It's been 5 months since I posted about the Steam AI score idea and its ramifications (#345, #436, #459, #480, #594, #595, #628), and the discourse around AI usage and gaming has progressed enough that I feel confident about how the future will play out.

It seems clear to me that the vast majority of gamers will eventually be okay with AI usage, especially if such usage is disclosed and detailed like with my AI logs. Most people will not read these, but it doesn't matter because what people are looking for are signs of effort and that the game was not built from a single prompt. Seeing a list of 100+ logs pretty much curbs any claims of "this is effortless slop." It's also clear that what I said in Just don't lie is correct, the recent Big Walk drama (their disclosure, IGF jurors) has a few people upset because they did not disclose AI usage on Steam, despite AI coding usage disclosure not being required, and the people who are upset do not care that it's only 0.1% of code affected, any AI usage taints it for them, this confirms my claim that it's better to either lie or be 100% transparent, I have personally chosen to be 100% transparent but it's easy to understand why developers would lie instead, still, they shouldn't do it, as it increases noise and makes the world a worse place both for others and for the developer. This 100% anti-AI section of the population will always exist and will likely not change their minds, probably autistic-leaning due to the black and white thinking and inability to compartmentalize properly, which is an endearing trait in many ways, but annoying in other ways.

Because most people will be reasonable about it, and because, at least as of today, the progress of models in terms of gamedev capabilities has been somewhat steady throughout the entire year (this is perhaps to be more detailed in another post), most of my thoughts regarding the ability for decent games to be built automatically, that assumed a future where quality games are abundant and thus the person is scarce and becomes the important resource, are likely not going to come to pass in their extreme forms.

As for the IGF portion of the drama, as I mentioned in Son of a Serpent, being truly independent means that I can say that:

Gamergate was the fucking funniest thing that happened in video games and that I wished it happened again without having to worry that I'll get blacklisted by someone or some group. And the reason I am unblacklistable is because I don't care about things like awards, or influencers, or the press, or any of these things that are irrelevant to making games.

If things like awards matter to you, and it upsets you that the award categorized a game wrong, you are still operating in its frame, and it still has power over you. The only way to truly win and make yourself actually independent is by transcending it instead by not caring.

People who are unreasonable and who would discard your efforts because you used this or that other tool are irrelevant and should correctly not be engaging with your work. Being honest and 100% transparent is your way of filtering your player base and fans towards a composition of reasonable human beings who are cognitively flexible and who appreciate thoughtfulness, nuance and moral complexity. Every story-based work I plan on releasing in the future has these traits (like It Follows did) so it's good for me to not cultivate a player base of people who cannot think in those terms. This also applies to gameplay, all my games are build-heavy and varied, although they should be even more so, one of the reasons I dislike the VS-like -> incremental path is due to what I mentioned in meaning and commitment (#204, #213, #264), but also because that direction is less about the player cleverly figuring out some niche build that breaks the game and more about just linearly amassing power over time, which is just less cognitively interesting to me.