“Generator’s Haunted”: A Brief, Spooky Account of Hauntological Effects in the Player Experience of Procedural Generation
Max Kreminski · 2023
Theories of the poetics of procedural generation attempt to explain the player experience of interacting with generators by describing the aesthetic or experiential qualities that generators can afford when they are deployed in particular ways. We propose that an underinvestigated aspect of procgen poetics—the experiential effects of the sequencing of generated artifacts—can be understood in terms of hauntology, a theory of textual interpretation that aims to account for the lingering effects of past texts (and their implied futures) on present ones. We briefly introduce hauntology, discuss a few examples of hauntological effects in player experiences of procgen, and gesture at implications for future technical work.