How Big Walk inspired a new wave of debate on genAI in games

Big Walk is an excellent game about wandering around a big island with your pals and solving puzzles from House House, creator of Untitled Goose Game. It’s a Game of the Year contender and a delightfully silly experience that has earned its fair share of accolades. It’s also the unexpected center of yet another debate about AI on social media.

The furor began when a group of jurors from the Independent Games Festival released a statement saying they would not vote for any title that used AI. At first, this seemed like a fairly standard stance; IGF's juror pool includes creatives, critics, and developers, all of whom tend to lean anti-AI for obvious reasons. Things got more complex on social media when it was eventually revealed one of the biggest topics of debate for jurors was Big Walk.

House House told Aftermath they “estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code” was assisted by generative AI. There is no other use of generative AI used in the game, and an LLM was only used after House House encountered a technical issue that they could not internally solve. The developer then consulted an engineer at Unity, who was unable to come up with a solution. Finally, House House consulted a chatbot, eventually found a possible fix, and modified that answer. The end result is that a mere ten lines of code were partially generated by AI.