Generative AI is more than just a touchy subject, and for good reason. It’s creatively bankrupt, and when used at its worst, it does a grave disservice to talented artists who have spent thousands of hours honing their craft. Now, this is Recreate Games studio. party animalannounced an AI video contest with big prizes at stake, but unsurprisingly, it disappeared like a glass of cold vomit.
As shared by the X multiplayer game studio yesterday, May 13, the Golden Paw Awards challenge players to create short films in honor of their favorite animals. While the post itself appears to have been written using AI, it stipulates that “the AIGC must be a core creative tool, including but not limited to AI-generated images, video, music, narration, 3D assets, etc.” Eh. You stand a chance to win $75,000 in exchange for selling your creative integrity. That’s a lot of cash that could instead be awarded to people with skills beyond writing prompts.
The comments below the post are never supportive and aren’t all that great on Steam. Party Animals has received over 800 negative reviews in the past few days, most if not all of them criticizing Recreate’s AI support. Reflecting this, recent reviews have been marked as ‘mostly negative’. The entire event forum post attached to the X announcement now returns a “Page Not Found” error, so it’s likely that Recreate is actually reading the room.
My disappointment is immeasurable, but unfortunately this is the situation video games are currently in. From major studios to indie companies, Gen AI is increasingly being used. I love good old physics-based party games, so I really enjoyed Party Animals when it first launched in 2023. You could also play as an otter, which instantly pushed it to the top of the rankings in my mind, which makes me a little sad now.
If anything, this should serve as a reminder that we need to embrace AI in the most ethical way possible, especially if we don’t want to be criticized in the comments. This industry has already lost a lot of talent to the evil treatment of technology, and I hate to see it celebrated like this.
