More Unpredictable Stuff

Michael Cook, creator of the game-designing AI Angelina and founder of PROCJAM, has been thinking about uniqueness. Procedural generation can create unimaginably vast amounts of things, but are those things unique?

He summaries the most common vision of procedural generation–“More Unpredictable Stuff” and discusses how both what we hate and what we love about procedural generation is summed up this way.

This strikes me as an important conversation to have, particularly given the number of major upcoming games that use procedural generation. When you have a generator that can produce unpredictable stuff, what are its limits? Can you measure interesting uniqueness, and how does that differ from unpredictability? Should you make your game infinite, or should you deliberately limit its scope? Can you think of uses for procedural generation that go beyond “more unpredictable stuff”?

You can read Michael Cook’s article on the Games by Angelina blog here: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2015/10/more-unpredictable-stuff/