Worldbuilding and Procedural Generation

I recently gave a talk at Dakota State University about procedural generation and worldbuilding.

The basic thesis is that worldbuilding is about constructing imaginary worlds directly out of ideas, and so we don’t need to limit ourselves to generating the artifacts of a world–the maps and encyclopedias.

Instead, we can directly expresses ideas about the world through the structure of the generator that defines it. After all, the greatest expert on what dwarf in Dwarf Fortress is like is found in the source code of Dwarf Fortress.

I used the occasion to talk about the thinking I’ve been developing around the poetics of generation, building off the inspiration I’ve found in NaNoGenMo (not to mention Emily Short’s work).

You’ll recognize more than a few examples I’ve talked about here on the blog, as well as several that I haven’t written about yet. I view it as one small step toward an aesthetic theory for working with generative systems.

While I don’t have a recording of the talk at hand, I have put the slides online. Plus my notes, such as they are.