The Necessary Fantasy Logic

In my second post about videogame architecture over on BLDGBLOG, I connect some ideas about the design of videogame cities to the possibilities of procedural generation. It's a little bit speculative, especially when I start to link Half-Life 2's Viktor Antonov (whose concept art for The Crossing is above) to Chris Delay's methods in Subversion:

"What parameters would we need in order both to understand and create a science fiction Edinburgh, or Sao Paulo, or Vancouver? Identify the necessary fantasy logic within a procedural city-building system and you could recreate cities with their alternate identity in an instant. An accelerated future Moscow, or a retropunk Venice, instantly sprawling out of the monitor."

Stuff like that.