Posted by anigbrowl 12/21/2025
Taking a scorched earth approach to AI usage is just being a luddite.
I'd love for them to create a separate category for "Best non-AI game". They can fight it out over that award. Perhaps then in a decade or so they will quietly let the award category fade away.
https://rl.bloat.cat/preview/pre/k7zsc1nls7af1.jpeg?width=19...
This does make it a bit more suspicious. It seems unlikely they coincidentally used gen AI placeholders only for the one case where it’s absurdly obvious.
Learning. From the website:
> I started it on January 13, 2023, to learn something new and improve my GNU/Linux skills.
Also, not relying on a single service for one thing is a good thing, as Reddit itself demonstrated when they closed off API access.
To others you may be addressing, I suspect they would say the ship has already sailed on textiles. Perhaps they are trying to sink this ship before it sails.
Machines? Bah, humbug!
/s
The Indie Game Awards, despite sounding similar to The Game Awards, is an unrelated organization that holds their awards the same week. They are small and this is their second year.
The founders of this studio come from rich family backgrounds, to think they have anything in common with what the average person understands as an "indie game" developer is laughable. For example, they supposedly rented an office to work in, in a building owned by the founder's father's real estate firm, of course.
Projects like these used to be called AA games. It's a fantastic game, it doesn't have to be indie to be good.
Putting essentially arbitrary limitation on which tools game developers are allowed to use is just nonsensical. Yes, the output of AI models can be really bad, but then a game obviously does not deserve an award. Especially for an indie game, with limited resources, AI can be a huge force multiplier. Gatekeeping awards based on these meaningless characteristics seems just very strange.
But i don't mind people using AI it's their own choice, the focus then just becomes in the curation skill of the individual, team, company etc of the generated AI output. So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.
To nitpick: the independent game awards are the Luddites here. The Luddites were a protest movement, not just a group of people unfamiliar with technology.
In the historical context that's apparently become appropriate again, Luddites violently protested the disruptive introduction of new automation in the textile industry that they argued led to reduced wages, precarious employment, and de-skilling.
> Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
I haven't found anything more detailed than that; I'm not sure if anything more detailed actually exists, or needs to.
And, second, what counts as generative AI? A lot of people wouldn't include procedural generative techniques in that definition, but, AFAIK, there's no consensus on whether traditional procedural approaches should be described as "generative AI".
And a third thing is, if I use an IDE that has generative AI, even for something as simple as code completion, does that run afoul of the rule? So, if I used Visual Studio with its default IntelliCode settings, that's not allowed because it has a generative AI-based autocomplete?
Sure there is. "Generative AI" is just a marketing label applied to LLMs - intended specifically to muddy these particular waters, I might add.
No one is legitimately confused about the difference between hand-built procedural generation techniques, and LLMs.
So I think Gen AI is an umbrella. The question is, do older techniques like GANs fall under Gen AI? It's technically a generative technique that can upscale images, so it's generating those extra pixels, but I don't know if it counts.
A bunch of 'if' is an "expert system", but I'm old enough to remember when that was groundbreaking AI.
Do they count procedural level generation as generative AI? Am I crazy that this doesn't seem clear to me?
