That Emily Short blog post is a good read, but I didn't find that it helped me learn what is "the horseshoe theory of AI generation" nor in what sense handcrafting should end up close to procgen or anything else. Can you elaborate and/or point to something that does?
1) left horseshoe prong (prolific handcrafted quantity is quality): "4000 handcrafted unique rooms made by one person" that are all fundamentally the same in terms of non-consequential interactivity. Ie, the quality is extremely low compared to what you can actually do even with QBasic!
Online, almost nobody is actually going to crack open the interactions.txt file. Instead, the conversation is about the idea of it being interesting or of any special qualities, when it isn't. The thing itself is just a prop for the conversation, and you can see where anyone actually talking about the thing itself is on the margins.
When this is for a free text adventure game, it's harmless fun to hype it. But the other prong is AAA hype and AI hype, which seems like the opposite but is actually the same thing.
2) right horseshoe prong ("infinitely generated quantity is quality"): "100,000,000,000 unique planets made by one generative codebase" was the premise of Endless Space and it had a very rocky launch that took years of bespoke human work and decisions to improve the quality. Because when you're deadset on quantity being your primary quality, you also don't have time for intractable complexity or true differentiation.
And you can see the consequences play out in an adventure game like Starfield where they included infinite random planet generation, except the interactions and space of player decisions remain the exact same, so it's more like an infinite screensaver than gameplay.
On both ends, the media and discussion is aggressively channeled away from the thing itself and towards the narrative of it being something compelling and noteworthy by virtue of how it was created.
The "robot barista" at the SF airport "making" you an espresso by having a servo arm insert a kurig cup and charging you 5 bucks is extremely similar to someone charging you 50 bucks at a craft fair for a "handmade" set of earrings that look suspiciously like someone just wrapped some copper wiring they bought online around a semi-precious stone they bought online.
In one case you are "participating in a spectacle of the future" and living in an aesthetically futuristic moment while paying 500% markup to drink a shitty instant espresso, and in the other you are "participating in a spectacle of the past" and harkening back to the aesthetic of a time where we all came together as a close-knit community at our town market to support our village crafters and artists while... also paying a 500% markup for goods where real or perceptible increase in quality/value-add is often marginal.
The goods which are remarkable speak for themselves, the rest is marketing.
Ah, okay, I buy that theory (especially in its incarnation as handcrafted earrings at craft fairs). I recognize the examples of robot coffee (or pizza) and handmade crafts as "genera" with an unfortunately large number of examples/species in the real world.
But I still fail to recognize the OP's 4000-room game as a species of any recognizable "genus" of similar games/products. I'm not saying it seems good, I'm just saying it seems pretty sui generis to me. Maybe I don't play enough bad handmade games. :)
