But community on the internet is a funny thing. Perhaps the most important of the components in my favorite Internet Formula is anonymity. People don’t want to be known online. It’s why we have screen names, avatars, user IDs. It’s why we don’t call each other Bob or Jill but Kagor and Ash’ra’ael. The importance of identity is diminished on the internet, where I can call myself anything I like, on any medium I choose: I can create email addresses, forum handles, avatar names. Who I am becomes less important than what I say.

As a result, people feel freer. Explicitly not safer since safety necessitates a diminished perception of threat, but people who use the internet feel no need to restrain themselves quite as much. They can say things that they’ve never told people, or wouldn’t say normally. They call people obscene things, and rant at length about secret loves. They have no need for pretense when everyone is acting by the same rules: when I say that my weekend was spent gearing up my paladin and priest for the changes coming in Cataclysm, you don’t have to stare at me. You know exactly what I mean.

When Blizzard announced, about a month ago, that they were going to enabled Real ID names for all of their forum posts, the response was overwhelming. Literally. That thread almost got to 50,000 posts, the vast majority of which decried the change. One of the most compelling I read plainly and simply stated the reasons that the poster (Faythe, of Sol Eternum on Icecrown) hated the idea.

I, the poster, am one or more of the following:

- a woman
- a minor
- a member of an ethnic minority
- a person of alternative sexuality
- a transgendered person
- a person with a unique/uncommon name
- a person who has been harassed/stalked
- a person in an information-sensitive profession
- a person who may be Google searched by co-workers/employers/potential employers
- a person who may be Google searched by mates/potential mates
- a person who is concerned about account security
- a person who is uninterested in online social networking
- a person who does not fit any of these categories but who is nonetheless concerned for him/herself or for the welfare of others

and I oppose RealID for one or more of these reasons:

- It is a threat to personal safety.
- It is a threat to personal security.
- It will not eliminate/significantly reduce trolling.
- It should be optional; choosing between risk and silence is not truly “optional”.
- Unified tags/handles provide the same effect with minimal risk.
- World of Warcraft is not Facebook.

If this decision persists, I will do one or more of the following:

- Refrain from posting on these forums.
- Seriously reconsider my subscription.
- Cancel my subscription. Have already attempted twice to cancel my account, but the page isn’t working. Will call and cancel.
- Prepare to cancel my subscription should RealID be made mandatory in-game.

Though there are many good sources of information and discussion on WoW apart from the game’s main forums, Blizzard has been the place for its own community moderators and game designers. It’s the place where Blizzard’s official policy is made public, and it has a lot of weight because of that. All of that weight means that when we get to nearly 50,000 posts about how this is a bad thing, we arrive at Blizzard’s reversal.

Rather than sticking with it, the policy was revoked. Posted about three weeks ago, Blizzard chose to listen to their supporters.

We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

Was it a smart move? Maybe. There’s certainly a couple of different arguments we could follow, about whether Blizzard should’ve stuck to their guns and gone through with it, because its their game and their servers and they’ll do the things they want to in their own way. There’s the other side of the coin that says that Facebook’s already gotten a lot of heat for privacy concerns and this, being the hot button topic of the web for the past few months (a long time on this here internet), needs to be addressed carefully to the consumer’s satisfaction.

I think the end result is a mixed bag. Blizzard has partnered with Facebook in regards to RealID, and though I’m loving the ability to talk to my WoW guildmates from SCII, I think the problem is that privacy and security are a big concern with both right now, and Blizzard has ominously used the words “for now” regarding a lot of the RealID development. The issues and stakes have been raised, and it’s up to the community that Blizzard has created to stand up for themselves. If something like this happens again, the people who are affected have to be vigilant, and cry out, 50,000 posts strong:

“No.”

Piracy for video games is a problem. I think we can all respect the idea that people want to be paid for services they provide and products they create, and the people who create video games are no different. They make something we enjoy, and there are a lot of people behind the project: artists, writers, musicians, voice actors, producers, directors… Modern gaming is a lot like a movie in that way. But movies and other “intellectual properties” are viciously guarded by certain entities, who take really drastic measures to protect them, and the video game industry is following suit.

