Gardening Games

This post by Max Kreminski (Epitaph, blackout poetry generator) is about gardening games, in contrast to the usual use of procedural generation to make spaces to explore.

I think it speaks to something I’ve been circling for a while, which is that I’d like to see more generators that feed into each other and interact with other systems.

Exploration games have been a fertile field for procedurally generated stuff, but as Max points out, tends to be about consumption: every time you find an interesting location, you devour it and never return. Gardening games, in contrast, are about building and recursion, revisiting the same space but in a different state.

Videogames in general tend to use space as a synecdoche for time and progress: moving to the next map in an RPG or an FPS corresponds to moving the plot forward. It’s an easy, flat structure that’s become embedded in our playing vocabulary. You enter a new area, deplete it, and move on to the next.

There are, of course, exceptions: the kinds of games that Max is talking about where the limited space but recursive interaction feel more like gardening than conquest.

I didn’t have a vocabulary for it before I read this, but I immediately recognized that it’s relevant to a question I’ve been puzzling over for a while, when it comes to certain games: Does the map look more interesting or less interesting once you’ve interacted with an area?

Some games feel quite dead if you turn around and look at where you’ve been. Others at least record your history. Some are more vibrant when you’ve finished than when you started.

And, as Max points out, while infinite terrain generation has created some great games, that’s only scratching the surface of possibilities for what procedural generation could be used for.

I’d like to see more one-city-block scale generated spaces, where density is favored over infinity.

There’s lots more to be gleaned from the essay, so do go read it: https://mkremins.github.io/blog/gardening-games/