Procedural Content Generation & Emergent Gameplay
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007Found a cool article about Procedural Content Generation here, which refers to games such as Darwinia, Defcon, the upcoming Spore from Will Wright, and some classics such as Elite:
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/336/procedural_content_.php?page=1
This type of design has been around for a while; however, I believe it is going to become more and more critical in the future of game development, as does the author of the brief article. This technology, along with emergent AI, emergent gameplay, and simulations (such as physics gameplay) are all leading us, as developers, to a world where our games are more realistic, less restrictive, and may even require less work to create.
Our players are getting tired of the same old puzzles that have only one solution. They want to solve puzzles in their own way. This is where we need to abdicate some of our authorship when designing those puzzles. Using simulations and emergent gameplay concepts, we can give players the perceived freedom they desire.
Procedurally generated content will also provide our players with a sense of variety to the gameworld and characters. Dynamic difficulty as well as dynamic characters and environments provides strong replay to games that would otherwise be sitting on the shelf after the first run through. And of course, the more of our content that is procedural, the less we end up having to build by hand.