Generative Methods

The field of procedural content generation continues to grow in scope and in technology, but the term “procedural content generation” awkwardly suggests that the field’s output be defined by its ability to produce game “content”, a term that fails to capture the breadth of artifacts produced by PCG researchers. There are many parallel fields of research on using algorithmic means to generate what we often call “content”, but due to differences in terminology and industry they have remained invisible to the mainstream of games research. In this paper, we propose the term “generative methods” to refer to all such generative systems. This term relates our practice to similar work in generative art, generative music, generative design, and other fields, and reconnects game artifact generation problems to their historical (but non-game-specific) instances that have often been overlooked.