Games

Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.

I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.

I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.