ABSTRACT
At first glance, procedural content generation (PCG) and handmade design seem markedly dichotomous. One produces a near-infinite volume of permutations while the other only offers a single instance. One appears focused on replayability while the other seems to offer little that is new to the player who returns for a second playthrough. One is designed by an algorithm designed by humans; the other is designed directly by humans. One can only be learned in terms of the algorithm’s outputs while the other can be precisely rote-learned. One is used in only a small fraction of all computer games, while the other is so near-universal that many players may not even recognize that the first kind even exists. Despite these gulfs of difference, a significant number of games (including the author’s) choose to integrate these two design rationales in an attempt to have the best of both worlds and/or utilize procedural content to produce game experiences that are difficult to hand-make (and vice versa), resulting in patchwork level designs that are not entirely one thing or the other. This style of probabilistically varied level design—the absolute singularity of the handmade combined with the vastly unpredictable of the procedural—merits a close examination in order to understand the respective benefits of both procedural and handmade content, the different methods of overlaying these rationales, the gameplay experiences created by these methods, and the (un)intended consequences of creating such multilayered game design architectures.
