I'm hard on story-driven games as well, I don't think games are very good at telling narratives because the narrator's desire to control what happens next is at odds with the player's freedom to choose what happens next.
The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.
One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.
Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)
I can't wait for the computer generated content trend to end. I understand why it's attractive to indies, because they can focus on the engine - and a game emerges from the effort on its own. But hand generated content is always superior. Turns out Shakespeare writes better stories than even a million monkeys.
There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge.
What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot.
For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.
The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.
One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.
Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)