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 hand-encoded 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.