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Emergent Gameplay: What is it and how can we see more?
So, I'd like to get a little discussion here for some of the more game design/theory people about emergent gameplay. What is everyone's definition of this idea and what are some key design elements to help foster it's use in more games? I've always found emergent gameplay to be one of the best selling points of a game and really provides a sense of character and depth to games such as Dwarf Fortress. I'm curious to see what people think.
Comments
One example of something i mean is that when I play Ocarina of time, I'm usually rolling every where, or backflipping all the way across Hyrule Field whenever I don't have Epona. It's a little bit weird but I thought it made travelling around a bit more fun, you have to have a rhythm.
I think I might also include small rules changes and mods. Take siege maps in NS. The rules of one game are tweaked relatively slightly, and suddenly a completely different game appears. Really siege is the same rules as NS except that the map is constructed such that certain impenetrable doors bisect the map until an amount of time has passed.
I've always thought that the more simple rules you have the more chances you have for them to grow into an emergent system. But the rules need to be able to stand on their own and also feed into each other.
I also think that the rules need to be applied to the whole game and not small subsets. Like how you can mine/collect everything in Minecraft. Being able to then use, almost, everything to build something new and to be able to place, again almost, down on the ground to build something gives rise to tons of emergent gameplay.
An example where I think a game designer gave this up and went for a more easily controllable system is EVE Online. There you have one set of goods produced by NPC Controlled stations/planets that can be traded between them. And you have another group of goods to be mined to produce place made good. And then there is yet another group of goods to be mined from comets/balls of ice to run player space stations. And then there is another set of goods mined by player space stations to help you produce ... and so on. They could have made the simple decision to have just one set of raw materials and have everything flow from that, rather than continuing to add more and more and more exotic materials. I see this as a missed opportunity.
EVE does have other areas where they do keep to a more simple set of rules, or lack there of, where emergent gameplay arises.
All the maths of science can written down in a few very small formula. The individual concepts are pretty simple too. When you start adding them together you get crazy stuff like stars and galaxies and little ants too.
Back in "the day" my friends and I invented "Kill the Pimp" in GTA3; kill as many of the pimps in the bright pink suites as possible before you die. If you knowingly kill anyone else (including cops) it was game over as well.
Monster Wars in Doom 2 was another favorite around my childhood; pick one of the big arena maps (Downtown, Suburbia, Dead Simple, etc), use WadEd to fill it with two types of monsters that can't hurt themselves (basically anything other than zombies), get them to fight and see who wins. Hell Knights v. Revenants and Imps v. Cacodemons were favorites.
By its very nature, Emergent Gameplay can't be designed before hand. Jamming your game with tons of complex mechanisms based on simple rules is a good way to encourage it though.
Player actions are a direct result of game design. If players "emerge" a new style of play, that is a mechanical extension of the game's rules.
Are you talking more about things like Portal speed runs; people using physics glitches and portal bugs to subvert the intended solution to a puzzle?
You can try to say that "emergent" gameplay is by definition "unintended," but that's a largely useless definition. Rather, if it truly was unintended AND unexpected, then the game was not thoroughly analyzed at design-time. I'm not saying such analysis is necessary, simply that "emergent" gameplay is a literal extension of the rules of the game, no different from intended play.
I'd also like to mention that life, in some sense, is emergent itself. Conway's Game of Life demonstrates how some configurations of the underlying rulesets can give rise to stable change propagation. There are some arguments that life itself works this way, that physics works this way (an electron being a stable configuration from a random change in some goopy substrate), that evolution works this way in part, and that socioeconomic systems work this way.
If you want to get a very interesting perspective on this concept of how emergent, stable behaviors can be brought about by engineering substrates and encouraging the right interactions, check out Steve Grand's book Creation. If anyone played the game Creatures (1, 2, 3 or Docking Station), Steve Grand is the fellow who put those games together. I'm a little over halfway through it, but it is a fantastic read for perspective.
At leas that's my working definition.
If "emergent" were simply defined by being unpredictable outcomes from lower rulesets, then it would be called chaotic or statistical. Chaotic systems cannot be precisely predicted as iterations increase without having absolutely perfect knowledge and precision. Statistical systems are quite obviously random and thus unpredictable. Both lead to unpredictable outcomes (although either can have predictability within some error margin), and both are founded upon some mathematical framework (which could be a set of rules, why not?).
Emergent properties imply that higher level behaviors emerge as interactions from and between lower level rules. Some of these properties can absolutely be predicted. Engineers can thus design for certain emergent properties to exist. The engineers are creating lower level rulesets, so the emergent play styles are not necessarily forced upon the players.
However, if you consider cascading levels of emergence, it might be that the lowest level of rulesets are engineered so that the next level (player choices) result in a higher level (player/environment interactions) of emergence that creates behaviors and properties that are somewhat more directed than say those game designers who just make up core rules and let people have at it.
To put it less academically:
I would argue that tweaking the shit out of a game through playtesting is examining the emergent properties of the game and then engineering the lower level rules to yield emergent gameplay that better follows the designer's vision. It is the styles of play that aren't within the designer's vision that are most often referred to as "emergent", but I would argue all styles of play are in fact emergent. It is an unfortunate trend of using the word emergent for this isolated set of cases that causes confusion.
It also lists "unexpected" before "natural consequence" so clearly I win
Also, more to the point, you choosing to cite one alternative definition of a general dictionary reeks of confirmation bias. ;^) Words like "emergent," "game," "strategy," or "tactic" mean very specific things in particular fields of discussion: using a colloquial definition there is a futile endeavor, as such definitions are usually overbroad.
If a game can sort of play itself in an interesting way, and then the player gets to hop in there and take part, I think that makes for a good baseline. Dwarf Fortress did this to a lesser extent. Creatures did this very well. Black and White did this to some extent. Sims even did it. These are all games that sort of have something going on even if you aren't there, but once you are there, those goings on enrich your experience.
I think any game in the artificial life genre sort of has to have this feature. I think games with a strong focus on agent-based modeling and simulation or learning agents will also have this feature. Perhaps all of these have emergent properties that enhance gameplay because the game engine changes actor behavior over time (as opposed to canned or scripted behaviors of the usual game which do not change over time).
Also the relevant XKCD.