Ten lines,
Zero-point-one percent shadow.
Disclosure triggers the purge.
Absolute hygiene demanded.
New syntax, old dogma.
Apology only feeds the feed.
On Monday, a group of 19 named Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors issued a joint statement saying that they would be ādeclining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.ā
While the initial statement didnāt name names, internal deliberations quickly spilled onto social media. Narrative designer Bruno Diaz confirmed on Bluesky House Houseās critically acclaimed hit Big Walk was the title at the center of the dispute. Diaz pointed out the obvious irony: judges only knew about the AI usage because House House honestly complied with the IGFās disclosure guidelines.
In their submission to the festival, the famously principled Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game updated the FAQ on their website to answer the question: Was AI used to make Big Walk?
The answer was yes. Roughly ten lines of engine code:
The primary use case for House Houseās use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If youāre technically-minded, and curious, hereās an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldnāt find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasnāt possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.
Just to be clear: House House estimates that an LLM touched well under 0.1% of Big Walkās code. And Generative AI (whatever that actually means) was not used for any art, animation, voice acting, music, level design, or dialogue.
The reaction has been deranged. Hereās a brief overview of the drama:
Steam Review Bombing: The game’s recent review rating on Steam plunged as hundreds of negative reviews flooded the store within hours, with negative reviewers branding the studio hypocritical.
Refund Demands: Players took to discussion boards demanding immediate refunds regardless of playtime, citing moral objections.
Creator Fallout: Independent streamers and content creators with strict anti-AI coverage policies publicly distanced themselves or expressed regret for having featured the game.
The most vocal was streamer Nick Reineke:
For context, House House is an an explicitly progressive pro-labor studio based in Australia. They voluntarily pay Indigenous land rent on their earnings, and recently boycotted releasing on Xbox over BDS guidelines. Yet, for anti-AI purists, using an LLM to patch a rendering bug is being treated by players as an unforgivable moral betrayal.
All of this pressured House House into issuing a, frankly, grovelling statement:
We originally wrote a version of the above disclosure as it was a suggested part of our IGF submission. We have not made any disclosure on Steam as the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.
This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal. We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as āinevitableā. 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 Walkās LLM usage may not meet their standards.
From festival jurorsā grandstanding to the review bombing, the entire sequence of events just seems totally inhinged.
Just before all this happened, Ahmet Sabanci wrote on his blog about how hostile puritanism is incompatible with genuine creativity. I agree with him:
none of this is actually about art but it is putting creativity into a groupās purity tests. Once this is normalized, it will only open the door to more purity tests. […] If you want to defend art and creativity, you need to accept it is going to be messy, weird, disturbing at times, and most certainly not fitting into any one groupās puritanical norms. If your goal is to truly defend artists, you have to make sure they can be any of these things with no fear.
The thing about this seemingly niche gaming AI drama is that the cultural machinery powering the backlash is the same old bullshit.
The indie game development sphere spent a decade fending off bad-faith mob harassment. From the abuse targeting Anita Sarkeesian and Jennifer Hepler (2011ā2012), to Gamergate’s “ethics in video game journalism” facade (2014ā2015), to the reactionary tantrums surrounding The Last of Us Part II (2020), to the targeting of the narrative consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. (2024)
Gaming culture has spent the last 15 years being wrong, reactionary, and weird about almost every major cultural shift, and the anti-AI stuff is that same lineage.
Regardless of where you stand on AI, the backlash against House House borrows directly from the same Gamergate playbook; itās all the same tactics being deployed:
- Rather than organising against major publishers laying off hundreds of developers, the mob is focused on an independent Melbourne studio trying to fix a sunrise glitch.
- Just as past culture-war campaigns treated any project with a diversity consultant as “tainted,” the current anti-AI zealots treat a developer asking an LLM for a 10-line Unity workaround as an unforgivable ethical betrayal.
- And above all, its all operating in the social media sphere. What I call ‘Performative Enforcement’: Steam review scores and social media pile-ons are weaponised to force ideological conformity through reputational damage.
What frustrates me most about this entire incident, though, isnāt just the festival grandstanding. Itās the apology!
