The artist and the automaton in digital game production

Abstract

This article analyses discourses around procedural content generation (PCG) as automation of creativity in the games industry. PCG refers to techniques for creating game content algorithmically, by manipulating data through sets of computational operations and parameters. By producing scalable results with combinatorial diversity, procedural generation is touted as the future of content, yet flouted as the harbinger of technological unemployment in game art production. Critical scholarship on automation suggests that the real danger is not job loss per se, but the constitution of an underclass of artists whose vital work of conditioning algorithmic outputs is denigrated as derivative and ‘manual’. Framed by liberal humanist ideas of agency, PCG naturalizes trade-offs where the autonomy of generative machines is contingent upon the automatism of its human conditioners. This qualitative analyses of talks on PCG at the Game Developers Conference (2015–2020) shows how procedural systems bifurcate the creative work of algorithmic cultural production into affective and mechanical forms of conditioning that map onto stratifications of racial capitalism. Affective tuning resists documentation and is reserved for artists with technomasculine forms of cultural capital; mechanical tuning is relegated to automatable and outsourced labour and relies on replicable technique that is considered artistic but not creative. This article argues that PCG’s reclassification of creativity through racialised dialectics of human agency and machine automaticity overlooks the autonomy of procedural systems. PCG pipelines are organised less around the agency of human toolmakers and more around the autonomy of systems that assimilate tasks in the management of complex networks of dependencies. Instead of pitting artists against machines, this analysis politicises automation’s racial stratifications by examining the momentum of more-than-human systems in which toolmakers and tool users negotiate granularities of control and degrees of concession.

Digital and postdigital art: from aesthetics of a subject to the ontology of an object

“…The human creator (who, perhaps out of habit or natural ego, considers themselves as such or convinces themselves that only they, and not some soulless machine or something artificial, albeit intellectual, are worthy to bear such an honorable title) and generative machines, algorithmic AI systems, and procedural content generation systems are caught in a situation where "the agency of one entails the automatism of the other" (Chia, 2022). There is also a pressing issue of the autonomy and independence of the human person (both as the artist and creator and as a viewer and observer) from not human but technical and hybrid agents.…”

The Engine Is the Message: Videogame Infrastructure and the Future of Digital Platforms

“…Automation of 3D art production requires human articulation to tune and tweak outputs from algorithmic processes such as photogrammetry or procedural generation. Yet, articulation work is devalued as mechanical and deemed interchangeable with outsourced work of East and South Asians, who are routinely pegged as less creative and more robotic (Chia 2022). As engines platformize cultural production, the metaverse will be built on sociotechnical infrastructures informed by racial capitalism.…”

“That Darned Sandstorm”: A Study of Procedural Generation through Archaeological Storytelling

“…Within game studies, there is precedent for considering that glitches queer gameplay experience -they challenge the status quo of a presumed desire for player control and immersion [35]. In terms of procedural content generation, the glitches generative systems produce throw into relief the tension between the marketing of the technique as a way of increasing efficiency, versus the parallel claim that the surprising results they produce are indicative of creative potential [3]. The 'sandstorm' in our survey is a case in point.…”