Preliminary Poetics of Procedural Generation

I recently gave a talk about my theories about how we can express meaning through the processes of procedural generation. I called it “Poetics of Procedural Generation” in the Aristotelian sense of a poetics being a theory of literary forms. 

We need, as Mike Cook has said, better ways to talk about procedural generation. For starters, I object to the mutually-exclusive order-versus-chaos framing of procedural generation that I sometimes see thrown around. I think the reality is closer to the Apollonian and Dionysian balance I discuss in the talk: dice and patterned tiles can and do co-exist.

The talk also covers my views on how we can discuss the different forms of  Complexity, Form, Locus, and Variation in procedural generators. Each of those probably deserves its own post, so watch the video (or wait for me to write it).

If you’d rather just read the paper, I’ve posted it online too: https://isaackarth.com/cv/DiGRA_ProcgenPoetics_20180722_conference.pdf