Calling a ten-line bug fix an internal “failure” and apologising for not meeting the moral standards of crazy people enacting an online tribunal only legitimises the mob. In the entire history of internet outrage mobs, an apology has never once de-escalated a purity crusade; it just confirms guilt and drops fresh blood in the water.
At some point, game developers will need to just state the obvious: “Yeah, we used an AI tool to fix broken code, just like every other programmer on the planet does. Get over it.ā
I have a more nuanced position on broader arrival of fully generated āSlopcoreā that I plan to write about soon. But right now itās late in 2026, and the technical genie isnāt going back in the bottle. Good luck to those IGF jurors trying to enforce a zero-tolerance wall next year, and the year after, as LLM-assisted coding becomes standard across almost every studio. Seeing progressive indie jurors, creators , and a new swathe of ‘gamers’ adopting the exact same Gamergate tactics over AI use is disgraceful.
Swapping “ethics in games journalism” for “ethics in engine debugging” doesn’t change the underlying mechanics.
It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
On The Blog
Oct 2026 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 10. Photo-a-day for the month of Oct 2026.
Photo 365
Terminal Access
I really enjoyed this piece on curiosity by Adam Phillips in the LRB the other week.
The superego,ā which has all too easily passed into ordinary language as the secular equivalent of the conscience, has had a rather chequered career as both an idea and as one of the main ācharactersā in our so-called internal world. Originally deemed by Freud to be the voice of the restrictive and forbidding father internalised by the Oedipal child (the father who stops the child, in this literally familiar scenario, from sleeping with the mother), the superego seemed to relish its part as the punitive, mean-minded killjoy that supervised our lives, using guilt and shame to keep us on the straight and narrow. Its astonishing power revealed the strength of our wish to be inhibited and controlled (just think of the scale and scope of guilt and shame in our everyday lives).
Dipping the Stacks
Average moments of a long-term meditator
The moment when you contact what is sometimes called God. And forever after, the idea of doubt feels silly. Mystery is not sillyācontacting the Divine aspect of Reality doesnāt resolve all questions about the afterlife, or good and evil, or anything like that. But doubting the divine, when you have eyes to see it, is like doubting gravity.
Are Reddit Boys’ Struggle Apartments Actually the Future of Design?
In a time that celebrates wealth, taste, and conspicuous domestic consumption, the bro home quietly rejects all three. Realized at global scale through mass production and distribution, the bro home is the final stop of the minimum dwelling.
Chinese technologists, on the other hand, were raised in an internationalist milieu. Until recently, they believed that techno-utopian aspirations and business pragmatism united them with their US counterparts. They are discovering now that some Americans truly see themselves as fighting a new Cold War. As weāll cover later, their response to this realization is furious ā and, increasingly, radical.
The Entire History of Italian Brainrot
What started as innocuous non-sense AI images, became internet folklore, a global sensation and one of the biggest Internet memes of 2025. When people started pretending that a bunch of random AI images were an IP, they inadvertently caused these character to break out and become a global entertainment success story, without being tied to any company.
Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
We had a slightly stupid moment when we thought we’d got it wrong, and the clock was running backwards – only to realise we were inside the clock and so were looking at it the wrong way. Doh.
Reading
Same as last week. Still reading:
- Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold
- Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen (2nd time)
I finished reading
- Voice of Command by Richard Swa
Music
Why? – Oh Golly / Yes Lord (LP)
After the release of 2024’s break up album The Well I Fell Into, it’s clear that Yoni Wolf hasn’t had a great couple of years. But that time has produced another a creative masterpiece. Oh Golly / Yes Lord is two sided record half empty / half full, though where to draw the line isn’t as simple as that.
I’ve seen a few reviews of this LP lamenting that Wolf ‘just isn’t the rapper he used to be’ but I think thats really unfair. Over the years each Why? album has become more and more of a personal journal of sorts. Brutally honest self reflection set to music. If you start at the beginning of Why?‘s discography and listen straight through, you will hear the arc of a whole life lived thus far.
I can’t stress how important that arc’s influence has had on me. Every album that drops is an honest gem.
Remember Kids:
āthis disputation would be needful against freethinkers (les Libertins). We are agreed on this point and those who are so mad as to contradict it can only rest their contradiction on the Scripture itself, contradicting themselves before contradicting the Scripture, using it in the very protestation which they make that they will not use it.ā
Saint Francis De Sales