I'm very uncomfortable with this House House LLM thing

I'd like to get real vulnerable for a few minutes, if you'll indulge me.

Back in 2023, I received funding from a government body here in the Australian state I live in (VicScreen, who's been single-handedly propping up the Australian games industry for ages) in order to complete development of a project I'd started back in ~2016. At the time that the grant came through, I'd just left a shitty, abusive office job working as an Executive Assistant for one of the branches of a construction union here in Melbourne that's currently embroiled in one of the biggest corruption scandals in recent memory (which may or may help fuck over the state government's chances of reelection in a few weeks). In this shitty office job I hated, I was making over AUD$100k/year and I more-than halved my salary to pivot to working full time as a game developer and focus entirely on Alcyone. I have absolutely no regrets about that decision and would have taken even more of a pay cut if given the option then or now.

For the last two or so years, I've been utterly struggling to find followup funding for my next project despite releasing Alcyone last year. I — incredibly naively, it would turn out — genuinely thought that releasing a game of my own — under my own name, instead of lending my creative energy as a contractor to other companies who under-credited my contributions — would open opportunities for me and make this process easier. I thought for the first time in my professional life I was finally getting my foot in the door as myself on my own terms and finally laying the groundwork for creative independence and creative self-sufficiency.

Obviously, a lot of shit has happened in the world since 2023, much of it completely outside of my own control — the games industry has flatlined and everyone's been fired once Embracer realised it was unsustainable trying to borg every company in existence and the hiring that happened during/after covid collapsed violently. I did think that I'd still be able to weather this because I'm primarily a solo developer with meagre costs and enough professional experience to be realistic about my capabilities, timelines, and budget — I'm also willing to pay myself in economic fumes if it means I'll never have to micromanage and babysit another "executive" twice my age again in my life. I knew that Alcyone was not going to make me a millionaire, it's an interactive novel and no one reads anymore. I did think that the game was going to make enough of a blip that I could confidently claim legitimacy when trying to find financing for the next project. I did think it would make that easier. It has not.

For the last two or so years now I have been struggling to find a revenue source that will give me stable runway to do my next project. I have written several novels' worth of documentation, budget spreadsheets, game design documents, pitch decks, and plain old application text in and of itself. I have done a dozen different grant applications with multiple different funding bodies by now — no exaggeration whatsoever. I am currently on Game Concept #5, trying to get something to stick with people and organisations who have the means to provide financial support. I have tried every imaginable avenue available to me that I can think of — from government grants to private funds to publishers within Australia and internationally, and even given serious consideration to Kickstarter again even though these days you need tens of thousands of dollars in advertising to fulfil a Kickstarter campaign and if I had that I'd rather spend it on game development. I've fleshed out multiple distinct game designs at this point, of which several have fully playable prototypes, trying to get something that will convince somebody to give me a full development budget of less than what I was making in a single year as a glorified secretary in an office job that made me hate life. I've borrowed money to incorporate a company, even, in the hopes that this would open doors to funding that I couldn't access as an individual alone. Were it not for both of my partners taking on an inordinate amount financial responsibility and supporting me pursuing something that gives me purpose, I wouldn't even be able to maintain the struggle — I would have had to give up and find a "real" job again (though with irony even that sucks — this year alone I have literally been hired four times, only to have each role collapse immediately for one reason or another; never in my life have I ever experienced anything like this before).

I'd hired someone to port Alcyone from the Twine prototype I built in CSS/HTML/Javascript into Unity back in 2019, and the first person I hired once I got the VicScreen grant was another programmer to finish the rest of development work needed before release. When the grant money ran out in late 2024, one of my partners — who is a software engineer in his own job — learned enough Unity and C# to lend a hand finishing up the remaining work to help me get the game released and handle some of the bigger bugs after it came out. I'm historically not the greatest of programmers; I generally understand enough to point someone else at what I think the problem is and I'm often right about the solution, but I don't have the confidence to build software from scratch or even modify someone else's scripts to a significant degree. I have almost thirty years' worth of effort trying to get my head around it — and people are shocked when I say I don't really think I'm a good programmer, given my experience in game development — but despite books, lessons, direct tutoring, and much head-bashing my brain just really doesn't work in a way that lets me usefully internalise anything about programming directly. I am self-taught with CSS/HTML/Javascript the way that I'm self-taught with most things I know how to do — I started working on a project I wanted to make, and I figured out how to get it done along the way.

