Ben Gonshaw: Digital Media Theorist & Game Design Consultant
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EMERGENCE: Gaming's Saviour, or False Hope? Categorising Emergence in Games

There are some great confusions about what emergence actually is when it comes to games, because the term has been used so liberally. Some will count essentially simple systems as having emergence if the player can come up with new ways to play it. This is an attempt to pin down what emergence is in games and how we can categorise it, inspired by Jesse Rothenburg's post on Ludonauts a while back.

What to Study in Games

When looking at emergence in games a key factor to consider at all times is that part of your system, your world, is the player’s or players’ brain(s). True, the human part of the loop may be restricted by the capabilities you grant their avatar, be that a physical incarnation in the game world, or an incorporeal commander issuing orders. Gamers have extraordinary abilities to invent new ways to interact with a game even under such restrictions and are the ultimate random factor that can perturb a simulated complex system.

 

Before you can begin to examine the uses of emergence in games, you must first decide what exactly you want to study. I believe that there are two things that can be studied:

1: Emergence in the gameworld as a complete system without any external inputs.
EXCLUSIVE SYSTEM (ES): No player exists: the system(s) you examine is/are purely virtual and run/s without interference.

 

2: Emergence in the gameworld as a complete system with the inclusion of the player.
INCLUSIVE SYSTEM (IS): The player is an integral part of the system(s) being examined.

There is one more aspect that can also be studied, but I won’t be spending too much time on it here, because it is only obliquely related:

1. ‘Emergence’ in the player’s responses to the game environment (of a non-complex system):

The player is watched to see whether they create novel solutions or uses for standard game items and abilities. the player’s aptitude to press their avatar into action for purposes other than the designer’s is legendary. Jesse mentions mine-climbing in halflife, others cite 'carpet-bombing' in RTS Myth II, a physics exploit where players would throw molotov cocktails and then propel them far into enemy territory by hitting the bottles with an attack from a different troop type (read the bottom of the page). Another great driver for player innovation comes from speed trials, people's attempts to finish games in as short a time as possible. They sacrifice health by banging into enemies to push them up to higher platforms and all kinds of other tricks to finish in the fastest time.

 

I would argue that such things are not emergence, there need be no complex system within the game (a pre-requisite of emergence), rather they are displays of player ingenuity and nothing more.

Categorising Emergence

As a game designer you can create systems that are, Complex, Dynamic and Adaptive. These systems must have useful and interesting behaviours before a player even gets their hands on them. Ok, so now we have refined what we are studying, now we can begin to categorise the types of emergence that we can find in games.

 

Emergence Dependency Level

The extent to which a game relies on emergence as a technique that affects gameplay through the game mechanics is important. We will call this the Emergence Dependence Level (EDL), a scale which at 0 has no effect on gameplay to 100 where emergence is integral.   On one side of the scale we have icing: flocks of birds in the sky, shoaling fish in the ponds, and inconsequential but convincing milling crowds. On the other end of the scale you have a herding game where interacting with a complex system is the raison d’être and the game cannot exist without it.

Intentionality

The second measure is a qualifier on that EDL, Intentionality. Do you deliberately create your mechanics to rely on a complex system that can produce emergence, or does the emergence have a high level of unexpected impact on your game that alters the play dynamic? Just because a game ends up being reliant on the emergence within it to be fun, does not mean that this was the intention of the designers to start with. At 0 there is an intention to base none of the gameplay elements on emergence. At 50 there is a desire to base 50% of the gameplay on complex systems and at 100 the fundamental premise of the game is to centered on emergence.   This is not a particularly useful measure if examining a game that you are producing yourself, but it is very helpful in analysing the strengths and weaknesses of other games. The intention of the games creators compared with the reality of how the game plays can help you in devising more successful games.

Order

Order is not meant in the neat and tidy definition. Here order refers to what level of complexity you are dealing with. If your game is a herding game, like in the previous example, then your game is first order: you are shaping and honing a single system. If instead you are a wolf in one of 16 wolf packs, the higher order system of wolf-society meets wolf society is the environment, and is a 2nd order system.   The higher the order the more complex and unpredictable the results are, as they depend on systems that in themselves are difficult to predict.

Type of Influence

There are two basic types of influence based on the player's relationship to the system that is manipulated: Internal or External A different play experience can be had depending on whether you are external to the system and affecting it from the outside, or internal to the system and a partner in the changes. This is simply illustrated with the sheep herder game. Are you are a sheepdog, affecting it from the outside or a sheep, subverting the flock from the inside?

Other Measures

There may well be further levels of granularity, such as the stability of the core systems and their likelihood to break down or to 'evolve' i.e. break down in a way that is useful for gameplay. For gaming purposes one supposes that a game relies on a stable underlying simulation for gameplay to be possible so this has been deliberately ignored. The circumstance of game shepherd, where it is the player's job to maintain order in an atrophying system, is the obvious exception to this.

 

When games come to rely on multiple emergent systems within them, these measures will have to be applied to each and every system within the game as opposed to to the game in general. This means that overall a game may have an External influence, but as the leader of a company of troops this is exercised through an Internal influence. I do not see a reason to create a 'mixed' category, as eventually all games will be mixed to one degree or another, therefore it would not be a useful delineation.

 

If you think of another measure or a refinement of one of these, please drop me a mail, or add a comment.

Conclusion

By employing these measures we can classify what type of emergence any given game employs and where the player fits into that system. This should prove useful for designing games that employ emergence better and in studying games that attempt it.

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