The Procedure of Gaming

Procedural content generation is a technique that many of your favourite games, over the years, have been employing on the down low, like a dirty little secret that they don't want you to know about.

The word 'procedural' has recently become popular again, since the release of Will Wright's Spore, which makes widespread use of procedural animation, content generation, and graphical detailing techniques. Everyone has been using the word, but do you really know what it means? We thought so.

Just so that you don't get caught with your pants down in a flame war somewhere in the wilderness that is the World Wide Web, Gameconnect's latest editorial feature is dedicated to all things procedural, how they apply to gaming in general, and what that means to gamers in particular.

Procedural programming and graphical techniques are more widespread than many might think, and it's a sad state of affairs that such a widely used term is so widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and applied. Let's correct all that, shall we? Let us proceed to the next page....

No, we could really not help ourselves on that one.