This will be the final year of the Australian STEM Videogame Challenge, a competition aimed at young people, as entries have been overrun with AI-generated garbage. According to a report from PC gamer the event, which has been running for 12 years, will cease operations because it became too difficult to determine which games were created with AI and which were created entirely by the children themselves.
The competition was open to elementary through high school students and asked children working alone or in groups of up to four people to submit a game based on a chosen theme, accompanied by a design document and a short trailer showcasing the game. On Reddit, a parent of a child who regularly submitted games to the competition lamented the discontinuation of the competition. “My teenage son and his friends participated in the competition for several years, meeting regularly, discussing ideas, and working together on an exciting project,” the parent wrote. “It gave them something exciting to work on and a common goal to achieve outside of school. It also gave them confidence and made them feel part of a larger community.”
In a statement to PC gamerCathy Zemaitis, head of Student Learning and Progress at ACER, the company running 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 did themselves and moving the program further from its original goal. »
The “justification” for using AI in a professional game development environment is essentially to make games faster and cheaper. One of the stated goals of the challenge is to “enable students to develop real-world skills.” How can this be achieved using AI tools, especially at a time when basic game development skills have not yet been acquired? I guess it’s not very effective. And it’s a real shame that the example adults are setting by pushing and standardizing generative AI is leading to the end of a valuable opportunity for the next generation to develop a skill. We eat the corn seeds intended for the development of the game.
“I know that as adults the world can be unfair and we have to adapt,” the parent wrote on Reddit. “But it really hit me hard, because the victims this time are children. My son was visibly devastated when I told him the news, and I really felt like a part of his identity had been destroyed.”
Gn tech
