It's very complex, because I know there are people who love games, art, etc. with some kind of procedural generation, and you can put a lot of work into creating a procgen system that creates really nice results.
But also, procedurally-generated games feel like empty content to me. Even Hades. The parts that do appeal are the parts that are hand-crafted, like the story and unique bosses.
Procgen art for me runs the gamut from "fun toy" to "meh". I'm almost never impressed by it.
@aeva I would make a distinction between simulation or procgen as a starting point/background deatil, and procgen as the primary mechanic.
A civ-type game that generates a random world by simulating plate tectonics, wind and weather patterns, etc. or an open-world game where foliage is auto-placed are fine.
So while I don't love e.g. Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft, I do like them more than most roguelikes.
The more of the game is gameplay-focused procgen, the emptier and more pointless it feels.
@aeva I guess to answer your question more directly, "yes, I always view procgen negatively" - but again, it's not a moral judgment; it's a "me" thing. I'm glad people are making art that other people who are not me enjoy.
@tess that's an interesting distinction to make. The normal meaning of the word includes everything you're describing as simulation, along with a lot of other things. I'm used to thinking of the word specifically in the context for programmatic creation tools (Houdini, Blender Geometry Nodes, OpenSCAD, my project Tangerine, etc).
@aeva that does seem broad; like, is an art tool that fills a surface in an image with a realistic-looking texture be procgen in the same way as 99% of Starfield is?
If you define it that broadly, I don't think there's anything I can really say about it.
But there's a vast spectrum from "the textures on the bushes in this landscape are procedurally-generated" to "the entire landscape you will be traversing as the primary goal of the game is procedurally-generated".
@tess ok so to back up quite a bit, the motivation behind my poll is because there's been a gradually increasing trend of "procgen" being colloquially used as a negative term, much in the same way that I think that the well has been poisoned for the word "algorithm". These are both fairly broad umbrella terms that encompass a lot of things ranging from wildly complex marvels of mad science to things that are so trivial to the point of being invisibly ordinary.
@tess and so the problem I have, is procgen is also commonly used to describe much more narrow things, and one of those things is the kind of tool that Tangerine is as well as the sort of art such a tool makes.
The broader trend freaks me out because I've put an enormous amount of effort into building Tangerine and by extension everything I've made with it, and it'll all just be binned next to NFTs and automated plagiarism systems without any hesitation.
@tess now here's the funny part: I put rogue-likes on the poll because I figured they were probably one of the first things people commonly think of when they read "procgen", but it did not occur to me at all that rouge-likes might also be a contributing factor to the negative connotation of the word.
@yora oh. parametric just means something is parameterized in some way, usually so that you can either have it adapt to a specification of some sort or contextual constraints. An example would be things like blender geometry nodes, or OpenSCAD
@yora pretty much I was trying to reach for another term for when a computer plays a nontrivial role in the structure and creation of a work, but the creative decisions are direct active decisions made by the human or humans who made the work.