Born in Fair Haven: Procedural Generation of Cultural Sign Systems

Abstract

We propose the term procedural cultural sign systems generation to help define the emergent practice of procedurally generating games that seek to mimic or in some way signify fictitious culture. We borrow from cybernetics to understand procedural cultural sign systems generation and exemplify this with our VMachine algorithm. We argue the need for procedural content generation algorithms that are readily implementable, and generalizable for multiple use cases. In this paper, we discuss cybernetics in the context of procedural content generation followed by an overview of recent games that generate elements of culture as part of gameplay. We then outline our VMachine Algorithm and our method, before demonstrating practical applications in two short case studies based on games we are currently developing.