Context for title, from the Background section of the paper:
One well-known example of this is The Ten Thousands Bowls of Oatmeal Problem, a term coined by Kate Compton and now one of the best-known idioms among procedural generation practitioners. In this analogy, Compton likens procedurally generated content to bowls of oatmeal, and uses this to highlight the meaninglessness of appeals to variety or unpredictability which often accompany sales pitches related to procedural generation. Every bowl of oatmeal is unique, Compton explains, but that does not make them interesting or valuable. Designers use this to understand that procedural generation alone does not guarantee variety or interest, and that systems must be carefully designed to use generative methods as an expressive tool, rather than a solution in and of itself.
As a VFX-person I have to add that the variation can be a value in itself.
E.g. imagine a level in a computer game that plays in an office building. Having procedural desks with different heights and stuff on it with various degrees of use and personalization seems boring, but in sum it makes a big room look more like the real thing, because most real things have these tiny imperfections. In games where e.g. you have items to find the variance of the environment is a major factor in the enjoyability of the game. Too much and nobody can tell items from assets, too little and items feel like on a board game.
That being said, procedural systems must either be incredibly intricate or use a lot of artistic input to produce good results.
E.g. a good level artist might tell a whole story of human relationships with the way a room is set up, with the pictures/notes those office workers hung at the walls, which objects decorated their work places, what is missing from their places etc.
A purely procedural approach will look very arbitrary unless it tries to model the same underlying rules (e.g. "simulating" the owner of said desk and their role within the system that produced that room). If done correctly this can look extremely good (better than mediocre level designers) — but this is rarely taken that far.
To your last point, I think you’ll see much more of that soon.
A trick of writing is to leave stuff off the page. If you put everything on, it’s tiresome. If there’s nothing left off, characters seem hollow. A character background or even scenes that exist but aren’t shared means there’s a sense to things that the reader can pick up on, even if they don’t know exactly what it is.
I can see the same thing happening with generative AI. Rather than procedurally generating desks and the objects on them, you generate a sales team. The composition of the team makes sense. Then you give each employee a paragraph of background, then from that generate a desk. This will give something much more cohesive than adding a family picture if rand < 0.2.
Dwarf Fortress actually does something like what you describe. It simulates natural phenomena and history to generate the world. Roguelikes in general show a lot of experimentation in that space.
The uniformity vs variability is not the issue I think. The opposite of procedural generation is manual generation, and a level designer would add required variety by hand too.
The problem with procedural generation is (over)use of it to generate gameplay. In your example it'd be "we have 50 million different offices to explore!", but they're all just different arrangements of the same desks.
Interesting observation that also gives a hint of the utility or appeal of generative AI art over time. Even a lot of pretty oatmeal is still oatmeal at the end of the day.
One well-known example of this is The Ten Thousands Bowls of Oatmeal Problem, a term coined by Kate Compton and now one of the best-known idioms among procedural generation practitioners. In this analogy, Compton likens procedurally generated content to bowls of oatmeal, and uses this to highlight the meaninglessness of appeals to variety or unpredictability which often accompany sales pitches related to procedural generation. Every bowl of oatmeal is unique, Compton explains, but that does not make them interesting or valuable. Designers use this to understand that procedural generation alone does not guarantee variety or interest, and that systems must be carefully designed to use generative methods as an expressive tool, rather than a solution in and of itself.