The Other Vote

I want the prize from the man who doesn’t like me. Money can come from anybody. I’ve accepted money from people I wouldn’t ask to watch a sandwich. But a prize is supposed to tell you something money doesn’t, and a room full of your friends can only tell you that you’ve managed to keep some friends. I want the other vote. The one that takes a while.

Give me the cash, of course. Don’t try to pay me in the quality of the deliberations. I have bills with windows in the envelopes. But somewhere in the ceremony I want to catch sight of the man who had to be persuaded. He doesn’t have to shake my hand. He can sit there looking as if somebody has moved his car. It matters to me that he read the thing and couldn’t get out of it.

I allow myself this fantasy more often than is useful. It costs nothing, which is one of its advantages over entering prizes. In the fantasy I never charm the judge. My work does it. I don’t have to dress better or remember his children’s names. I put the pages down and something unpleasant happens to his certainty.

A few indie game jurors have found a way to make this fantasy uncomfortable. They’ve said they won’t vote this year for games using generative AI in any capacity, including code. They count programming as creative labor. Their objection includes the creative work used to train models without consent; it doesn’t stop at whether a player can see a generated picture. They’ve praised the games. They can think the work is good and still decline to vote for it.

Good and no. Those are difficult words to get into the same mouth. Usually I can persuade myself that a man who refuses me hasn’t understood the good part yet.

House House says it used LLMs sparingly toward the end of making Big Walk, sometimes taking snippets as starting points and modifying them. The studio estimates that well under 0.1 percent of its code was associated with that use, and says it used generative AI for nothing else. One problem involved unnecessary shadows behind the player rendering out to an infinite distance. In the studio’s account, the game became 50 percent slower for about twenty seconds at sunrise and sunset. Their research, their own inspection and a Unity engineer hadn’t found a solution. After some dead ends, a chatbot suggested a possible fix. They reworked it extensively and got it working: about ten lines in Unity’s rendering pipeline.

I keep coming back to the unnecessary shadows. There is something particularly aggravating about a thing going wrong behind your back, at enormous distance, twice a day. Not even a grand disaster. Twenty seconds of the morning spoiled. Then the evening. You work on something for years and the sunrise starts making extra work.

The temptation there doesn’t require a manifesto. It requires wanting to go home. Or wanting to stay another hour and finally have the thing right. I know that hour. The chair has become part of your body. You have stopped wanting supper and started wanting one small part of the world to behave. The studio’s account gives me a reason for the decision that isn’t stupidity or contempt for the work. It sounds like work.

And work is also in the jurors’ objection. Not just the visible work that gets a name in a review. A programmer doesn’t become less creative because the result is ten lines you hope nobody will ever notice. Nor does the earlier work used to train a model disappear because the present problem is irritating. Calling the fix small tells you how much code is involved. It cannot, by itself, answer a person whose objection begins before those ten lines existed.

What bothers me is the loss of my favorite appeal. Make it better. That’s the bargain I have imagined with the difficult judge. I can do something about better, or at least spend a long time trying. I cannot make a person consent retroactively to the use of their work. I cannot edit my way back to a decision made before the pages reached the table. Yet I still want quality to be the thing that changes the judge’s mind. It’s the only bribe I have any hope of producing.

I don’t want the judge replaced with a friend. A friend would give me the prize and ruin half of what I wanted from it. I want that stubborn reader with his reasons intact. I want him to have noticed the best passage, not missed it while checking a rule. I want the silence after he has finished reading, when there is nothing left for me to explain.

There are pages on my desk now. I have pushed the unpaid bills underneath them, which is not a financial arrangement but does improve the view. I keep thinking of that man at the table. He can tell me no. He has reasons I can’t dispose of by making him ridiculous.

I want him to read it again.

Developer statement: Was AI used to make Big Walk?. Jurors’ statement: IGF jury members on generative AI. Clarification: Sam Barlow on Big Walk and the awards.

Source: The indie game community is in disarray over AI and Big Walk