Procedural generation (Hereby PG), now one of the industry's buzzwords of choice since it became apparent that Will Wright's Spore will be using it to generate a universe stuffed to the brim with sentient dicks, is a process by which level designers admit they have no clue what they're doing and just let a computer take over. Worms is probably the most easy to understand example of PG, instead of designing each level individually what the developers implemented was a system by which a string of numbers would determine the terrain of a particular level, essentially making the possible level variations close to infinite.
Now back when games came on foppy disks, cassettes, stone tablets and what have you, PG was pretty much mandatory. Early games developers had to work within memory constraints so brutal that adding predefined levels proved impossible. Instead the programmers used algorythms to generate the levels on the user end meaning that while yes, 'The Sentinel' did technically have ten god damn thousand levels, after the first one most of them were created by randomly mashing the number keys.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/sentinel.gif]
The sentinel. An early example of how button mashing always works. Even when it comes to game design.
As media storage space increased developers found they could add levels as actual game assets rather than just strings of code giving them unprecidented freedom when it came to detail and design. Of course this backfired wonderfully because we, that is the gaming public, started demanding a lot more from our games. Gone were the days of random surrealist mazes in space and in their place came more detailed and logical environments. Unlike a pacman maze you can't just pull a decent video game level out of your ass, you have to have some degree of aptitude for it meaning all of a sudden developers had to start hiring level designers.
Now of course a level designed with a specific purpose in mind is always going to be a better than a level made by having your computer eat a bunch of digits then vomit them back out, but there's still the odd developer who uses PG when it comes to game design. Diablo is one of the better examples of random level generation done well. Sure the dungeons all look a bit alike but the layout changes were just enough to keep the grinding for loot from getting stale. At least for a while. On the other hand Hellgate London took random dungeon generation and complete fucked it up. Ensuring that in most quests the Super important Macguffin that's supposedly guarded by the most vicious of hell's denizens spawns right next to the dungeon entrance which makes the game's antagonists look retarded.
But as technology moves on, female character's breasts get bigger, and we continue on the inevitable march towards a game with a four barreled rocket launching shot gun, procedurally generated content seems to be on the up and up again.
This is a rest stop. Take a moment to rest your eyes and walk around the room.
If there's one part of a game design team that could easily be replaced with a computer it'd be the writers. Ever noticed how video games seem to follow a standard plot with very little deviation save the colour of the main character's trenchcoat and how many guns he can fire at once? So have EA and right now they're busy eyeing up the design department considering how many bearded English majors they can fire and replace with a robots. Next step, the development team.
Actually this isn't as bad as it seems. Imagine if we had a game that could tailor itself to your tastes? You could literally define what kind of game you want to play and it could generate it on the fly. You get to choose the protagonist, the setting, the message, what kind of game it is, how hard it is, when and where it's set, and then your games console would generate a game that I guarantee would be better than half the shit on the market today.
Now that I've got you all excited, there is however one little caveat. How exactly would the ESRB (or whatever they've replaced it with by then, probably the inquistition) give a rating to a game like that? How can you recommend an age group for a game that changes itself according to the player's demands? I'm sure there'd be age restrictions but how long would it take for someone to crack the protection and start generating games about throwing puppies off cliffs or eating children? I mean sure I might want to play a game with a well rounded, intelligent protagonist and female characters that don't dress like they're auditioning for a position at an escort agency but is that what little twelve year old Jimmy wants? Probably not, and therein lies the problem.
The biggest problem with a computer designing our entertainment, and this sounds stupid I know, is that they're not human. But even marketers were human at one point and they're at least constrained by the need to look at least remotely decent and respectable so the public doesn't burn them out of their nests and lynch them, but a computer isn't restrained by social opinion.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/withprey.jpg]
A swarm of marketers attack an IGN reviewer.
The computer will give us whatever we want without considering if it's what we need or if it's even remotely good for us. Case in point: Little Jimmy's parents buy him a copy of the game and he sticks it in his xbox 720 and fires it up. The computer asks him a quick survey, checks out his internet searches and maybe does fancy shit with electrodes and eventually comes out with little Jimmy's idea of a perfect game which is probably going to end up being something like this.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/censored.gif]
An awesome idea to be sure but not exactly what Jimmy's parents had in mind when they bought that computer to help him with his homework.
