The second of Playdate’s signature “seasons”–bundles of games for the becranked handheld launched on a weekly basis for a set number of weeks–launched on May 29th this year, and on the 6th of June, friend-of-exp. Brandon Sheffield posted this:
Wasn't feeling Wheelsprung in the new Playdate Season 2 drop, something felt off for me. And well! There you go. play.date/games/wheels…
— Brandon Sheffield (@brandon.insertcredit.com) June 6, 2025 at 6:44 PM
[image or embed]
Well, that’s not good.
And… surprising? If you’re unfamiliar with Panic, the Portland-based Mac app developer who have been flush enough to not just put out a boutique handheld but even do things like put out Katamari Damacy t-shirts back in the day just because they could (I had the silver one, and I still miss it) they’re supposed to be one of the good ones. Their publishing arm put out Thank Goodness You’re Here, the official exp. Game Of The Year 2024, a beautiful, hand-crafted experience of regional and human specificity, and have just recently released the similarly human work Despelote, so it seems odd that they’d be so ok with our era of AI slopification that they’d not only allow it on Playdate but intentionally publish products featuring it.
The developer of Wheelsprung, Nino van Hooff, did respond to Sheffield on Bluesky, stating:
“Github Copilot was used for auto-completing single lines of code … As for text: I used chat gpt as a kind of dictionary and to explore level names. It might come up with Rolling Ripple and I would use that as inspiration for Ripple Ride.”
Rolling Ripple? This kind of “I used it but only in genuinely unnecessary ways” sounds more like a slippery slope to me. You couldn’t ask your co-developer or playtesters or QA team or publisher for level names? You couldn’t… finish writing the lines yourself?
As someone who hadn’t picked up Playdate Season 2 yet, and who has a strict “no AI” policy, I was interested to know what Panic had to say over this. So I got in touch with them and though it took a while, they did actually get back to me. Cabel Sasser, Panic’s co-founder:
“We hadn’t considered the possibility that a Season Two game might use LLMs, and in hindsight, that was naive — we take full responsibility for that. In the future, we’ll change our Season application and make sure we ask detailed questions about any LLM use in submitted games up-front, setting proper expectations early on.”
But considering they missed this, did any of the other Playdate Season 2 games feature GenAI?
“We tripled checked, and no other Season 2 games use any LLM-generated content.”
Alright then, but what if you’ve got a similar “no AI” policy to mine, but you’ve already bought in?
“If a customer feels hoodwinked by Wheelsprung’s use of LLMs, we totally understand, and they can reach out to our support team directly. While we’re not sure what we can do yet (it’s very complicated) but we’re working on some ideas.”
So there you go. Though this is disappointing, it does sound like the concerns have been heard, and while I’ll continue to hold off purchasing Playdate S2 (and it’s what I’ll advise) I don’t feel I have to scrap an article on Despelote that I already had in progress now (phew). If you’ve already picked up Season 2, I do suggest getting in touch with their support–at least to let your opposition to GenAI/LLMs be known. Let’s not just hope that Panic will decide to implement a blanket ban on GenAI/LLM use in titles they publish or on Playdate–let’s make it clear that’s the right move.
And for what it’s worth: though I’ve just written an entire article on this, I’m not interested in the public shaming of the developer (or Panic). I simply hope this is a lesson in the insidious ways GenAI is being made inescapable and how it is being positioned to encroach on human creativity subtly enough that people overlook it. Think of the tools you use in your practice–there’s probably some stupid fucking AI button somewhere, promising to make your work just a little bit easier. It won’t, and it’ll make what you’re doing a little less human. A little less you.
But they want you to click it anyway. So they can pretend what they’re offering is actually useful, so they can raise more money to drop more city-sized data centers that suck up more lakes of water and more fossil fuel, ever accelerating our planet’s death spiral. Fuck that. Let’s be better than that. Let’s be one of the good ones.