Hmm. Generative designs to me are the marriage of the simulation and, um, exploratory power of a computer and a system and the creativity and guidance of a designer and an artist, a sound designer, and so forth. Working on, uh, Journey with Austin Wintry, one of the things that we talked a lot about were ways to make the soundtrack, um, engaged in the actual play experience to make it dynamic and, uh, to trigger and interact with the character and the audio space in a way that would really complement the movement. And the movement was, there were so many options. It was a really, um, involved process. And we worked with him for three years, really the whole process of the game. We worked with the sound designer and the composer to - to make the game feel and sound like they were compatible. Um, when you generate a response to the player based on their input, you’re giving them the sense of creating the experience while being in the enclosure of a design. And it’s freedom without too much freedom. It’s the ability to express yourself but within a safe bound that you know you’ll have a pleasing outcome. And I think that this is, um, it’s really a - it’s a unique opportunity to design for that kind of a space. Um, you could build a game where every single object in the game made sounds and just moving around in the game with this little avatar, you could skate on a pond and skating would make some music. And then you could run around and run your hands along trees and that would make drum sounds. And building that space, a bunch of people go - go into that space and make a bunch of music together and they would be kind of dancing in this interactive environment, right? Would it be a game? I don’t know. Would it be fun? I don’t know. It would kind of depend on the people. But it would be really cool to see it made. And I think a lot about designs like this. What if you just put these tools in a space to generate experience? And then you let the people play with those things. Um, and the goal is really to sort of find where in the commercial environment we can take the best of both worlds, the openness of simulation and generating sound and visuals and - and, uh, and activities and the chaos, the beautiful chaos of the human mind and put them together. That’s, that’s where, I think that’s the - that’s the bleeding edge of games and a lot of the games that we see at Experimental Game Play Workshop are in that space, like where the systems and the players meet.
