Since 2014, the ACER Foundation, under the Australian Council for Educational Research, has run a large-scale event called the “STEM Video Game Challenge” to encourage young people interested in becoming game developers to get involved and share their creations with the developer community. However, after 2026 the event will be discontinued entirely, and the reason is that the entries have been overrun by a large amount of “AI slop.”
According to a recent report by PC Gamer, this game-making competition, which has a 12-year history, has officially been canceled because it has become increasingly difficult for the judging panel to distinguish which entries used AI-generated technology and which were truly handmade by students.
Participants in this competition are mainly elementary and high school students. Participants can register independently as individuals or form development teams of up to four people. They must create a game based on a theme provided by the organizers and submit a game design document as well as a short trailer showcasing the game content.
The parent of one of the long-term participants was at Reddit The forum shared the news that the “STEM Video Game Challenge” will officially be discontinued, and expressed regret over it, saying that his teenage son and friends have taken part in the event for several consecutive years. Every year they gather to discuss and ultimately rely on their passion to create their annual entries, which has allowed them to build skills and a shared goal outside of their studies while also developing their confidence.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Cathy Zemaitis, head of the Student Learning and Progress department under organizer ACER Foundation, explained that the decision was mainly driven by the rapid development of “generative AI” in game development, which has made it increasingly difficult for them to determine which content was created by the students themselves, and this has also caused the competition to gradually drift away from its original purpose at the time it was founded.
Although using AI technology in professional game development can indeed speed up development and reduce costs, one of the purposes of the “STEM Video Game Challenge” is precisely to “help students develop skills that meet real industry needs.” This means that if participating students begin to rely excessively on generative AI tools before they have learned the basic core skills of game development, the entire event will of course lose focus entirely.
Unfortunately, the development of generative AI in game development seems to have gotten out of hand. For example, at this year’s October Steam Next Fest, more than one-third of all new indie games used AI technology, and this trend will only become more serious in the future.
“I know that as adults, we understand the world is sometimes unfair, and we have to learn to adapt. But this news really hit me hard, because this time it was children who were hurt. When I told my son the news, he was clearly devastated; honestly, it felt as if part of his identity had been destroyed along with it,” the parent wrote on Reddit.
Source: KOCPC Chinese