Game buzzword of the year? Most likely. With games such as Scribblenauts, Little Big Planet, etc. it’s certainly a concept that, at the moment, is probably better understood by game players than most designers, dev teams, and especially the marketing teams in most companies.
If you want a straight definition of “Emergence”, wikipedia’s will do. However, if I might suggest, the same thing was called metagameplay a couple of years ago by many designers. The difference now seems to be that [emergence] is something a designer seeks to implement, whereas [metagameplay] seems to be a “holy ghost” like aspect of any game’s communication with its player. Both allude to the same thing, yet, emergence sounds easier to define, and it’s less “gamy” word wise, which allows it to be used for aspects of a game such as interface, plot, storytelling, etc; +1 to vocabulary… helping us sound smarter, “I recon’”.
Games that rely on [emergence] are inherently flawed, but that flaw is kept almost as a core/needed aspect of its design.
Mike’s (Michael Arlington) presentation was short and to the point. I wish I had his powerpoint to show here, but I’ll summarize as best I can:
EMERGENCE
- It allows for players to define their own play experience
- He talked about a family night poker session in which everyone had a turn to come up with weird poker mechanics for everyone to adapt to.
- He also mentioned some personal goals he played with:only betting when quarters were at stake, wanting to take all quarters from other players, others catching on to his quarter crave and baiting him, etc.
- His contribution to the game was rather funny! He described how he was annoyed at a game type called “Dr. Pepper”. Unable to catch on quick enough, on his turn to define rules he said, “Ok! Prime Numbers are Wild!” the night’s audience lol’ed; his laughter seemed maniacal.
- It’s a combination of player defined game objectives, game mechanics, performance self-awareness.
- Emergence basically refuses to see the game through only one lens; it both looks at the game as a series of disjointed objectives and mechanics up to the player to thread together in whatever way they choose to see, and it actually relies on the player’s awareness of the game’s context as it is within and without the players participation.
- He mentioned Bunny Hopping as an emergent annoying thing that wasn’t stomped out of the design, nor curbed from players ability to perform… now that I think of it, I wonder if this is why Ocarina of Time doesn’t let players jump wherever AND whenever they want, because Link would look stupid doing such things…
- Another example he brought as emergent play was speed runs. Most games weren’t designed with speed run performances in mind, yet, youtube is littered with them. He showed us this one.
The game designs that have implemented emergence lately are honestly phenomenal. Games that rely on [emergence] are inherently flawed, but that flaw is kept almost as a core/needed aspect of its design. I want to align what I’m saying to a better mastermind: Brian Moriarty’s “Constellation“, Emergence allows the broad strokes to be defined by the design, with the interpretation details defined and chosen by players. If that isn’t a core aspect of defining games as a medium, what is?
For now, Emergence remains in the playing audiences’ domain, not so much on a companies bottom line goals; it would be too tough to market. Just as Scribblenauts had a bit of an “Internet spanking” for not catching the inclusion of the word “Sambo”, it also highlighted the power of a design that is as rich as the emergence it provides. I certainly agree with Ian Bogost’s post on it; I would summarize or add that I feel that its design is so important that it should be given pardon a priori. Actually, I’m kinda happy it happened. First, I’m actually a STRONG opponent of censorship. Second, I’m a strong defender of people’s ownership of their reactions; the only punishment the game should have is for people to pause and think about wether or not purchase the game because of the word. It’s as if I were to avoid buying a dictionary because it has a word I disagree with. A word cannot be castrated, it can only be devolved… a language can’t be sold, it has to be given away. Unless people can prove that the intention of “5th Cell” (developers) was to offend with that word, I think we’ll be able to see it as an honest oversight of one word out of 22,000 <— yes, twenty two THOUSAND, mother flippin’ usable words.
My 2 main observations, each a penny’s worth:
- Emergence works mostly when the rules are left loosely, almost at the point of them being broken, braking to the game’s objectives, or even seen as bugs. The game I brought in was specifically designed to use icons that were left up to the player to attach to some symbol or impart it with significance, yet they’re still functionally connected to the game.
- Order of action/activity is a good place to allow emergence to be exploited. In a storytelling sense, it allows the story of the session to be crafted to the players choice. Flip a switch 1000 times just to do it… Obey traffic in GTA during Taxi missions is my favorite example of metaga.., er, I mean Emergence
- Achievements are the Next Generation addition of the current batch of consoles. They actually track emergent behaviors, cluing the players to the design’s awareness of “silly” things. Some of these achievements assist players with exploring the permutations of all possibilities of any game.
I brought a game to the presentation, so did Ricky the “Overachiever”. As soon as I’m done with mine, I’ll post it here, and there. I’ll probably release it Public domain or GPL’d, it’s more app than game, and it REAAAALLY needs an explanation 
… but I think there’s some room left for a lot of play. Hmm… I wonder if that’s why prototypes are so crucial to me? Is it because in that stage of development, everything is emergent around the core aspect of the prototyped feature? {~~O0. \think, think, think, self/ .oO~~}
Ultimately, Emergence serves to extend time, play, and interpretation of games and their mechanics by letting players understand the game from a chaotic point of view. That was my main takeaway.
Thanks, Mike for such an awesome topic of discussion!
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Next month’s will be Relationship Explorations through Interactivity. Katherine Winter’s will be the main presenter, along with other demoers. I’m sure that isn’t the topic’s title she has in mind.
It’ll be interesting to see what we all come up with.
Keyvan
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On Saturday July the 18th, Full Sail’s Game Development Department is hosting another iteration of The Playmine 24-hour project, an extracurricular student game project that lasts a contiguous 24 hours. In short, we design and code for 24 hours to see which game or games are born.