Let’s take a look at Ubisoft’s latest attempt to get into the debate. Recently, Ubisoft introduced some of the most stringent anti-piracy policies ever implemented. In essence, Ubisoft requires your game to keep a constant connection to the internet so that the game can log on to their servers and authenticate your copy of Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. This policy turns what are nominally single-player games into something else, since you can’t play them alone under all circumstances. If your internet connection goes out either because your hardware at home is crappy or your ISP is having a bad hair day, or Ubisoft’s own servers go down or are DDoS’d into oblivion, you’re out of luck.

The reaction to this policy has not been pretty. (The link on “pretty” is my favorite, by the way. If you only click on one link this entire article, that should be it.)

Though this only applies to the PC version of these games, it’s definitely a slap in the face to legitimate consumers who wanted to play AC2 on their home computer. X-Box and PS3 aficionados can still enjoy wacky medieval Italy just fine, but there are still gamers who prefer PCs to consoles. A friend of mine told me that she and her father eschewed home systems entirely: “What good is an X-Box that doesn’t run the games I want to play? My computer is more customizable and does things I need it to do, other than playing games.” Her stance is completely rational, and Ubisoft’s policy is not only infuriating to those people who feel like they are being punished for their preference of system, but it doesn’t even do what Ubisoft is trying to do.

Ultimately, Ubisoft’s aim is to stop pirates. They don’t want their product stolen. They want to have it paid for, which is reasonable. Their response is unreasonable, given the fact that pirates have in fact, cracked the game.

This is normal for pirates.

Everyone in the industry saw this coming. Really, everyone. Ubisoft especially must’ve seen this coming, because I don’t believe they can be this blind, this naive. Any gaming company that has been around this long cannot possibly be this stupid, and I chose to believe that what Ubisoft really is, at their core, is this desperate. They have thrown everything else at the wall, and none of that shit has stuck.

So while Ubisoft is becoming more like the RIAA, let’s consider people who are trying new things in combating piracy.

This is Jonathan Coulton. He’s a musician, and as such, people are interested in his goods: songs. Many people in fact are interested in his songs, particularly people who are good at computers, as he tends to sing about geeky things. As a result, he’s well aware that people are going to try and take his stuff without paying him. What does he say to that? Well, he’s kind of okay with it.

I don’t wish to misconstrue his position here. He would like to get paid for his work, since he has a child and a wife and wants to be able to contribute things like taxes to his community and so forth. What he does differently than big labels though is realize the truth: “The truth is, artists are already competing with free — your music can be obtained for free, I guarantee it. So it’s important to realize every music purchase represents a choice to spend money. I’ve always been clear that while I’m happy to let you download for free, I’d rather you actually gave me money. And a lot of people make that choice.”

He’s experimenting with something called a Creative Commons license to distribute his music, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Really, the trick to combating piracy seems to be aware of them, and to accept them as a reality. Dealing with the existence of pirates is working out better for people who are trying it, as opposed to doing everything possible to counteract their efforts.

“Tabor, what are these marvelous things?” This is what you would ask, if you called me Tabor. I would reply thus: they are organizations worthy of your charity, attention, and resources. Too often, gamers and nerds have bad reputations. Anti-social, misanthropic, disorganized, and all around dysfunctional people. These stereotypes have by and large created a need in us to defy them. Challenges and conceptions be damned, my friends are among the most generous and interesting people I know, and so I think you should take a look at them and consider helping out.

Let’s start with Child’s Play, because it pertains more to this blog than Heroes does. Child’s Play started in 2003, and is a charity devoted to helping children in hospitals worry less about their time there. In order to entertain kids and distract them from all the scary parts of a hospital visit (pain, fear, questions you can’t answer when you’re 10), Penny Arcade started raising money to donate to the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle. It got a lot of press then and continues to do its mission, and do it well, consecutively raising more donations
each year the charity has been in existence. It’s even expanded into Egypt!

That’s neat, and kind of takes us close to the other charity: Heroes Without Borders.

So, my friend Jenn decided she would give several years of her life to other people, and joined the Peace Corps. When she was accepted, she was sent off to Rwanda, which is not actually close to Egypt at all. Her job there is teaching English, and as a secondary project, she focused on making English more accessible to the children of that nation. She needed a way to make reading fun for them, and more importantly, cheap for Rwandans, and came up with a brilliant solution: comic books.

Comic book stores often have lots of back stock of comics, you see, and are dying to get rid of them. They are still entertaining however, especially to people who have never read them, and they can be purchased in bulk rather easily. This, combined with the number of geeks she knows, means that comic books are actually quite the practical solution to her project.