The opposite end of the spectrum is just as bad. It's well documented in films like Terminator and Wargames that the more intelligent a computer gets the more likely it is to stop running minesweeper and finding porn for us and start hating us with every silicon inch of its flawless electronic being. A computer running this game would spend every hour of every day learning about you, your habits, your likes, dislikes, aversions, and crushes. It'll trawl through the internet till it finds that geocities site you created back when you were 12 and it will store your teenage ramblings for later use. It'll rummage through your Ebay receipts and web history, it will record your msn conversations, it will take note of which friends you talk to and which ones you lie to so you don't have to deal with them. Let's be honest. It's only a matter of time before this machine absolute loathes you. Which is when you wake up to a game like this.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/game011.gif]
Now back when games came on foppy disks, cassettes, stone tablets and what have you, PG was pretty much mandatory. Early games developers had to work within memory constraints so brutal that adding predefined levels proved impossible. Instead the programmers used algorythms to generate the levels on the user end meaning that while yes, 'The Sentinel' did technically have ten god damn thousand levels, after the first one most of them were created by randomly mashing the number keys.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/sentinel.gif]
The sentinel. An early example of how button mashing always works. Even when it comes to game design.
As media storage space increased developers found they could add levels as actual game assets rather than just strings of code giving them unprecidented freedom when it came to detail and design. Of course this backfired wonderfully because we, that is the gaming public, started demanding a lot more from our games. Gone were the days of random surrealist mazes in space and in their place came more detailed and logical environments. Unlike a pacman maze you can't just pull a decent video game level out of your ass, you have to have some degree of aptitude for it meaning all of a sudden developers had to start hiring level designers.
Now of course a level designed with a specific purpose in mind is always going to be a better than a level made by having your computer eat a bunch of digits then vomit them back out, but there's still the odd developer who uses PG when it comes to game design. Diablo is one of the better examples of random level generation done well. Sure the dungeons all look a bit alike but the layout changes were just enough to keep the grinding for loot from getting stale. At least for a while. On the other hand Hellgate London took random dungeon generation and complete fucked it up. Ensuring that in most quests the Super important Macguffin that's supposedly guarded by the most vicious of hell's denizens spawns right next to the dungeon entrance which makes the game's antagonists look retarded.
But as technology moves on, female character's breasts get bigger, and we continue on the inevitable march towards a game with a four barreled rocket launching shot gun, procedurally generated content seems to be on the up and up again.
This is a rest stop. Take a moment to rest your eyes and walk around the room.
If there's one part of a game design team that could easily be replaced with a computer it'd be the writers. Ever noticed how video games seem to follow a standard plot with very little deviation save the colour of the main character's trenchcoat and how many guns he can fire at once? So have EA and right now they're busy eyeing up the design department considering how many bearded English majors they can fire and replace with a robots. Next step, the development team.
Actually this isn't as bad as it seems. Imagine if we had a game that could tailor itself to your tastes? You could literally define what kind of game you want to play and it could generate it on the fly. You get to choose the protagonist, the setting, the message, what kind of game it is, how hard it is, when and where it's set, and then your games console would generate a game that I guarantee would be better than half the shit on the market today.
Now that I've got you all excited, there is however one little caveat. How exactly would the ESRB (or whatever they've replaced it with by then, probably the inquistition) give a rating to a game like that? How can you recommend an age group for a game that changes itself according to the player's demands? I'm sure there'd be age restrictions but how long would it take for someone to crack the protection and start generating games about throwing puppies off cliffs or eating children? I mean sure I might want to play a game with a well rounded, intelligent protagonist and female characters that don't dress like they're auditioning for a position at an escort agency but is that what little twelve year old Jimmy wants? Probably not, and therein lies the problem.
The biggest problem with a computer designing our entertainment, and this sounds stupid I know, is that they're not human. But even marketers were human at one point and they're at least constrained by the need to look at least remotely decent and respectable so the public doesn't burn them out of their nests and lynch them, but a computer isn't restrained by social opinion.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/withprey.jpg]
A swarm of marketers attack an IGN reviewer.
The computer will give us whatever we want without considering if it's what we need or if it's even remotely good for us. Case in point: Little Jimmy's parents buy him a copy of the game and he sticks it in his xbox 720 and fires it up. The computer asks him a quick survey, checks out his internet searches and maybe does fancy shit with electrodes and eventually comes out with little Jimmy's idea of a perfect game which is probably going to end up being something like this.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/censored.gif]
An awesome idea to be sure but not exactly what Jimmy's parents had in mind when they bought that computer to help him with his homework.
The opposite end of the spectrum is just as bad. It's well documented in films like Terminator and Wargames that the more intelligent a computer gets the more likely it is to stop running minesweeper and finding porn for us and start hating us with every silicon inch of its flawless electronic being. A computer running this game would spend every hour of every day learning about you, your habits, your likes, dislikes, aversions, and crushes. It'll trawl through the internet till it finds that geocities site you created back when you were 12 and it will store your teenage ramblings for later use. It'll rummage through your Ebay receipts and web history, it will record your msn conversations, it will take note of which friends you talk to and which ones you lie to so you don't have to deal with them. Let's be honest. It's only a matter of time before this machine absolute loathes you. Which is when you wake up to a game like this.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/game011.gif]