For whatever reason, I have never been able to successfully figure out how to do the same thing when it comes to programming — I don't know if it's a different scale of complexity or what, but I do know that when I'm trying to learn through small sample applications that I have no interest in, my brain just absolutely refuses to retain anything because I'm not working on something I actually care about making.

And this is where I know people are going to read all of the above and decide I'm making excuses or justification but I'm not exaggerating when I say that fucking around (in the experimental sense, not the "CEO of Nvidia" sense) with chatbots has been absolutely transformative in a way I genuinely never expected it to be. In less than a year, I have become dramatically more confident at game development entirely because I'm working on things I'm actually interested in and when I don't understand something, the Anthropomorphisable Autocorrect has been the equivalent of having someone available 24/7 standing over my shoulder and helping me out. I have been able to pull apart my own game and understand the work that three other programmers did and suss out how that happened and it has fundamentally changed my relationship with and understanding of coding.

Some of those playable prototypes have been developed as a result of this process, and it's something I absolutely would not have been able to do a year ago on my own otherwise.

"AI" is an incredibly contentious topic and I've been extremely reticent to weigh into it at all for ages, but the drama at the moment with House House and the IGF has veered into territory where I'm watching people I ostensibly consider my professional peers discuss this with the same language that one would use for literal violence against other human beings — and I'm not being hyperbolic about that, either. People I look up to professionally are acting like House House has committed crimes that deserve the strongest kind of capital punishment in order to send a message to everyone else and scare them from ever doing the same.

Look, I'd rather not use the Devil Box for anything — every single one of the dozen budgets I've drawn up over the last two years left a considerably large line item for a programmer, because I would significantly prefer to collaborate with a human being than smash my face against a sycophantic text box that has the personality of an over-eager intern with a praise kink. Collaborating with other people is awesome! Making something with someone else's help is one of the coolest fucking experiences I have ever had. The playable prototypes I've developed myself were always intended to be demonstrative proof-of-concepts that would be replaced by a more competent human being once I had the money to hire them to do so.

I have been struggling, at tremendous personal effort and to the detriment of my own mental health being told no over and over and over again, to find that money. The maddening fucking thing is that every rejection is always "this is so great, we really love this, we hope it comes to market" and the people with the means to help make that happen choose not to do so; yesterday alone I had a double-whammy of two publishers within twelve hours of each other decline to proceed on anything after meeting with me about my latest attempt to get funding, both after asking me for additional materials and after several rounds of communication. Both of them loved the game concept, thought my execution and ideas were innovative, polished, original; yet neither of them want to proceed because they don't think they'd be able to help me market it effectively and what I'm making is outside of the sort of games they have confidence in supporting — the most frustrating "it's not you, it's me" that I can think of. Last month, I found out that I was not getting a different grant by accident because the government portal accidentally leaked the internal status of my application ~three weeks after I'd submitted it and a full two months before I expected to find anything out. The only saving grace was that I wasn't waiting months stressing about an outcome, but I saw the status in the portal and had to wait four days for someone to respond to my polite freaking out about it with "yes, sorry Joshua, you did not get the grant, we would have preferred that you didn't find out this way but oops." The application was declined not for the merits of the project but because in the current market they are prioritising support for people with either an established track record or existing publisher backing — things I might have had if my earlier career had not been taken advantage of by more powerful people than me who used my naiveté and excitement with "finally being a paid writer" in ways that are fucking me over decades later.

So, please tell me, what exactly am I meant to do? It's clear that to a large portion of my professional peers, including those on voting bodies for accolades that would be incredibly helpful for me to receive, even a prototype built with the Devil Box that's completely replaced by human assets later on is still tainted and impure — and this is to say nothing of my inafuckingbility to get the funding necessary to hire someone else in the first place particularly without a playable prototype to begin with. I'd prefer not to have to rely on ChatGPT or Claude because I'd rather pass that job off to another person, but I have no money to pay another person — so is it "you either get a human being or you can't do it at all" in order to satisfy criteria that I think is unreasonable in the first place?

I know that there are people who are going to absolutely take a look at that question and respond with a resounding yes, you just don't get to make things then and I vehemently disagree that it's a decision other people get to decide on my behalf. Particularly when the big voices in this conversation are people who do already have an established presence with established resources, it's hard not to feel like it's pulling the ladder up behind you — and don't even get me started on seeing vociferous teeth-gnashing against AI from people who treated me abusively in professional and personal contexts.