So please, please please please, pretty please: Get in touch with either of these great organizations, and try to help out.

There are very few things in life we have to do, and they mostly include automatic responses from our nervous system. That being said, there are things we should do, and we largely lump these things together in a category of things we call “being responsible”. These involve getting a job, paying your taxes, treating other humans with respect and courtesy, and generally being a productive member of society. Responsibility is sometimes given a bad break, because it’s tedious, and mostly doesn’t make us feel great. While the end result is sometimes a positive feeling, or even pride at having accomplished something important, the tasks we undertake while being responsible are arduous, time consuming, and most often, and this is the important part kids, not fun. Which often means things we consider to be fun should be devoid of responsibility.

This however, is not the case. It shouldn’t be. There are some great examples of a lot of fun to be had, particularly fun with other people, that need to be pursued responsibly. Driving is one. You don’t drive a car without a seat belt and without regard for your passengers’ safety and the other drivers on the road, even if you’re going really fast. Especially if you’re going really fast. Same thing with sex: you work out with your partner ahead of time what is acceptable behavior, and you stick to it. You don’t deviate outside of the guidelines you’ve set up without a lot of unacceptable risk. Amusement rides are full of safety precautions that you have to meet before you can enjoy responsibly. Speaking of enjoying responsibly, did anyone mention alcohol? In essence, responsibility when it comes to having fun is about meeting the demands of everyone, and creating the most happiness for those involved. It also means, perhaps explicitly, not raining down on someone else’s parade.

Thus, our responsibility while having fun is clear. There are plenty of good examples of what are bad ideas, and when not to do them. Gaming should be no different. Much like sex however, what is acceptable differs from person to person, and group to group. There are perhaps a few commonly accepted rules, which I believe can be addressed as common fare, but given the large scopes of kinds of gamers as I addressed in my last post, what is understood as necessary by one group may be totally superfluous for another. Let’s start with the basics then.

1. People should be ready to game. This means that, whoever you should be, you should be wherever you need to be, whenever you need to be there, with whatever you need to game. I wanted to fit however into this, but why ever for?

In essence, be punctual and prepared. This doesn’t mean that you have to be in someone’s face about them showing up 5 to 10 minutes late, but let’s not waste people’s time here. When you’re going to be 15, 20, 30 minutes late, that’s definitely when you should be telling people, at the very least. Have whatever you need with you too: dice, character sheets, books, laptop… whatever you need to be ready to throw down and kick some goblin’s ass. In line with being prepared with the mechanical pieces of the game, be prepared by knowing the mechanical essence of the game.

2.Know the system. This doesn’t necessarily mean game the system, or abuse it (and it’s important for DMs to know when the system is being abused), but know what you need to know for the game you’re in, and your character in particular. If you’re playing a combative character, be prepared to be able to throw down some dice and say what you hit with. If you’ve got to know how to cast a spell, or do some occult research, know your pools.

This is important for DMs and MMO gamers as well. DMs need to be even more well versed than players with the mechanics of the game, but by the same token, don’t abuse it and make the game unfair for your players. You have to be aware of what they’re capable of, as well as what the obstacles that lie in their way are. Tangentially, if you’re playing a MMO like WoW, know what your role is (Tank, Healer, Damage) and be prepared to know the mechanics of it. If you’re playing a Feral Druid for example, you should know that contemporary theory says that because you should be crit immune, you should stack Stamina and shouldn’t pick up a lick of defense gear.

Most importantly comes the synthesis of rules 1 and 2.

3.Don’t be a dick. I hate to steal Wheaton’s Law, but its elegance is amazing, and works into the discussion like this: Don’t do anything that ruins someone’s enjoyment of a game. Whether that’s being 45 minutes to an hour late and wasting people’s time and energy, or harping on someone’s choice of mechanics without a grounded reason. Most importantly, don’t be cruel about it. Someone can make a decision for a lot of reasons, and if you’re a dick about it, you’re only going to agitate and disturb what should be a fun activity.

