Procedural Generation and Information Games

Procedural generation is used to achieve a wide variety of game design goals, and has led to the creation of several game subgenres by injecting variance, surprise or unpredictability into otherwise static designs. Information games are a type of mystery game in which the player is tasked with gathering knowledge and developing an understanding of an event or system. Their reliance on player knowledge leaves them vulnerable to spoilers and hard to replay. In this paper we introduce the notion of a generative forensics game, a subgenre of information games that challenge the player to understand the output of a generative system, and present two examples.