Procedural Content Generation in Games: A Survey with Insights on Emerging LLM Integration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is defined as the automatic creation of game content using algorithms. PCG has a long history in both the game industry and the academic world. It can increase player engagement and ease the work of game designers. While recent advances in deep learning approaches in PCG have enabled researchers and practitioners to create more sophisticated content, it is the arrival of Large Language Models (LLMs) that truly disrupted the trajectory of PCG advancement. This survey explores the differences between various algorithms used for PCG, including search-based methods, machine learning-based methods, other frequently used methods (e.g., noise functions), and the newcomer, LLMs. We also provide a detailed discussion on combined methods. Furthermore, we compare these methods based on the type of content they generate and the publication dates of their respective papers. Finally, we identify gaps in the existing academic work and suggest possible directions for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".