Image: Still from Dead Cities 001 by Matt Schell 2018
A lot of my personal work explores concepts of generativity, procedural content generation and various forms of indirect or chaotic art creation. For many creators of procedural content, we are looking for moments of surprise and revelation, that 1+1=3 moment where through juxtaposition, coincidence or chance our generator throws up something beautiful or interesting. In a way I think of this process as analogous to exploring a natural landscape, and some of the sense of beauty we experience in that. The natural landscape is complex, shaped by chaotic forces yet also follows a set of underlying rules. Rivers do not flow through the air and trees are usually perpendicular to the ground. When they’re uprooted on their side, crawling around in or on their roots and the resulting small cave can be fascinating. We love waterfalls because the juxtaposition of cliff, river and gravity produces the beautiful emergent phenomena of water falling through the air. Working with, experiencing and exploring generative art has a similar feeling for me. The experience can be interesting on the superficial level, in which interesting immediate forms are thrown up, but also gives us an opportunity to practice systems thinking. How did this get here? What factors lead to this arising?
The moments of discovery we feel in the natural landscape are more exciting to us when they feel unplanned. There is a major difference in feeling when we hold onto a guardrail and follow the well lit path down into a cave, and when we discover a cave in the forest with no signs and no safety barriers. Derek Yu, in his wonderful book Spelunky, about the creative process behind the game of the same title, talks about the concept of ‘indifference’. In this case he refers to a rejection of the theme park approach to level design, in which every rock and shrub is carefully arranged and colored to lead you down the path to the next crafted set piece. Many level designers discuss the value in studying the work of the Disney corporation in laying out it’s theme parks, and there is no doubt that they are masterpieces of sight lines, spatial planning and careful, subliminal guidance. Like reading a great novel, swept up in the flow, we are effortless guided from one delightful experience to the next. But we cannot honestly call this an experience of exploration. At best this is an exploration on an invisible cognitive leash.
I had an early memorable experience playing Minecraft with my two sons, who were probably 4 and 5 at the time. We were building a house by the beach, and digging a moat around it, to fill with water and keep out zombies. In the process of digging out the moat around the house, suddenly my screen went black. What had happened? I had accidentally broken through into a cave. When I managed to bring some light into the cave I discovered a canyon like underground cavern system filled with skeletons and lava. The experience was memorable because of it’s surprising nature and the very real feeling that this space had been there beneath my feet, but no one had led me there, yet I had discovered it. I remember it now well enough to recount it, and that’s not something I can say about many video games. In this generated, indifferent environment I had an experience worth describing in a few sentences. It felt real to me in the way that no carefully crafted climactic set piece in a game has.
As computers become more powerful and our facility with procedural tools increases I hope that this is a thread we continue to explore. Indeed given the multi-billion dollar success of Minecraft I hope that it’s lessons of complex, indifferent, procedural worlds are absorbed and developed further.
