apna time aayega

First, here is something from the original El País article where the journalist, Jorge Morla, interviewed François Meurisse from Sandfall Interactive in one part of the article:

this is at the top of the article now. very clearly states that no generative AI-created assets are in the game, the only instance of it was a temporary placeholder for textures back in 2022 - but were removed with correct textures (and is art made by the team) that had always been intended for release. The placeholders ones were accidentally missed during a QA check. As a former QA checker in my last job, sometimes a few things get missed even in multiple passes so I feel this pain. additionally, it's possible that the pre-existing assets that were used were sourced from the Unreal Engine marketplace or any other free programs they were using. (Btw, this incident of the placeholder being left in happened way back in April and got patched out pretty quickly when it was brought to attention.)

I want to make it clear that I'm not excusing Sandfall's usage of Gen-AI and they definitely could've gone a different route when it came to placeholder texture assets (but more thoughts down below). Considering how much I've had to deal with Gen-AI stuff this year with a bunch of students using things like ChatGPT to do their homework, I will also personally never use Gen-AI for any of my academic or creative writing/art, and I dislike this technology in general.

But I think that people immediately bashing on e33 for "always being a bad game," calling it slop, and dismissing it because of this specific instance are just assuming huge chunks or even the entirety of the game was made with Gen AI when... that's not the case at all? Here's another part of the article:

this is the part that many other news sources and headlines are hyper focusing on since the recent news of the Indie Game Awards disqualifying e33 due to Gen AI usage, likely because of the fact that François Meurisse said, "We use some AI, but not much." Again, I'm not excusing Gen AI - but are we forgetting that AI in of itself exists in so many other forms - HAS existed in many forms - and has been a huge part of the technology used to create a video game? Even in the spellcheck and autocorrect features on the Office products I use for work, school, and writing has always been AI tech. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these programs are now utilizing new tools, calling it AI (buzzwords for everything lately) when you and I know it's just Gen-AI and LLM stuff that's largely unregulated, doesn't work correctly, and most of the time users are not allowed to opt out (I did on my personal devices/accounts, but I can't on my work device/accounts).

In any case, I'm not mad about them getting disqualified for this specific award and think it was justified because 1) I don't even consider it an indie game to begin with so idk why it was nominated in the first place lol, and 2) yes, there was just one instance of Gen-AI in the development stage which broke the rules of the nomination to begin with. Personally, this game is easily my GOTY for 2025, especially having just recently finished the main story endings just a few days ago. The amount of hard, human work that was put into this - from years of development, the art, the mocap, the voice acting, the music - I know this game was a huge labor of love and collaboration.

Am I upset about this use of Gen-AI? Well, admittedly yes, and it almost felt like a slap in the face since this game is so focused on art, creation, and painting, but I'm also - and don't get mad at me when I say this - not completely dismissing the entirety of the game because of this either. I also don't feel "betrayed" like how many people have been feeling, or think Sandfall is hiding things from us. A part of it is because, as I stated above, that this instance happened around 2022 and honestly, let's not pretend we didn't know people who were using Gen-AI at the time before knowing more about it, too, especially since the technology was so new (y'all remember Dall-E 2?). This seems like a case of it being used once as an experiment, and then literally never again as stated in the first screenshot I posted about how there is no Gen-AI in the rest of the game and final product at all.

It's just sad to me that this technology has evolved way too fast in such a short period of time, and quite frankly I think there's just a lot understandable fear and anxiety due to this AI market and bubble replacing jobs, and companies pushing us towards over reliance. I think this whole thing is just scary for a lot of people, which I totally understand and have my own fears as I continue into my new field of study and aim for Librarianship. I've been seeing a lot of criticism towards this whole thing where people are saying it's a "slippery slope" wherein one usage will lead to more and more. I get where this stance is coming from, because we've been seeing it happen in real time with so many companies and studios. Hell, the amount of actual and unregulated Gen-AI slop video games I've seen lately has been insane. You can easily tell when a game is strictly Gen-AI and nothing else, which e33 clearly isn't.

