How do we talk about Ren'Py and media production overall in an age of LLMs?

It seems that the Ren'Py Patreon post where the developer admitted that he used large language models (LLMs) to help with a few tasks is finally getting attention. I knew about this for a while, but I didn't bring it up in any public spaces because it's the kind of cognitohazard that messes with the heads of people trying to make their first visual novel.

Unsurprisingly, people are interested in pivoting to other software in hopes of an AI-free workflow. I am not going to belabor the point that Kayin has made, that "looking at your entire software chain like that isn't useful and is just going to drive you mad." If you're familiar with tech news, then you know that your OS, Python, and internet browsers already have the LLM taint.

Likewise, I'm not going to participate in that never-ending discourse where people are evaluating what makes for an acceptable compromise. The only reason that people who aren't in the know have learned about LLM usage in Ren'Py is that the developer tried to distinguish his efforts from vibe coders on BlueSky. I'll let others dissect this bizarre logic.

Instead, I am more interested about what this means for transparency in media/art production. One of the reasons I got into this "writing about niche media" business is that I was drawn toward extensively written production notes. I have a book detailing Kon Satoshi's storyboards for Paprika. I loved reading Sylvie's notes for Discover the World. And I also write up postmortems of interactive fiction games to reflect on what worked and what didn't.

I view this activity as not only fun but also a way to make social meaning out of the work we've done as artists. When the SeaBed developers mentioned on Twitter that they used OpenOffice's Calc to design the mansion, I read this as the devs publicizing their diaries to the world. It offers us insight into how they approach things and broadens the horizons of how we could make games in the future.

For my own purposes, these notes are useful interlocutors for my own thoughts. I don't necessarily want to excavate the author's intent as I am using them to understand why I agree or disagree with creative decisions made during the art production process. They are literature that helps me engage with the subject matter on a deeper level. I wouldn't have developed a satisfying account of Elizabeth Smyth's Bogeyman without the postmortem.

But I will also admit that this transparency can be harmful. It's hard to take seriously Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 after learning in a penned coda that the novel was a diatribe against minorities censoring literature. One could make a compelling argument about never meeting your heroes -- or at least never seeing them work inside the sausage factory.

This dynamic has also emerged in discussions on games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. When Indie Game Awards learned that the developers used generative AI during production, they rescinded its awards. It didn't matter if the AI placeholder textures were patched out; this went against the regulations the festival had. But for the organizers and many fans, this news went under the radar for a long while. I can only wonder if the charade would have gone on for longer if the co-founder didn't blurt out in print that they were interested in exploring the technology.

Interest in the new Tomb Raider game also flatlined when the Steam storefront page included a generative AI disclosure detailing its usage of placeholder assets and promise to make fully human-crafted games.

My precious doujin games are not immune: Labyrinth of Touhou Tri still has a few placeholder icons despite the handmade art, many RPG Maker MZ games made today use generated backgrounds because the royalty-free backgrounds people were using cannot match today's video resolutions, and developers are experimenting with Adobe Firefly (it's apparently more ethical, but can you really trust Adobe in this day and age?)...

These new trends have somewhat made me less excited about playing games. Not only do I find this profoundly unethical but I don't want to contribute attention and money toward the slop-ification of genres I care about: r/incremental_games is drowning in so much slop that someone made a fake game announcement tapping on all the trends that vibe coders are exploiting.

While knowledge of this technology has harmed my own evaluation of media made today, I am content that at the very least these disclosures are kinda happening. I know there are people who hide their tracks -- witness the mysterious Pixiv pages that have disabled comments as of late -- but the fact that some companies and people are still willing to play along is better than nothing.

Nevertheless, I remain worried about what this means for artists who want to be chatty about their process. One of the reasons why I found the BlueSky comments by the Ren'Py developer more irritating than usual is that it opens up criticism of developers for knowingly using an engine that is tainted by LLMs.

The people who read English-language visual novels are likely going to be folks who categorically despise any usage of LLMs. Not everyone is going to be won over by facts like "your OS has vibe coding" or "Python already has this crap". It also didn't help that the Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2, a beginner-friendly jam, was happening around this period -- I've read a few posts by first-time developers wondering if they should pivot to another engine or worse, give up. The organizers have thankfully responded by telling these newcomers what experienced participants like me are going to do: there is no need to check the generative AI disclosure because that is meant for people who are willingly using those resources to make their games.

