This will be the last year for the Australian STEM Videogame Challenge, a competition for young people, as the entries have grown overrun with AI-generated slop. According to a report in PC Gamer the event, which has been around for 12 years, will cease operations because it was getting too difficult to determine which games were made with AI and which were made entirely by the kids themselves.
The contest was open to students from elementary to high school, and required kids either working alone or in groups of up to four people to submit a game based on a chosen theme complete with a design document and a short trailer showing off the game. On Reddit, a parent of a child who regularly submitted games to the competition lamented the competition’s shutdown. “My teenage son and his friends entered the competition for several years, meeting up regularly, discussing ideas, and working together on a shared passion project,” the parent wrote. “It gave them something exciting to work on, and a common goal to strive towards outside of school. It also gave them confidence, and made them feel part of a wider community.”
In a statement to PC Gamer, Cathy Zemaitis, head of the Student Learning and Progress division at ACER, the company that puts on the challenge, said, “The decision was driven by the rapid and complex rise of generative AI in game development, making it harder to judge what students made themselves, and moving the program away from its original purpose.”
The “justification” for using AI in a professional game development setting is to essentially make games faster and more cheaply. One of the stated purposes of the challenge is to “enable students to develop real-world skills.” How is that accomplished using AI tools, especially at an age when core game development skills haven’t yet been learned? I’d imagine not very effectively. And it really sucks that the example adults are setting with the push for and normalization of generative AI is resulting in the end of a valuable opportunity for the next generation to develop a skill. We are eating the game development seed corn.
“I know as adults the world can be unfair, and we need to adapt,” the parent on Reddit wrote. “But this really hit home for me, because the victims this time are children. My son was visibly gutted when I told him the news, and it genuinely felt like part of his identity had been destroyed.”