During the recent Indie Game Awards, wildly popular RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was awarded two accolades: one for Debut Game, and another for Game of the Year, somewhat unsurprisingly. However, the IGA has now officially disqualified the title due to its use of generative artificial intelligence, which goes against the IGA’s fundamental guidelines and strict stance on gen AI. As they state on the FAQ section of their website, “Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.”
This resulted in the game’s two awards going to the next highest-ranking participants: the Debut Game award was instead given to survival horror game Sorry We’re Closed, while the new Game of the Year recipient ended up being Blue Prince, a mind-bending puzzle roguelike.
It’s worth noting, however, that Sandfall Interactive did provide some additional clarification on the matter. In an update to an article published by major Spanish newspaper El País, Sandfall Interactive went on to clarify that while there are no gen AI assets used within the game, placeholder assets were indeed used during development, but these were not intended to make it into the final release. Some of them still did, though. “When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.”
So, essentially, it was apparently an honest mistake, according to Sandfall. That said, the fact remains that gen AI assets were indeed used, even if they were never meant to be seen in the final game – so, in that sense, the IGA’s decision is understandable, especially in light of Sandfall’s initial failure to disclose their usage of AI. Them’s the rules, as they say.
This incident also serves to highlight a broader question regarding the utilization of gen AI and the extent of its involvement in various creative processes. One could argue that simply using generative AI strictly as a tool that aids – but does not replace – the work of the person using them, is an entirely different beast compared to actually cramming your finished product full of textures, music, visuals, dialogue or even voice acting that were created purely by a machine and some prompts. They’re not exactly in the same weight category, one could say, but opinions on the matter are understandably divided for a variety of reasons – including the fact that it is very much a potential slippery slope. You could say that just a little bit of AI is fine, but then where do you draw the line of what “a little bit” means? And so on. One thing is for certain, though: artificial intelligence is most likely here to stay; the genie is out of the proverbial bottle, and there’s no putting it back. The only question is whether or not we allow it to run rampant, and how we can responsibly keep it in check – but if you ask me, I’d say we’ll likely have an answer to that question sooner rather than later.