But with this, there's also a flip side - there are people who DID dabble in Gen-AI without knowing about its harm, eventually learned from their mistakes, took the time to educate themselves, and stopped using it entirely. Again, using my students as an example, one simple conversation and explaining why they shouldn't use things like ChaptGPT has led them to not rely on it anymore. This is something that can (hopefully) happen with many more developers to come. Of course, I don't want Sandfall or any other developers to rely on Gen-AI going forward in development processes and I DO want accountability, but I think it's safe to say that Sandfall is doing that and not doubling down on defending the usage (unlike some other studios out there, staring at you Larian) - I think they've been very transparent from the start.

I'm no game developer, but I'm a college teacher and current Information & Library Sciences MS student who has been learning more and more about the fundamentals of digital tech & software in the aid and use of information searching, and how this impacts us and different information behaviors. Clearly we're already seeing the impacts with this whole e33 thing, but also including other games like Blue Prince being falsely accused of using Gen-AI when it wasn't used at all (x). So, as we enter into the new year, with the AI bubble likely to burst soon, with more and more people grouping everything as AI, my questions are this: as more games are being released, how do we determine what lines developers can and cannot cross with AI when it comes to their development? Are we still going to conflate AI and Gen-AI as being the same thing? Is there going to be more education about the difference between what's AI and Gen-AI? Will there be better regulation on the usage of AI? and finally: If Sandfall or any other dev studio creates a new game and uses pre-built assets from other programs who don't disclose their Gen-AI usage, then what comes next?

As I said in the beginning, these are just my thoughts. I know I didn't touch on other aspects about Gen-AI, like environmental or cognitive impacts. For the purpose of this post, it wasn't really relevant as I was just thinking of the gaming sphere and recent critiques. This is just my piece to the ongoing conversation - and is something I look forward to exploring more as my next semester begins and I'm able to observe more impacts.

I've hyperlinked the sources I used within my post, but I'll also share the links directly down below as a kind of makeshift works cited page, including a Polygon article from today (12/22/25) that also discusses tensions over AI use in the gaming industry moving forward:

The link with The Escapist article that accused Blue Prince of using Gen-AI was taken down since it was proven wrong, but this is an archived link if you want to see how crazy it was. It wasn't embedding, so I hyperlinked it above but also here. And here's the bsky post by Raw Fury that disproved the Gen-AI claim, hyperlinked here.

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Why Dems Keep Screwing Up Media Efforts

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

my telenovela heart yearns for crownovela drama

It reads "any attempted theft will be reported to the police" in the 15 most commonly spoken languages by immigrants here other than English or other western european languages (in descending order).

This sign was only half of the art piece, the other half was the most stereotypically Icelandic painting I could think of:

When the piece was shown the painting and the sign were hung on opposite sides of the room, making the sign more of an afterthought for those who don't speak any of the languages written on the sign. Standing out just enough for them to notice it and maybe wonder what it said, but ultimately not giving it a second thought for the most part.

I wanted to highlight one of the most common ways racism and xenophobia present themselves here as well as the comfort of ignorance. The sign doesn't cater to you, you ignore it it, and you don't care what it might say. You don't have to think about it because it doesn't affect you.

For those who can read the sign though, or bother to translate it, this is just yet another reminder of people's ignorance and double standards. My inspiration for this piece came from my old workplace, where they had this sign hanging on one of the doors:

The main things that stood out about this to me were that

It was the only sign on the premises written in anything other than Icelandic and/or English

All of the additional languages (Vietnamese, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian) specifically targeted minority groups that already face discrimination here

The location of the sign. We only had 1 of these, and they chose to put it up somewhere where only staff would see it rather than the customers. In fact, it was right next to the break room so you had to walk past it every time you went on break. And it was a sign reminding people not to steal. Big win for inclusivity here

People love saying that we're not racist/xenophobic here even though we very much are. The problem is just that so many people don't take the time to look when it doesn't directly affect them. I was very happy with my piece because people actually came up to me and asked what the sign said because they wanted to know, it started a conversation and made those previously unaware of this issue more aware. I wonder if these sorts of signs would be anywhere near as commonplace as they are if more people looked at them critically and asked "why is this the thing we bother translating?"