House House said Big Walk used AI in well under 0.1% of its code, after some IGF jurors said they would not vote for any game that uses generative AI. The dispute puts IGF Games judging and disclosure standards under pressure as the festival’s jury weighs entries that may have used LLM tools in development.
The company said it used AI only in the final stretch of development, and only to work through difficult technical problems and bugs. In some cases, it copied snippets from LLM responses as a starting point for game code, then modified them. House House said generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.
Sam Barlow and Lena Raine
Some Independent Games Festival jurors published a statement saying they would not vote for games that use generative AI in any capacity. Sam Barlow and Lena Raine signed it, and the statement said there had been a significant increase in the number of games developed with generative AI tools in this year's IGF entries.
The jurors also said there had been fairly intense discussion and disagreement, with no universal consensus. Austin Walker posted a copy of the statement, which did not speak for IGF as an organization or for all jury members. Big Walk, a co-op game from House House, became part of that debate soon after the statement circulated.
House House and IGF
House House said its main use of LLMs was to research issues it encountered with third-party code. It said it had already researched one shadows problem extensively and spoken to an engineer at Unity before using an LLM chatbot on the issue.
The company also said it disclosed its AI usage as part of its IGF submission. It said it had not put that information on Big Walk’s Steam page because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. House House said voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of generative AI technology or its treatment as inevitable.
Big Walk and the IGF
House House said it supports work to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologized that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet those standards. That leaves the immediate question for IGF Games judging: whether jurors apply the same line to every entry, or whether disclosures and limited use change how they handle the game in practice.
The statement from the jurors drew that line sharply; House House drew a narrower one around its own code. Those two positions now sit beside each other inside the same awards process.
