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The reason why procgen in games is, as we like to say, a great way of getting twice the content with four times the work is that you can't fight Shannon's laws any more than you can fight the laws of thermodynamics. You can't give the audience more information than you were willing to put in.

Sometimes this means manually creating a lot of material that is going to be recombined, sometimes this means spending an unreasonable amount of time defining the exact parameters and structure of a grammar or a generator.

It's a magic trick of the same kind as the ones where something large comes out of a small box; it's done by making something that *unfolds* itself. "Generation" is almost a misnomer, really, it's *decompression.*

Any aspect of the system that isn't downstream from those choices is, essentially, noise. A little bit of noise is texture, a lot of noise makes the semantic content of the piece collapse out.

Ultimately I think the first few games with LLM chatbot NPCs are an interesting novelty, but there's no particular long-run future in this because every game that does this has functionally the same NPCs. it's all just a fungible commodity.

Ultimately it's a shallow misconception to think that procgen is about making things that are "infinite". If you've seen every biome in Minecraft you've seen all of Minecraft.

What procgen is doing in almost every game that uses it, from Civilization to Nethack to Minecraft to Spelunky, is really managing the game's information economy so the player can re-experience and re-play the same things over and over without the game being functionally "spoiled" for them.

Honestly, I think it's even worse than it seems. These systems create outputs which would be described by the maximum number of people as the inputs. Part of the implication to that is anything not in the input *must* become un-memorable and unworthy of mention. Conceptually invisible to the mind.

Why are the genAI curtains in the generated room blue? For a reason: because that was the color statistically optimized to avoid all notice or commenting on by the human mind. To be a void of thought and meaning, intentionally optimized as such by consequence of the transformation applied.

They go to great lengths when setting these systems up to specifically avoid certain biases due to this: to be capable of generating a non-white man with the prompt "man" and some other obvious biases. Can barely manage that. But everything else? The most flattened "normal" for all but the prompt.