What this all means is that you should, when you game, lay down certain ground rules about what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Players gonna miss a few games? That might be okay, or it might not fly. Prot Warrior’s thinking of respeccing to a slightly different build? Make sure that the raid leader and Warrior Class Lead (if such a person exists) know about it, and do what they need to do about it. Or just let him go wily-nilly. If people in your group are deviating from what others in the group think they should, it’s important to correct the small deviations before they grow into large ones, and make what was once something awesome into something resembling a burden. Playing well together’s important, but the fun’s the thing.

But what is a gamer? Would that which we call a gamer by any other name would have as much fun?

I was going to do a little research on the term gamer, etymologically speaking. Where did the word come from? Where was it first used? What is our shared history as gamers, so to speak, but I’m not quite sure that it matters, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

A gamer is someone who plays games as a primary form of enjoyment. They may deeply analyze the rules and structure of the game, or they may be new to the game they’re experiencing. They might participate over a wide variety of games (tabletop, console, card, computer), or they may devote themselves to one game, and believe that it is superior to others that try to emulate it. Despite all these different kings of gamers, they all share the same aim: to get enjoyment from playing a game, and devote some amount of time to it above their other interests.

Thinking that this is a reasonable definition, I submit the argument before you, dear reader, that anyone who wants to claim the mantle of Gamer is free to do so. Hell, they should be encouraged to do so. More people at the gaming table means more fun to go around. Exclusivity should never be our aim, as we’re too often misunderstood anyway.

In a very excellent article, Jeffrey Michael Grubb notes that gamers tend to instantly leap upon accusations of impropriety, defending their passion with a furor that may scare “normal’ people. He writes, “…if we are going to be more concerned about protecting the reputation of a video game than about fighting international sexual tourism, people are going to continue to look at gamers as an unbalanced people with twisted priorities.”

So when people want to call themselves gamers, embrace them as gamers, and invite them to play. Don’t question their title, or where they fit into the hardcore vs. casual debate, just accept that they are a gamer, and want what you want. They want to have a good time playing a game, just like you.

It might be the single greatest thing seen over the last two expansions. Honestly.

For those of you who are still reading and don’t know what the system is, the LFG engine has been redesigned. They opened up instances to be battlegroup-wide, just like battlegrounds. You queue up in much the same way, except that for an instance you declare what you bring to the party, in terms of tank, healer, or damage. You can choose to enter the queue with a group that you already have, filling in the last few spots you don’t have, or you can just queue in solo and get a full party. That’s when the amazing parts start happening. You immediately get teleported to the instance when the group is formed and ready, saving a lot in the way of travel costs. You suddenly don’t have to be in Northrend all the god damn time, and indeed, I was thinking of setting up my hearth in some place that isn’t as laggy as Dalaran tends to be. Maybe Shattrath City, but honestly, I think my Tauren is ready to go home to TB.

After you kill the last boss in it, you get a reward, which is a small gold amount, and some badges. If this is your first random heroic dungeon of the day, you get two badges of Frost. If it’s not, you get two badges of Triumph. On patch day, I managed to pick up 47 badges of triumph, more than I have in two weeks of 3.2. Granted, all the bosses in Northrend drop Triumph badges now, but the speed involved in just tearing through dungeons radically redefines the fun I have with this game: I don’t have to stop chaining heroics together once I know that my group works. We’re like the God damned Energizer Bunny. I ran through the three new five-mans, OK, VH, HoS, CoS, Nexus, and Drak’Tharon Keep last night, in the span of about 6 hours. 9 dungeons, three of them brand new content, on a patch day. This is fast.

Now, it isn’t all plums and roses. Sometimes, you’ll get a fail group. It happens with every randomized action you take, in real life or not. I got a terrible warrior, who had never even run the dungeon we were in (Old Kingdom), and was proud of his 1.2k DPS. The chances of a fail group go down however when you get people you know in your group, and only allow one or two spots to be filled, particularly if those spots are damage dealers, and as more people get used to the system, especially with the amount of loot being tossed around, I imagine these failures will become less and less.

All in all, I think the random instance tool is a great success, and will be very happy with it for some time to come. There are a couple of other of features about 3.3 that note some attention:

I was hoping for something slightly different with the new disenchanting tool. I was hoping it would just let you break all the greens down into enchant mats, but it requires you to have an enchanter of the appropriate skill to do it. That’s both good and bad news. It means that enchanters aren’t useless, but it also means they are in fact more useful. Not having a main who is an enchanter in the guild will get to be a bigger and bigger problem, especially since the guild has been using a lot of materials. I only got one group randomly with a ‘chanter who could help me, and failed to win any of the items that were sharded. Oh well.

