I love this, because decay implies a story, evidence of somebody else's specific failure, which procgen can't fake. It's not just clever, it's brilliant!
Minecraft's procgen villages and mines are oatmeal by comparison. Oxygen Not Included generates ruined stuff, but it isn't from other players, and I've never found it interesting -- just a way of handing you some advanced objects you don't have yet. Ruins with no provenance are a loot table with extra steps.
NetHack bones files, The Sims Exchange in 2000, Spore's pollination, Drivatars, and this mod are all the same mechanism, reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name.
It has a name. Maxis called it the Pollinated Content System, and Caryl Shaw's job title was Pollinated Content Producer. GDC 2006, "Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore":
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013402/Building-Community-Aro...
"Massively single player" names the shape of the game. "Pollination" names the mechanism, and it's the better word, because pollen goes where it's needed, carried by something that isn't the plant.
Chaim Gingold wrote: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you visit a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. That difference is most of the value, and it's the part every mod-based version of this still hasn't got.
http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...
Placement is the hard part, and it's the part nobody proposing these mods has thought about yet. Spore's server pulled content in as needed to keep the ecosystem balanced, and the game built a model of your taste to decide what to ask for. Will, in the February 2007 PopSci interview:
>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.
https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...
Caryl Shaw, whose actual job this was:
>I have a team that works on the server like the database schema who figure out the algorithms to do the matching so that the content that you get make sense for your game and you don't have to download hundreds and thousands of mega bytes of content. You only get the kind of stuff that makes sense for your game.
https://www.animationxpress.com/interviews/exclusive-intervi...
That one mechanism answers Avicebron's "co-evolve the ecosystems", ratelimitsteve's "geography never affects the animals", and analog8374's curation problem, all at once.
Curation comes free. Download counts rank quality better than a designer can, because thousands of people are each picking for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. The "tedious lot of work" analog8374 describes is work the community does unpaid, and does better!
Payload size is why any of this is possible. Spore creatures compressed to about 3KB; 1KB of source expanded to 5MB of content, a 5000:1 ratio. Better than that: every piece of pollinated content was a "card" -- a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image file. You could email a creature. You could post one on a forum and somebody could drag it straight into their game. The picture was the data. A decayed Factorio base or Minecraft settlement is a small diff, not a 30GB folder.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-p...
Why it keeps dying: the mechanism is cheap to build and expensive to maintain, and it generates no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block.
Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone (but I'm working on solving that problem). Spore's servers are somehow still up, which I always assumed was because there's nobody left at EA who knows how to log in and turn them off.
Now that EA belongs to the Saudi Public Investment Fund (93.4%) and Jared Kushner, the failure mode I worry about isn't a forgotten password.
The PIF's chairman is Mohammed bin Salman. In 2018 his people met the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with a bone saw and a forensic pathologist who had explained the plan on tape twelve minutes before Khashoggi walked in: "After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out." He left the building in five suitcases and his remains have never been found. Three days later they sent the consulate car to a car wash. The Saudi government's account changed five times in three weeks; the New York Times ran it under the headline "Khashoggi's Death Is Explained by the Saudis in Five Acts (and Counting)". In 2021 the US declassified its assessment that bin Salman approved the operation. Every word of that is one search away, and reality is worse than any joke I can make about it.
So the thing I actually worry about is not Spore. Nobody is going to convene a meeting about Spore. It's The Sims. Saudi Arabia's media regulator banned Final Fantasy XVI from the kingdom in 2023 over Square Enix's "complete refusal to modify the content to suit the region", and made Roblox switch off voice and text chat and delete over 300,000 games. The Sims 4 has shipped gender-independent clothing since 2016, sexual orientation as a character setting since July 2022, and since patch 140 in January 2023, chest binders under Tops > Tanks and top surgery scars under Body > Body Scars. Go look, it's in the base game. A regime that could not tolerate one man writing newspaper columns is not going to tolerate two little cartoon women getting married in a suburban house you built for them. That content is a rounding error in EA's revenue and an existential affront to the people who now sign EA's checks, cutting it costs nothing and buys goodwill in Riyadh, and the $700 million a year in cost reductions gives them a reason to say it was about money. I am writing this down with dates and menu paths so that when it happens, nobody gets to say it wasn't foreseeable.
But I digress...
"The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.
And generative models are trained to produce the conditional average, so pointing one at the oatmeal problem gets you oatmeal faster and in greater volume. The only fix anyone has ever demonstrated is a person who cares about one specific creature.
Kate Compton says 10,000 bowls of oatmeal. Phil Hartman on SNL got there in 1989, and it was a lot more than 30,000.
Stop settling for oatmeal. There's fiber, and then there's high fiber!