A procedurality of joy
About taking things not that seriously
If we are not careful, we may automate ourselves to death. Not literally, of course. I do not fear Cyberdyne systems, robots killing humans, or any other classic dystopian scenario involving superintelligent machines. After all, humans are already pretty good at annihilating humans, and we seem to enjoy doing so. If there is a job I think we won’t fully automate, that will be genocide (though we may facilitate it with automation – ours is the age of the Fordism of mass murder).
I am more concerned about one of the multiple avoidable apocalypses that may be coming. It is a procedural apocalypse, defined by substituting everything we care about with computer-generated slop. Music, arts, games, and literature are all produced by dull AIs that try to reproduce a profoundly conservative and traditionalist culture emerging from the statistical biopsy of our past that is machine learning.
Many people are writing about this, so I’ll add a quick comment and move on. AI-generated content can kill the joy of making things, even if they suck; the pleasure of giving things we made to others; and the fun of interacting with things made by people. Things understood as forms of expression, as dialogues captured in materials.
As a poetic form, the roguelike shows us a sketch of another future. Procedurally generated content can be a collaboration of human and artificial agency driven by joy: the joy of making and the joy of playing. In Darius Kazemi’s excellent deep dive into Spelunky's procedural generation systems, we can see both the beauty of the machine-generated levels and the role of human taste in framing how those processes should run. Without the human, the system could produce endless slop. Without the machine, humans would never stumble upon surprising combinations of elements.
As poetic forms, Roguelikes gives players an excuse to play with automated systems. These are not instrumental systems; they are not made to multiply the slop around us. They are fundamentally unserious systems. If play is defined as acting as something trivial that is fundamentally serious and important, the systems that create the roguelike experience are designed with that purpose. They are about the procedural generation of pleasure, about the fun of creating something that was not there, that was not made by a human, but with a human touch.
Procedurality in roguelikes is a sensual, communicative, aesthetic experience. Roguelikes are the poetics of procedural content generation. These games are not attractive because there are systems that automatically create parts of the game. Roguelikes require the taste of a human in the human fine-tuning of the results of PCG and the taste of a player in entering that conversation, learning to read the algorithms and the humans behind them, and knowing when to follow and when to dissent. Roguelikes are a dance of agencies: the designer, the system, and the player are entangled in creating something new every time the game is played.
My biggest fear is to live in a world where I do what systems want me to do. Deterministic systems are just seeking my input to complete their functions, pass some more data, and continue to demand some action and feedback from me. Software can be a way of informating pleasure.
At the same time, I love computational systems, their expressiveness, and the way they show worlds within this world I never knew anything about. Roguelikes taught me how to play with these systems. Roguelikes are a lesson on not taking computers seriously but joyfully. In letting me play with these unexpected futures, roguelikes show me the joy of systems appropriated for creativity and play. The stories of my playthroughs and the rituals of playing roguelikes are all forms of transcending the banality of utilitarianism and productivity that often reduces software to an instrument to produce and consume better and more.
I am writing all this to make sense of my love for roguelikes. That may be my mistake. I cannot ultimately translate that love into words because I am reducing my roguelike experience to something instrumental. And roguelikes are not instruments. They are dances, conversations, and rituals; roguelikes are what matters to me because they are software that tells me something about someone else, about myself, and about itself, and it does so by letting me play with them. Paraphrasing the punk band Idles, Roguelikes are the procedural systems of joy as an act of resistance.