"Content is Bad"

"I just came across an article by the good folks at Introversion discussing procedural animation and its benefits versus hand crafted content. Some of my favorite games of all time are riddled with procedural content. The universes of Elite, the dungeons of NetHack, the random maps of Age of Wonders...all these are littered with procedural content."

"For Introversion Software’s latest game, DEFCON, the only real content that we made was the audio. Almost everything else in the game is generated from publicly available information – the locations of cities, longitudes and latitudes of the various coastlines and country borders of the world are all freely available on the internet. DEFCON was in development for about a year.

Introversion’s Darwinia, on the other hand, has about 10 hours of game-play from hand-built content, and took 3 years to develop. And each of the landscapes in Darwinia is generated procedurally from a few lines of text – if each of these landscapes was handcrafted too, who knows how long it would have taken."

Introversion - Subversion
Lost Garden: "Content is Bad"
Introversion Software: Procedural Content Generation