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Genres Are More Like Guidelines |
I was working on the second half of my "Sets As a Definition Language" article when I came upon a realization that meant slightly changing focus. The second half will still cover what it was supposed to cover, just more of it, and in a more unified way. That's what this whole site is about, after all. Finding the unified theory of procedural world generation.
However, I think it might be worth while to frame exactly why I'm creating a "genre" definition language in the first place. After all, most games - even the random ones - are hard coded into a specific genre, so why go to the trouble of creating more content than many players will actually use? Why go to the trouble of creating the ability for an orc to wear an evening gown when only like two people will think it's funny?
The truth is, a genre isn't just a literary thing like science fiction or fantasy, romance or drama. It's a collection of similarities that are shared amongst a bunch of thing. Not just similarities. Some genres are defined as much by what they are not than what they are. Can you think of a whole collection of similar things that might be defined by their similarities? If you said the product of procedural design, you've been reading my notes again you naughty bastard.
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One Dungeon, All Dungeons |
Let's look at the most simple and obvious case. When you think about dungeons in an RPG, they typically fall into several different… wait for it… genres. For example, a castle usually has stone walls with torches lighting the way. Sewers are all hallways with an eerie green glow lighting them. Caves, some might say, organic tunnels connecting at non-orthogonal angles. Castles are filled with guards, sewers filled with slimes and the occasional undead, and caves have lots of bats, bears, and one or two dragons. Castles are well lit. Caves are dark. And so on.
As you can see, a cave-type dungeon is a genre of dungeons. Though many of them differ in some ways (like a mine may have tracks and mine carts), they share similarities, including similar differences with other genres. A mine is as different from a castle as a cave is.
From a procedural standpoint, the way a cave differs from a castle may be nothing more than the floor plan generator and the set of objects which occupy it. At a higher level, when you start dealing with sub-genres, those differences become more complex.
A castle is built from rooms, which can be themed like a treasure vault or a throne room, with the hallways being rather nondescript. The difference between a castle, a dungeon, and a prison may be the number of floors, the kind of theme rooms you see, the color of the walls, etc. In other words, sub-genres are built from the details.
Why this is important is because when you create a template - a set of rules to procedurally generate a particular dungeon - you are not defining the dungeon itself. Instead, you are defining a genre of dungeons. Each unique implementation of those rules creates a new dungeon in the genre you specified. So even though you may be using the same generator to create floor 8 as floor 24, the differences in texture, components, and flow can create fundamentally different experiences.
In fact, it is the definition of these genres which contribute the most to the feeling of variety in procedural games. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to create a way to define genres, even if just to differentiate between dungeons.
Using the genre definition language that I'm in the process of specifying, you can basically design entirely new games simply by changing a set here or there. In the next article, I'll talk more about templates, which allow you to modify components and even combine them to create new components. By changing how the components are put together, you have a very, very significant amount of power over the final product. But the genre definition isn't everything. It's only the first step.
Wikipedia defines a genre as "a loose set of criteria for a category of composition". Set? Criteria? Category? Composition? Sounds stupidly familiar, as if that's exactly what the genre definition language did. But what it doesn't say is the make up of what's in that set. How they are built. How they interact.
You can say that a Flash Gordon genre has ray guns, hawk men, stereotypical asian overlords, laser swords, and giant phallic silver spaceships. But that doesn't tell you the plot of the story. That doesn't tell you whether or not the hawk men are proud warriors, like the Klingons, or whether they are cold and calculating like Vulcans. It doesn't say whether Ming is merciless or not. It doesn't give characters names or motivations. It is simply a list of elements that, one might argue, define a Flash Gordon story as opposed to a Buck Rogers one.
This is just the first step in creating a procedural game, though I argue the single most important one. Procedural content is less about procedure and more about boundaries. Defining a genre is entirely about defining boundaries. What you do within those boundaries… well, that's another story for another time.
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