fix, for instance, and others that lean heavily on AI to generate the bulk of their art, music, or the core of the game engine itself.

IGF judge Liz Ryerson wrote on social media that she didn’t find House House’s AI use to be personally disqualifying for the awards and that “the fact that many acted like there aren’t any levels to this and it’s all the same is bothersome to me.”

“To feel like someone gets punished a lot more for transparency about a smaller level of fuckup vs. just not even attempting to be honest or transparent at all is what bothers me,” she wrote.

Steam Hype staff writer and prolific Steam curator Dominic Tarason also pushed back against the idea that “House House need to be memory-holed and their work never spoken of again” as a “penalty for touching the Forbidden Device.” He said he considers “very mildly compromised art” that is still “absolutely, unquestionably art and very human.”

“They spent on that work of art,” Tarason added. “They asked a chatbot for two minutes how to fix a bug. That’s a ‘That’s lame, don’t do that again’ failing. … Some of you are acting like they’ve been convicted of high crimes against humanity, to be sealed away in the darkest oubliette until not even bones remain.”

But some have argued that using AI to fix a bug rather than hiring an expert to figure it out did make the game’s development at least a bit less human than it could have been. “House House aren’t laying off developers to replace them with Claude, and I’m sure they would be firmly against the mere thought of doing this, but we can also clearly see how their actions are part of the same problem,” AI researcher Mike Cook wrote on his blog.

Still, game developer, author, and professor Brendan Keogh wrote that he thinks “an extreme zero tolerance of any [generative AI] is ultimately counterproductive now. [There’s] a lot of anger at devs that feel deeply conflicted enough about their glorified Google search to disclose it, and [that is] encouraging those using it to actually steal labor to hide that use.”

As time goes on and AI tools are increasingly used in the building of major game engines, it may become increasingly difficult for anti-AI absolutists to avoid every game that has been touched by even a hint of LLM-generated code (if that use is even disclosed in the first place). That said, many still see value in a firm and unyielding public stance against what they see as a scourge to their entire industry.

“I think zero tolerance is a viable political position,” narrative designer and writer Hannah Nicklin wrote on social media. “You use politics against systems, for people you affect change through connection and understanding… The IGF jury statement… levels itself at a system of shared value and asks for change to enable solidarity around a position of harm reduction.”