Proceduralist Readings, Procedurally

Abstract

While generative approaches to game design offer great promise, systems can only reliably generate what they can “understand,” often limited to what can be handencoded by system authors. Proceduralist readings, a way of deriving meaning for games based on their underlying processes and interactions in conjunction with aesthetic and cultural cues, offer a novel, systematic approach to game understanding. We formalize proceduralist argumentation as a logic program that performs static reasoning over game specifications to derive higher-level meanings (e.g., deriving dynamics from mechanics), opening the door to broader and more culturally-situated game generation.