Nineteen IGF jurors refuse to vote for games using generative AI

Nineteen jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival said they would decline to vote for any game that used generative AI “in any capacity,” explicitly including code. The signatories argued that programming is creative labor and should receive the same respect as art, writing, composition and voice work.

The group said its statement did not represent the Independent Games Festival as an organization or all of its jury members. A Clockwork Worlds account, which described the jury process, said 19 of roughly 50 jurists signed, while some supported the stance without feeling comfortable signing and others fundamentally disagreed. The group urged the IGF to adopt a future policy barring games containing AI-generated work.

The jurors said the number of games made with generative-AI tools had risen significantly, and cited effects on the economy, labor market, environment and global information pipeline. They rejected the view that using such tools is inevitable for the games industry. Sam Barlow and Lena Raine were among the signatories, while Polygon reported that Austin Walker also signed.

House House then set out its use of large language models in “Big Walk,” which has been submitted to the festival. In the game’s official FAQ, the studio said LLMs were used sparingly during the final stretch of development to work through technical problems and bugs, with well under 0.1% of the code connected to that use. It said generative AI was not used elsewhere in making the game.

The principal use was research into problems in third-party code through chatbots. House House said one shadow-caster problem slowed the game by 50% for about 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. After researching the issue, inspecting Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline code and consulting a Unity engineer, the team obtained a workable LLM-suggested fix, then extensively modified it. The cited fix amounted to about 10 lines of code.

House House said it had disclosed the use in its IGF submission, but not on the game’s Steam page because Steam had not requested disclosures covering code or chatbot use. It stressed that the disclosure was not an endorsement of AI, and expressed concern that voluntary disclosure could help normalize the technology or make it seem inevitable.

The studio apologized if its use failed to meet the standards of those trying to limit generative AI’s harm to games and beyond. It said “Big Walk” had been made without an internal AI-use policy, called that a failure and said it would establish a more comprehensive policy.

Barlow said “Big Walk” was not the impetus for the jury discussion, though it became a “tricky edge case” because of the limited use described by House House. He said the jurors were considering what an IGF award should represent, rather than calling for a boycott or seeking to economically harm a development team.

IGF submissions closed Sept. 13, and finalists are scheduled to be announced in January 2027.