Another bad faith / inexperienced take.

Also, what happens when the model generates an environment that can’t be traversed? What if it places invisible walls in weird places?

That’s also one of the reasons why it’s interesting. This happens a lot when implementing regular mapgen and you have to fix it until it only generates correct maps. AI can perceive what it generated and make sure certain invariants are holding and if not, modify map to fix it, and continue going and going. You can ask it to start with noise and carve space for villages and carve roads between them. You can ask to start with noise and quests and generate roads based on what makes sense for progression, and so on.

I only really enjoy WFC mapgens, simply because structures they come up with are largely driven by modular pieces and that produces interesting results for longer time (for me personally). I find noise/biome/temperature driven open-world worldgens boring af, and I get a feeling I’ve seen it all very very fast. AI can potentially produce unique structures in open-world worldgens way better than noise-based algorithms with basic heuristics on top of them. You mentioned quests, just consider that AI-based worldgen can generate/modify world based on those characters and quests. You can ask it to start with noises, then modify to arrange for villages/cities, then make sure there is nice road from village A to village B and landscape is modified to make this road nicely traversable, and if there is a quest, modify map in a way that the needed dungeon happens according to intended progression in the mountain between those villages, etc.

I want to see it myself real bad. The reason for this is actually very simple: more traditional handcoded worldgen algorithms usually operate with some basic noise functions controlled by some parameters like “biome” or “temperature” or “height” and then slap some heuristics on top to smooth rough edges or to introduce a bit more of interest. Those heuristics you code there are rather limited. You ofcourse could spend a lot of efforts and hardcode a lot of stuff there, but it’s still limited. And in practice they are most often are very limited. With AI though, what developers can hope for is multistep generation with self-feedback. We may manually model some prefabs, modular pieces and ask AI to stitch them together in a way that resembles some special symbol per map, possibly generating some intermediate pieces by itself if those are lacking, also come up with enemy placements and look at the thing at whole and try to rebalance it for certain difficulty, etc. It’s more flexible and it’s potentially unbounded. You can ask it to reprompt itself however times needed if it see there are some problematic places or missed opportunities in map it generated. You can give it a list of gimmicks and ask to try to compose and balance every map around random gimmick picked from this list. You can also ask it to roll a dice and with probability of 15% it will invent a gimmick itself instead of picking from the list. Possibilities are wild.

Is procedural world generation AI?

Its’ not if you don’t use AI for it. But, many many people wish they could use AI for worldgen to see what they can get out of it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that anything “rewarding” doesn’t necessarily affect dopamine chemistry the way we used to talk about regarding game mechanics. After all, I’m not an expert in neurobiology, it might very well be the case that “dopamine rush” is a meme that simply takes a vague intuition of “dopamine is related to feeling of reward in the brain” to the absolute just for the sake of convenience of rhetoric device. But in reality, those things are more nuanced than that. There are many other neurotransmitters, neuromediators and in general things involved in brain signalling like serotonine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc, many of which are involved together in any “rewarding game situation” and interact in complex ways. To try to put it in more simple terms, the way you killed a bunch of goblins, the music that was on background, the scenery and palette, and the chest you open that they were guarding, affects dozens upon dozens of neuromediators that all interplay together in complex ways and form your experience, the way you feel, and gamers usually just ignore all that, focus only on the chest part and say “dopamine”. While in reality even the chest part alone isn’t just dopamine, and reward circuitry also isn’t just dopamine alone, and experiencing it is different depending on what you experience before/after and in parallel, and so on. What I didn’t like about the article is that it’s not about this topic at all and barely mentions it, basically there is a single sentence on it, but it’s used for the sake of clickbait title.

It’s past 178k now.

The articles themselves also got archived:

• archive.ph/USxe6
• archive.ph/x5cGQ

Is this Dark & Darker?

Review weighting formula needs updates, if it’s not taking this into account already. There are many many ways to do this. For example, review and it’s score are multiplied by coefficients that are computed from hours spent in the game, percentage of achievements completed, time from the last review posted on the same account, number of people who clicked “this looks like a shopped review” button, etc.