Call it whatever you want, the game wouldn't exist without them doing something about it. And because they did something about achieving their vision other people get to play the game.
How about we just call these people the game Producers instead. Thats what a producer does anyway right? They make decisions of how the game is built, what goes into it, ect, ect, ect.
What if you get someone else to program it? By this logic, Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac, Mew-Genics) isn't a game developer, because he doesn't code.
Edmund McMillen isn't a game developer per se. As listed in his Wikipedia profile, he's a game designer and artist. He still did that work, though, and human beings still wrote that code. The end result is still an expression in part of his unique talent and creative process.
He could still be called a game developer in a general sense because "game development" doesn't have to explicitly refer to programming, as the game development process is multidisciplinary and multifaceted. But of course the dichotomy here isn't between "did this person or that person write the code" but rather "does a human who uses a machine to generate content deserve the same credit as a human who puts in skill and effort and does the work?"
Arguments equating the use of AI to using a compiler or photoshop or other tools fall flat because if those were equivalent no one would be using AI, the tools allow greater control and are less expensive. The entire use case of AI is that it replicates the creative process, not that it acts as a tool to facilitate that process for a human. AI can create assets and code that a person doesn't understand, and wouldn't be capable of replicating themselves, which wouldn't be the case using mere tools.
And yet AI people come up with these strained metaphors and false equivalences because they don't want to face up to the nature of what AI is, that it isn't liberating them from "gatekeepers" or freeing their creativity, it's commoditizing them and using them to generate content and putting them in a prison of their own device.
Oh please, just stop being silly. Being a game dev means you're building games which means you're thinking about the mechanics of the game and what makes something fun to play. The programming is not "game dev" and offloading it to an AI agent doesn't make someone any less of a game dev.
Totally! I'm sick of not being able to see what tools they use. In fact, I feel that we should also start tagging devs that use an IDE instead of properly coding games in notepad.