The five-mans are very well constructed, but I fear the heroics to be a bit daunting for players. They seem to be a bit on the long side, and I worry how casual players will get to see this content, because it’s very challenging. The bosses in the Heroic Pit of Souls for example have almost one million hit points, far more than any other boss in any five-man. Hell, the trash mobs almost as much health as some five-man heroic bosses. I suppose I should count myself lucky to have finished it with no wipes on heroic on the first go, but it was very intimidating, even for someone who has two BiS items.

I’m sure, as with all patches, it will eventually become commonplace. For a lot of new players, or recently-turned-80s, this is what will be normal. They have always gotten Triumph badges from heroics, and the LFG system always worked this way. But for me, it seems a small bit of heaven. I don’t get to have to be bogged down by the weight of the game, I can just do what I love doing most about WoW: taking 20 minutes and tearing through some fantastical dungeon.

The internet still continues to grow and change however, and affect our lives in more diverse and interesting ways. Social networking is an excellent example. I’ve connected with friends I haven’t seen in years thanks to Facebook, and have made deep and meaningful contacts with people over e-mail and forums. Yet at the places where social networking sites and channels come into contact with gaming, I don’t see much of a change in the way that it affects gamers’ social behaviors, particularly those they have in the real world. By that I mean that gamers are usually socially awkward, not really brave enough to talk to or meet new people, for fear that their interests that they so love will be rejected. I do not think social networking changes this basic IRL social behavior, even given that social networking is specifically adapted to let like minded people group together.

Twitter hasn’t been around long enough to have a real component or factor in gaming, or on gamers, I think. I’ll choose to ignore it for now, unless someone can point me in a different direction. The most interaction I get out of Twitter when it comes to gaming is following funny things that @cwgabriel and @wilw say. Twitter to me feels like it’s still figuring out what it’s trying to do, and I don’t think social interaction is something it’s actually good at. Two people have to be interacting to be having an interaction. Then again, there are some excellent examples to prove me wrong.

Facebook might be one of the newest form social networking takes, and it relates to gamers in interesting ways. Besides becoming fans of games such as WoW, D&D, and Modern Warfare 2, popular games have actually spawned on Facebook. Foremost among them is the omnipresent Farmville, and its spin-off/rival Island Paradise. Mafia Wars is another excellent example of a game that spawned entirely in Facebook.

Yet for all Facebooks’ ability to make people interact, I don’t think of these games as multiplayer, or indeed, particularly interactive. Maybe it’s because I haven’t played them (and likely won’t) but all that I see are applications on Facebook that try to be RPGs, rather than actual games. Really, for these applications it breaks down to “do this task over and over again”. Examples of actual games that run this scheme better? I can think of a few.

But really, social networking is more than just Facebook and Twitter, and has been deeply involved in the gaming community for a long time. Blogs, IRC channels, Forums, and E-mail lists have been influential in steering modern gaming culture, and none of these relate to real world interactions much, with the possible exception of E-mail. If you’re not familiar with it, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory(vaguely NSFW) is an excellent example of why interactions over the net break down, and why the basic social behavior of gamers isn’t significantly changed online. People who hide behind façades of internet identities have nothing to lose by being rude and abrasive, arguing about nerfs to their favorite class abilities and insulting each other endlessly. Arguments over the internet can’t be won, and indeed, are often lost by even claiming to win (see Danth’s Law). When we feel empathy for people, we tend to behave better towards them, and that empathy is lost when connections are channeled through the lens of a computer screen. Gamers are too shy to get to know people in real life, and too proud to accept people in cyberspace.

Overall, social networking hasn’t done a great favor for gamers. It hasn’t really hurt them per se, but it’s not like friending someone on Facebook or following them on Twitter is actually going to give you a social connection with them. It may give them a starting point, and connections have to start somewhere of course, but these communication methods only facilitate interactions; they don’t make them any easier or any harder, and they’re certainly not going to teach gamers Wheaton’s Law.

Does the rest of America know what’s going on this weekend? There’s Labor Day, sure, so people get to relax instead of getting to work immediately, but I don’t think that they realize quite yet that at this 5th PAX, the rules are changing. PAX sold out on the West Coast this year. We have complete dominion over the convention hall. If we had the Pike St. Annex, that would be ours too, as it was last year.

