Looking for Love on Pandora
A talk at VideoBrains by Tommy Thompson about procedural generation and Borderlands 2.
Starting off with the connection between the rate of interaction, the prominence of the procedural generation, and the variety in the system, he draws a connection to looking for a gun that you love in Borderlands.
He argues that the experience of trying to find the outlier in the the data, the gun that’s perfect for your current point on the level curve, is the greatest strength of the game, rather than the details of the procedural generation system.
It’s also partially a response to Kate Compton and Mike Cook’s calls for changing the ways we talk about procedural generation.