Jokes aside, I do kinda worry that techbro AI brainrot is going to poison discourse about games with procedural generation. Procgen is intentional, it is written by designers and engineers who understand the domain, and it serves a specific purpose.

I wasn't a huge fan of procgen content in games before but yeah it doesn't deserve to be lumped in with LLM discourse

Agreed. The hype about LLMs is poisonous to any legitimate use they may have, in or out of the games industry, and the copyright issues don't help much either.

Dead Internet Theory becoming reality

To be fair, proc gen was already massively misunderstood by pretty much everyone who isn’t a game developer. 🙃

I think that once the hype around the current generation of "generative AI" has died down, nuance will return. I already get a lot of mileage out of just saying "different types of AI have been a part of video games and data analysis for years, GenAI is a fad"

This is the frustrating thing about this convo and why I hate that they call this new slop "AI" like. Plenty of things that are NOT "AI" were already called AI like pathfinding etc, and now it's all clumped together into the same poisoned slop 😤

Just wait until the 90's Elder Scrolls devs procedurally generated kickstarter game comes out. We'll see all kinds of takes, especially with a fanbase that big and opinionated

My multi-decade dream game project would heavily feature procedural content generation (the idea being "a Metroidvania that feels like exploring a different handcrafted world every time you play it"), and it's very hard to describe it without sounding like I'm trying to pitch an AI product.

Yeah, I saw one person be like "why should I play level if someone didn't care to make the level" about procgen on Mastodon and I was like "WTF?" (I stayed out of it tho, but heart and soul goes into writing procedural generation algorithms and I get upset about when people shit on that)

that's been poisoned since No Man's Sky procgen did become a shallow trend for a while where it was visibily badly utilized, but it has been part of designers' toolkit since the beginning gamers as whole tend to latch on to shallow discourses and procgen hate is probably gonna be around forever