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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Zero marginal content already exists with procedural generation (PG).

The problem with PG is that it's all the same after a while - i.e. one of the chief complaints of No Man's Sky is that all the PG planets look the same after a short period of time.

The real value isn't zero-marginal content, but zero-marginal narration (or story telling) that breaks new ground. Piecing together PG or zero-marginal content isn't enough, any next step breakthroughs will come with higher-level orchestration of said content.

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Here's my observation as mostly a player and (non-game) programmer but sometimes creator. To make these open ended games interesting there need to be large numbers of distinct unique interactions between things in the world, exhaustive testing will therefore be impossible and you will need to approach testing differently. If you're making a game like this, and you give people the chance to play a demo but they don't completely astonish you by doing something you'd never considered then your game is going to be disappointing.

The game world needs to make some sense (ie don't have the results of an interaction be merely pseudo-random) but it's OK if it's a bit weird. The real world is a bit weird, a little bit off the trivial defaults. Mario interacts with his world in a more or less predictable way... but lots of the edge cases are strange. Mario can't walk off the screen... but he can be pushed off by things. He bounces on some objects... but, the rules for how Mario bounces are hard to grasp, for a casual player it doesn't matter. In Minecraft if you put two bucketfuls of water a space apart from each other, unlimited water is the result. But if you put two bucketfuls of lava the same distance nothing interesting happens. Inconsistent, but not so haphazard as to be baffling.

If your world is in the resulting sweet spot, people can entertain themselves more or less indefinitely just like in this world. You can procedurally generate such worlds, but you must be prepared to have your players not interact with it the way you intended. When you buy a child a $$$ game and they spend hours happily playing with... the cardboard box it came in, they aren't doing it wrong, they're having fun, you don't get to dictate what other people enjoy. Lots of video game creators have that ego problem where they can't let go of how they thought the game is supposed to be played, and if you have procedural generation that's inherently wrong. Write a visual novel next time.

Elite Dangerous is a counterpoint to that; massive procedural galaxy, but very tight and designed gameplay loops.

Maybe I don't see it. A friend spent a few hours operating like a tourist bus service in Elite Dangerous, where somebody would contract him to go to specific places and then come back. But he wasn't playing it a week later, so I have no idea if there's actual depth there (Build a chain of tourist hotels orbiting interesting phenomena maybe?) or that tourist job is just one of a handful of ways to make some money but it doesn't really go anywhere.

The tourist bus thing is procedurally generated missions saying "fly from X to Y". It doesn't really go anywhere interesting; no difference to flying cargo missions.

I think you are spot on. I have been toying with a formal theory about this stuff which I then turned into a rambling HN post. Here's what I came up with:

In my theory, the reason that NMS is unsatisfying is because it has great procedural generation breadth (PGB), but insufficient procedural generation depth (PGD).

PGB is defined as just the raw number of composable pieces that can be used to generate artifacts. So, how many plant bits, animal bits, biome bits, etc there are available to the procgen system. NMS has sufficient PGB, there are lots of bits.

PGD is defined as the influence or interaction between PG artifacts. The influence can manifest as either affecting the generation itself (a high-gravity planet reduces the maximum size of procgen critters) or artifact behavior (a dim star cold planet alters the critter behavior to reduce movement to conserve energy). NMS has neither, as far as I know. Human defined categories or tag metadata for PG elements does not count. Declaring that sets of procgen components are all "desert" is not an interaction. NMS has very low PGD, the animals, plants, and biomes do not influence each other. The devs have grouped components together to make biomes look and feel self-similar. But this was not done procedurally, and has no depth to it.

A game like Rimworld on the other hand has a lower PGB than NMS. By the numbers, there are far fewer variations of entities in Rimworld than there is in NMS. But Rimworld makes up for this by having much higher PGD. The procgen landscape influences climate and biomes. The biome and latitude will influence growing season which influences the carrying capacity of herbivores which influences the carrying capacity of carnivores. The procgen of the pawn's social and family relationships influence each other's behavior. The available calories on the map influence what pawns are able to eat - which will interact with their food preferences... The most important thing is that PGD makes the procgen entities actually matter and creates surprising stories.

(As an aside, It occurs to me that PGD is directly related to emergent behavior. It is possible that this could be formally proved, as conway GOL emergent behavior is entirely predicated on neighboring cells affecting each other. It might be possible to prove that any system with sufficient PGD is capable of emergent behavior: which is really what we want from a PG system. We want to be surprised by the unexpected, something that GOL is absolutely capable of. In fact you could probably use GOL as a starting point for this whole theory of PGD/PGB.... hmm....)

The king of PGD is Dwarf Fortress. It has very high PGB and PGD, and its ability to create surprising stories is legendary. My hypothesis is that this is _why_ Dwarf Fortress is so good.

Anyway, since NMS has no PGD, it has no emergent behavior (except by the players themselves), and you come away from it feeling that it is a mile wide and an inch deep. No shade though! It is a beautiful piece of work -- I have been playing it from launch, and I think it is a towering achievement (not to mention the most incredible PR story in gaming history). No Man's Sky is an outstanding work of art and it should be remembered for what it is, not what it could be (or what many people think it should be). And the emergent gameplay of the players is really fun too.

But when I think about what it might be like to have a higher PGD in NMS... it would be really something.

I don't think you can call procedural generation "zero marginal content." When dealing with PG, the content is the procedure, not the output, and the procedure never changes. There is a distinction between PG and a generative model like DALL-E. PG involves procedures that are written and understood by humans. Something like DALL-E, while technically a deterministic procedure taking inputs and producing outputs, operates via a process that is not directly understandable to humans.

Plenty of games get procedural generation right, from NetHack, to Spelunky, to Minecraft. No Man's Sky might just be a bad game.

“As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls. Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were ’roughed in’. It was a common accident in the Fiction Department.”

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