One of the difficulties in creating novelty is in creating the "relationships between symbols" as you say.
Take a sword in an RPG for example. It can be a weapon, it can be sold, it can be used as a crutch for a wounded person. It can be used to signal to others by reflecting the sunlight off it. Each of these aspects add new systems of gameplay.
but these additional relationships don't seem like things you can predict without presupposing the existence of the whole sentient world. And we've said nothing about where the sword came from in the first place!
I agree with you on gameplay-significant procedural generation. After playing and loving Noctis and Frontier: Elite II, I wanted to create an arty space exploration game where you took control of a mysterious alien being who roamed the universe in search of "knowledge". You'd do this by exploring and scanning features of the universe with different tools that took skill to use.
For example, to scan a mountain range, you'd have to land several probes around it, maybe in difficult conditions. "Knowledge" would be things like "tallest mountain range","largest ocean","oxygen atmosphere","binary system with habitable planets". I thought this was a good way of having distinct goals, but remaining open ended and unpredictable. "biggest","tallest" etc being things which are easy to specify but could be anywhere in the universe.
I thought you could fly a "living ship" a bit like Moia in Farscape. This ship would develop according to how much knowledge you accumulated, along with resources you extract from the universe.
My goal was to make the procedural world itself as something of concern for the player, to encourage the player to actually get out there into the depths. Maybe I'll start on it someday, I don't know. Everyone seems to be making space games at the moment!
Take a sword in an RPG for example. It can be a weapon, it can be sold, it can be used as a crutch for a wounded person. It can be used to signal to others by reflecting the sunlight off it. Each of these aspects add new systems of gameplay.
but these additional relationships don't seem like things you can predict without presupposing the existence of the whole sentient world. And we've said nothing about where the sword came from in the first place!
I agree with you on gameplay-significant procedural generation. After playing and loving Noctis and Frontier: Elite II, I wanted to create an arty space exploration game where you took control of a mysterious alien being who roamed the universe in search of "knowledge". You'd do this by exploring and scanning features of the universe with different tools that took skill to use.
For example, to scan a mountain range, you'd have to land several probes around it, maybe in difficult conditions. "Knowledge" would be things like "tallest mountain range","largest ocean","oxygen atmosphere","binary system with habitable planets". I thought this was a good way of having distinct goals, but remaining open ended and unpredictable. "biggest","tallest" etc being things which are easy to specify but could be anywhere in the universe.
I thought you could fly a "living ship" a bit like Moia in Farscape. This ship would develop according to how much knowledge you accumulated, along with resources you extract from the universe.
My goal was to make the procedural world itself as something of concern for the player, to encourage the player to actually get out there into the depths. Maybe I'll start on it someday, I don't know. Everyone seems to be making space games at the moment!