Google changed its logo for Comicon, which gets national attention from media sources ranging from newspapers to TV stations. Comicon deserves that attention, but what is more interesting to me is how long it will be before people pick up on what we’re doing here. Blizzard’s demoing Cataclysm, the newest WoW expansion, more than a year before its scheduled release, and its two games that are much closer are also here: Diablo III and Starcraft II are on the tweets of a lot of people.

The panels are wide ranging, from topics involving gay gamers to the law with regards to the industry and how to get involved in the community through blogging and podcasting.

A conversation last night and a panel in a few days about Nerdcore has got me wondering about the shifting landscape of music. As more people become interested in MC Frontalot and his work, and all the other Nerdcore rappers, we have to wonder if the mainstream is becoming us, or if we’re infecting them. What may be more interesting is that all the buzz about nerd rock isn’t new at all. Weird Al Yankovic was doing it back in the early 80’s, and one might make a valid argument (or at least it was suggested last night) that prog rock group Devo could be pointed at with regards to the music of geeks.

When the subculture becomes mainstream, and when the minority becoms the majority, it’s something to recognize and accept. But what if we’re not becoming the mainstream? What if we’ve been the majority for a while, and are just now realizing it?

Lots of people gave the groups participating in the Triwizard Drinking Tournament last night, but they were just as eager to be horrified at a bunch of kids dressing up as wizards as they were willing to ask us questions and get plastered with us. People wanted to feel like they belonged to a group as integrated and together as we did and do.

I think that we’re not going to be talked about as if we were outsiders for very long. I think we’re on the way to being the center.

This post is dedicated to Carie, for the original idea, and for Lark, who wants to see a revolution in her lifetime.

Several prominent examples of self-replicating machines exist in fiction however. The influential Terminator series was one of the first examples of modern fiction to depict a system of machines that self-replicate and evolve. Though others exist, it can be safely said that Terminator formed the basis for this generation’s concept of self-making machines.

Though real world examples are coming into their own, fictional examples remain constrained somewhat.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to talk about procedurally generated content (PCG). Accordingly, it’s kind of a new term in gaming, and doesn’t have a lot of background as far as actual video games go. It might best be defined as neither player generated content nor developer generated content, but content that is entirely made up by the system by which the game is governed. There are only a handful of examples, and none are very old. Diablo II might be the widest known example, and the arguably the least impressive. First released to critical acclaim in 2000, Diablo II’s dungeon maps were created wholly within the game, and no two were alike. Though they featured consistent content (for example, the Den of Evil always has the same number of monsters in it, including Corpsefire), the layouts and treasures were different for each game. Older examples exist, including the precursor to many space faring games, Elite. Probably the oldest example of procedurally generated content, almost the entire setting of Elite’s gameplay is drawn forth procedurally, allowing the system to process them all simply without accessing the memory of the machine as it’s made on the spot. There are some interesting advances being made. Hellfury, a mostly defunct MMO, used a lot of procedurally generated content, and GAR looks to be one of the more interesting displays of where this technique can take us. Further, the upcoming Star Trek MMO promises to use a great deal of it to allow players to interact with a great deal of the Star trek world without mapping it out explicitly.

So where does this bring us? Where do self-replicating machines and procedurally generated content meet? It’s a little hard to say. i think part of the draw of this topic for me has been the potential interactions between the two coming up with AI. It seems that currently, our ability to come up with procedurally generated content is limited by the scope of what we tell the procedures to come up with. GAR is a good example: The weapons made it the system are unique, but GAR doesn’t come up with unique ships, maps, or anything other than guns. Diablo III will use more of the mapping techniques pioneered by its predecessor, but that’s all. Nothing we’ve heard so far suggests anything other than maps will be the procedurally generated content in Diablo III.

But what if the procedurally generated content in a game told it how to make more procedurally generated content? It might be what’s next in gaming, or perhaps robotics. There are some interesting things generated by GAR, and I look forward to Star Trek’s use of procedurally generated content to map out the Star trek universe, but when the system can write itself, that’s when I get really interested. Until then, all I think that PCG actually does is allow the system to develop in unexpected ways, but in ways that are functionally the aim of the programmer or designer in the first place without the designer’s intervention. That is to say, lets them be a little lazier and keep the system nice and simple.