I get that for some folks, this technology is the epitome of evil and there is no compromise or nuance to be had because to them this is an ethical violation and you either have ethics or you don't — I certainly had a more hardline stance against it, particularly last year when Alcyone was released and someone who knew fuckall about the effort or work I'd put into my game accused me — without proof or cause — of using generative AI for its art and writing. I hadn't, for much of Alcyone's development the concept of generative AI or LLMs didn't even exist, and up to that point I'd been very vocally against it and clear that I'd never used it at all. But I also try to actually research something before I develop a strong opinion of it, and if someone's doom and glooming about how the Devil Box is going to take away my job I'd like to at least understand what the threat actually is.

Ultimately, I do not think this technology is evil; I have spent considerable effort trying to get my head around the opinion of those who do, because when people I respect have an opinion about something I don't share I do my best to understand them and where they're coming from. On this, I can empathise and see their point, but I ultimately fundamentally don't agree with the stance. I don't think this stuff is any more inherently evil than UberEats, Airbnb, Android, Photoshop, or social media is inherently evil. I think aspects are problematic the way that every fucking thing touched by corporate capitalism is problematic in the year of our lord 2026, but I do not think Sam Altman invented ChatGPT to secretly force everyone into being intellectually reliant on a chatbot subscription, and some of the vehemence I've witnessed surpasses the kind of conspiratorial energy that was ever-present during the pandemic. I can have misgivings about something without thinking it's evil; I can have problems with something's execution while still seeing its merit. I don't think that this stuff is any more immoral than any other aspect of modern technological living in a "developed country" in 2026, and the criticism of the environmental impacts come from people who, I feel, are really not prepared for the sort of reckoning they will have to have if they look at the environmental ramifications that come with Netflix binging, owning a vehicle, or eating meat. Modern living is a horrible fucking footprint on the planet; I'm absolutely happy to have a conversation about where that ecological impact should go — but there's an inherent hypocrisy in "this thing bad" when you're not also examining the other aspects of modern conveniences that you take for granted or never even thought about the electrical or water requirements of in the first place. I also can have misgivings with the hoovering of every word on the internet while still not thinking there is evil involved — people were stealing words of mine I'd written as a teenager in the early days of the internet back in 2000 and passing it off as their own almost thirty years ago; where actual copyright infringement has taken place there are mechanisms to enforce it without taking a hammer to the printing press wholesale.

In any event, the situation around House House has appalled me; I'm bothered by the AI slop cashgrabs as much as any other creative who takes pride in their work. It's always been my viewpoint that eventually this stuff will even itself out — customers don't want to buy shit, companies destroying themselves chasing the new shiny will collapse or realise how they've fucked up and have no choice but to pivot back to human labour, platforms will develop better policies that protect genuine creative effort because that's the only way to retain those paying customers. I absolutely think this transition will be unpleasant in a lot of ways which really fucking sucks for everyone other than a corporate echelon who won't be impacted nearly as hard as they should be, and I definitely agree that there should be a degree of strong pushback against those with the means and power to take responsibility and make ethical decisions — that pushback should be punching up, not lashing out violently in every direction against everyone who fails to live up to criteria no one can even agree on. Again, if the hundred-fucking-thousand Australian dollars I've been breaking myself into pieces over to get access to lands in my bank account tomorrow, I will happily hire a human being for development work right away — I already have people on board, available and interested, who I have had to go back to a dozen fucking times at this point and say "sorry, it was a no again" every fucking time. That's probably the most demoralising part of all of this — the budgets I'm creating pay myself pennies and most of it has been going to people with no or few credits in the industry, from marginalised backgrounds, who I have been trying to create opportunities for over and over again.

Earlier this year while I was complaining about this whole process within earshot of the CEO of a large, award-winning studio whose game had sold millions of copies, he said that I should just do a call out for interns or university graduates and get them to work for free with the promise of future sales or a share in my company. I struggle to fathom how this is less exploitive and more ethical than me making my own thing in my own time with my own Claude subscription which I am explicitly budgeting to replace if any of the myriad funding attempts I've been making for two years ever pan out — and I'm deeply bothered that many voices I would otherwise feel in alignment with as my progressive, leftist peers would agree that the latter is the more unforgivable sin here.

Absent anyone just giving me a fucking break, I would rather use imperfect tools that get me some of the way towards creating something I am happy with than sit in a fucking office job wanting to kill myself, and I'm deeply bothered that the animosity which should be directed at the real architects of this binary, crapitalistic choice is instead lashed out towards people who are generally doing their best with the options available to them, whether that fits some intractable ethical code or not. You pay me and I'll adopt whatever fucking ethics you want me to have at this point, otherwise I'm doing the best that I fucking can.