Effects of PCG on Creativity in Playful City-Building Environments in VR

Abstract

The use of procedural content generation (PCG) in the context of video games has increased over the years as it provides an economical way to generate game content whilst enhancing their variety and replayability. For city-building games, this approach is often utilized to predefine map layouts, terrains, or cityscapes for the player. One core aspect of facilitating enjoyment in these games comes from creative expressivity. PCG, in this context, may support creativity by lowering the technical complexity for content creation, or it may hinder creativity by taking away control and freedom from the user. To examine these potential effects, this paper investigates if PCG has an impact on players' creativity in the context of VR city-building games. We present a VR prototype that provides varying degrees of procedural content: No PCG, terrain generation, city generation, and full (city + terrain) generation. In a remote user study, these conditions were compared regarding their capability to support creativity. Statistical tests for equivalence revealed that the presence of PCG did not affect creativity in any way. Our work suggests that PCG can be a useful integration into city-building games without notably decreasing players' ability to express themselves creatively.