A group of Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors said they will not vote for any game that uses generative AI "in any capacity." Generative AI means tools that produce text, images or code from a prompt.
The jurors' statement said this year's entries have been "incredible," but that there has been "a significant increase" in games "developed with generative AI tools." That led to "fairly intense discussion and disagreement" among jurors, with no "universal consensus." The pledge comes from some jurors, not the festival as a whole.
Soon after, the developer of indie hit Big Walk published its own statement. It said it "sparingly" used AI in the "final stretch" of development, to "help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs."
The two statements show how wide the phrase "any capacity" is. Big Walk's developer describes a narrow use: troubleshooting late in production, not generating art or writing. A blanket pledge treats that the same as a game built around AI-made assets. Whether jurors intend that is unclear from their wording, and it is the question the festival's community will have to answer.
There is also a practical problem. Jurors play finished games and cannot easily see how a bug got fixed. A no-AI standard depends on developers volunteering the information, as Big Walk's team did, which means the studios most open about their process may be the ones that take the heat.
The jurors' own account of the split is the useful detail. If people who spend a season judging indie games cannot agree on where the line sits, entrants have little chance of guessing it.