In Defense of Giving a Shit

A few weeks ago I was one of the judges for the Independent Games Festival. Judging for the IGF is one of the highlights of my year, it's a real joy, but every year there is usually one discussion thread that gets a bit heated. You can normally tell which one it is because it has more comments than all the others - most might have 4-5 comments, but the spicy one will have 15. When I first saw the thread about Big Walk this year, it had 90 comments. I think it had 150 by the end. Games this year had to have declarations if they used AI. Unlike Steam's current declaration policy, which only requires developers to declare if assets are "consumed by players", the IGF required a declaration for any and all AI use. The upshot of this is that a huge number of games declared their use of AI, including games made by prominent indie developers who have not declared their use in public. The most controversial case was Big Walk, whose developers stated they had used LLMs for "less than 0.1% of the code" to fix errors late in production. The resulting discussion thread about this included some of the stupidest things I've ever seen anyone write about AI and game development, which truly is saying something. When it blew up today in public, I saw the same arguments being repeated. And I wanted to write this, not to rebut every single argument I've seen, as tempting as it is, but to talk a bit about the actual shape of this problem and what is actually happening. Because what's happening is not unusual, it's not extreme, it's not unfair and it's not a 'public flogging'. What's happening is exactly what is supposed to happen in creative communities. The argument surrounding Big Walk has two parts, so I'm going to break it down that way too: first, should the IGF have a policy on AI content; and second, should House House be disqualified from winning an award. And then I'm gonna ramble and yell a bit and then upload this post and go and lie down in a dark room again. The IGF Needs an AI Policy The IGF desperately needs a policy on AI content of some kind, whether that policy is for or against. The problem is that their existing (unwritten) policy was to allow individual judges/jury members to decide on what they wanted to do. I appreciate why you'd have a policy like this, it fits the subjective and personal nature of judging for arts festivals. But the problem is that the AI issue was happening so silently behind the scenes of the IGF that the average indie developer in 2026 is unaware that they are paying money to submit their game to an awards show where 1/3 of the judging pool are immediately going to abstain from considering their game. And I say that as one of those judges, like I'm not in favour of those games being in the IGF, but I think it's unfair to not clarify this massively important part of the judging for an awards show that you have to pay to enter. But if we agree that it's only fair to add a policy, what should the policy be? For many judges, the idea of banning AI content of any kind - even art - made them mad. Many people were fine with banning it for things like art or music, but felt very strongly that AI code is simply the norm now and shouldn't or can't be banned. The reasons given for this were mostly very stupid, and part of me wanted to list them out here and break them down but I think both of us would lose brain cells in the process that could be lost in a more fun way like playing videogames or running repeatedly into a brick wall. There are so many arguments against this that I truly am losing count of them these days, we have just mostly agreed to ignore them one by one. What I will say is that these discussions exhibited a lot of really, truly, deeply disingenuous arguments, and I see this more and more now. It was fascinating watching people who know absolutely nothing about AI talking confidently about what it can and can't do, or how it does or doesn't work. In many cases the writer was not even trying to be understood, they were trying to intimidate others into shutting up by wielding scientific/technological language as a way of appearing authoritative. I think this is one of the most hateful things you can do in tech or tech-adjacent spaces. I love science communication, and one of the things that makes me saddest is when people offer up their own stupidity before we've even begun talking about a difficult topic. And the reason they do it is because they spent a lot of their life being spoken to like this, by the worst kind of intellectual bully, and they've concluded that people around them must just understand these issues better. Of all the arguments against a ban though, there's one I do want to address because I think it gets at the core of "should there be an AI policy", and that's the idea that bans don't work. People pointed out that if you ban AI, how will you enforce it? People can sneak things in any time. And they're absolutely right. How would we have ever known that House House used AI if they hadn't declared it? They could've just snuck it in and it would've taken a significant internal leak for it to ever come out. So maybe banning is pointless? Here's the thing: when you write down a rule, it doesn't do anything. Rules are not magic. They don't have any power over people. But they do two important things despite this: They tell everyone outside the community what to expect from that community's space/awards show. They give everyone inside the community something to point to when a violation happens. So the rule is both a signal and a justification. It tells everyone what you stand for, and it helps you clearly enforce what you stand for when it matters. This is how it works for PROCJAM too. You cannot enter PROCJAM with generative AI. If I see it, I will delete it. But can you sneak it past me? Of course! You do not need to be very clever to do this. But by having the rule we are saying: look, this is what this community stands for. This is what we will and won't accept. And that creates a sense of community and space. And a lot of people respond to this, because we naturally understand what communities are and what they are for. The same goes for award shows! Many award shows have requirements to meet, and they define what the awards are for and what they believe is important. The other thing it does is outline consequences. Although House House could have hidden their use of AI, would they have risked it if there was a rule in place? Probably not. Because the cost of the news coming out is amplified many, many times over if they violated an explicit rule or policy. So it creates a little bit more social pressure as well. Of course people will cheat, but usually they're the kind of people who already don't care. The people who are invested in the community are risking a lot more by doing so. Bans on the use of AI should not be thought of as shaping reality or controlling what actually happens in spaces. They are about defining and empowering the community around them. This is actually the biggest issue the IGF faces, and the reason the debate was so intense this year: because the IGF no longer has a coherent single community, as evidenced by this issue. It is not really possible for the IGF to continue as it is, because defining a policy will instantly alienate a third of their judges no matter what. But I don't see another way forward, because the competition is currently a chaotic mix of opinions that I think, ultimately, will put people off submitting. So whatever your position, I think the IGF desperately needs some kind of policy, but pretty much everyone involved is agreed that it doesn't have one now, so we have to address the situation we're in some other way. So: Should House House Be Given Awards? Whether or not the IGF should have an AI policy, the fact remains that it does not, so for this year we have to fall back on their current stance which is that individual judges and