But I won't deny that this creates a chilling effect. I can easily imagine people feeling the need to hide that they are working in Ren'Py to prevent generative AI accusations because people do this with Unity, RPG Maker, and Game Maker engines. Those engines get a bad rep for enabling people to easily create asset flips. Using Ren'Py is a source of embarassment for visual novel developers like myself now.

There are thankfully alternatives to the engine. I use the Videotome family if the scenarios are relatively simple. There are now a couple of visual novels made with Dialogic like Glow of Honeydew. I've also heard of good things about Light.vn, which has been used in commercial projects like the Putrika series.

The last engine is the one that people have been talking about the most for good reason. I'm interested in it because it's a lightweight engine that uses Lua, a language I am familiar with from playing with PICO-8. The only reason I hadn't made the jump is a lack of accessibility tools out of the box. That said, it's also the only closed source engine of the bunch. We thus have to trust the developer's word that the engine isn't using LLMs of any kind. When we move from Ren'Py to light.vn, we are also trading the awareness of working in transparently compromised software for the comfort of a black box.

I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.

It is welcoming because we are putting a human face on the paintings we make. We can assure our audience that, yes, we are working our asses off trying to compose music. But it is also debilitating because our audience wants us to be hyper-aware of the ideologies embedded in the technologies we use to create our work. In the eyes of the general public, creating a Ren'Py visual novel introduces ambiguity on whether we support generative AI or not.

What I fear in the near future is that people will gradually stop leaving paper trails on how they're making digital art. It is in many people's best interest to shut up about their production process, so fans won't have to evaluate the degree of contamination inherent in the project. This blissful ignorance about how stuff is made can easily become the status quo if nothing drastic changes.

This trajectory is also antithetical to the allure of beginner-friendly engines like Ren'Py. The promise that you can make a visual novel after watching and reading a few tutorials is real. Some of the Toxic Yuri VN Jam developers I have chronicled for Mothership are first-time developers. Part of the success can be attributed to a friendly atmosphere encouraging people to share their progress and tips.

But now, we Ren'Py developers have to worry about whether the engine they're working with will be perceived by their audience as another example of people softening up their stances against LLMs.

I don't have a comprehensive answer on what should be done, but I know this environment is unhealthy and antisocial. It discourages transparency and amplifies the commodification of our work by not letting people peer into its machinations -- we are incentivized to make our audience think we are performing miracles right now.

People will have different responses to this problem, but for me, I am going to be even more transparent about how I'm making things. I've always believed that the role of criticism is to de-commodify and validate the labor-power expended through these works. I'm writing this piece on Kate because I thought it would be a short piece -- my usual workflow involves Obsidian otherwise.

This doesn't solve the problem, but I want to make it clear that anything I do is something you can not only do but iterate on. I am sharing my thoughts on this troubling subject because I believe in a critical commons where we can share and develop ideas together. It is better to have a thoughtful discussion about what we can do now rather than just doomscroll forever.

I am smitten by Robert Yang's suggestion that as much as we like to believe that game development is a "technical discipline", the aesthetic experience of a video game "has nothing to do with code or technology". If anything, video games are cultural work: they're getting people to talk and imagine these moments they may never experience, but their engagement is shaping the landscape of how we talk about the world writ large.

It is this cultural work that interests me as both essayist and game developer. If I am able to articulate what makes a certain perspective so intellectually stimulating, I believe that my audience will leave the piece with something new to meditate on. I have thus privately considered myself a cultural worker.

But we are living in times that limit the efficacy of such efforts. It is safer to avoid conflict and strife than to reckon with our ambivalence and figure out our own approaches. It is unpopular to be a killjoy and even more unsatisfying to stress that we must make do with what we have and be transparent about it.

And yet, I still think there's value in sticking to my guns, to argue that we should interrogate how we use legitimately democratizing technologies like Ren'Py and explain why we are using this and that. Perhaps, we shouldn't be simply asking the Generative AI cohort to disclose their tools -- we should do that too as part of our collective meaning-making.

We are already engaging with the politics of the materials we use, so the next step might be making it obvious to everyone how much we hate the system that controls our means of production. That revulsion is another ingredient of what makes our work socially meaningful.

So I hope that we will keep talking about our craft, else we are going to lose what makes it ultimately cultural: that we are trying to get people to make stuff and participate in culture too.