Polygamer - A Podcast of Equality & Diversity in Gaming & Video Games
  • About
  • Episodes
  • Guests
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Polygamer #48: Gillian Smith on procedural generation

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Ken Gagne
Gillian Smith

Gillian Smith is a professor of Art+Design and Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston. Her field of study is procedural content generation, in which aspects of a game — the world, its inhabitants, individual levels — are created on-the-fly. The resulting output, rather than being completely random, follows a predefined set of rules that results in a world that conforms to its designer’s vision, even if the exact manifestation is unexpected.

In her essay “A proceduralist view on diversity in games“, Smith argues that these rules can result in a game world that is more or less representative of its audience, as determined by the definitions and boundaries fed into the system. In this podcast, she discusses how this is so, some examples of procedural generation that does diversity right, and what the future for procedural generation is.

Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.

Links mentioned in this episode:

  • Gillian Smith
  • Gillian Smith on Twitter
  • “A Proceduralist View on Diversity in Games“
  • SpeedTree
  • Redshirt by Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris of The Tiniest Shark
  • Inside a Star-filled Sky
  • Passage: a video game by Jason Rohrer
  • Mike Cook’s ProcJam — join the jam!
  • Boston GameLoop unconference
https://media.blubrry.com/polygamer/www.polygamer.net/wp-content/uploads/podcast/pg48-gillian_smith.mp3

Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:29 — 26.3MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Related

Posted in Podcast | Tags: BrowserQuest, Gillian Smith, Passage, procedural content, procedural content generation, procedural generation, ProcJam, Redshirt, Rogue, Roguelike, SpeedTree |
« Polygamer #47: Mike Robles on fighting & board games
Side Quest #1: Star Trek Beyond with Sabriel Mastin »

Subscribe

Get our free email newsletter for updates on equality, diversity, podcasts, and more!
Send voicemail

Leave us a message, and we'll answer it on a future episode!

My Tweets

My Tweets

Recent Posts

  • Polygamer #128: Reflecting on Eight Years
  • Polygamer #127: Helene Utterback on polyamory
  • Polygamer #126: Aenne Schumann of Arcade Spirits
  • Polygamer #125: Game to Grow
  • Polygamer #124: Cyndi Wiley, Iowa State University’s Digital Accessibility Lead

Other podcasts

  • Character Reveal
  • Checkpoint
  • Ethics and Video Games
  • Feminist Frequency Radio
  • Spawn On Me
  • The Weekly Cooldown

Archived podcasts

  • +7 Intelligence
  • Diversi
  • Engage!
  • Fresh Out of Tokens
  • Gayme On
  • Girl on Guy
  • Less Than or Equal
  • Not Just a Game
  • Nuchallenger
  • Take This

CyberChimps WordPress Themes

Creative Commons License Polygamer by Gamebits is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://www.polygamer.net/. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://www.polygamer.net/about/.