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[bvanevery]

So I say.  It just doesn't happen.  Anything that ever happens in games, pretty much is anticipated by game designers before it happens.  A rocket launcher that makes you go airborne isn't emergent gameplay.  It's a consequence of implementing a physics system, and a fairly straightforward one at that.  If you could invent a rocket launcher in a physics system that only started with sticks, stones, and basic physical laws, I might start to believe that gameplay emerges.  But that's not how it goes.  We've never seen that game.  People fantasize about it endlessly, but what they actually end up getting are crafting systems.

Offer an example to prove my claim wrong.

This diatribe triggered by a comment in another thread:

There's emergent gameplay, why can't there be emergent story?

Who says there's any emergent gameplay?  A game world is like that Twilight Zone episode where faceless blue people construct the universe 1 minute in advance of you experiencing it.

[OneMoreGo]

 

There are lots of examples. Stacking people/sentry guns in TFC for example, it's a game within a game. Did the designers intend it - I highly doubt it.

(I was going to use a minecraft example but that would just set you off  )

[Alec S.]

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

That should disprove your statement alone, but I'll continue.

The fact that you're even asking about this shows a severe misunderstanding of the concept of emergent gameplay.  Take chess as an example.  The sheer possible number of ways for that game to play out.  Something on the range of 10^40, and that's if you put a limit on turn number.  This possibility space emerges out of a rather simple set of rules.  This is even more true for the game Go.  

A game of X-COM or Civilization can play out in an amazing number of ways.  Emergence is simply the result of a system and interaction.

Denying the existence of emergence in games is like denying the existence of narrative in movies or harmony in music.

[increpare]

Spleef, in minecraft counts as an example.

Or one can have games where players can create their own scripted entities - second-life, for instance.  

Do you think gold-farming was anticipated by the people who made the first MMO that was abused by gold-farmers?  

So I say.  It just doesn't happen.  Anything that ever happens in games, pretty much is anticipated by game designers before it happens.  A rocket launcher that makes you go airborne isn't emergent gameplay.  It's a consequence of implementing a physics system, and a fairly straightforward one at that.

Rocket jumping doesn't count - it first featured in doom I think, where it was an intended strategy for some levels.  I think it's useful pragmatically to say that things that the game designers encountered before launch don't count.*

Also, just because the connection appears obvious in retrospect, that doesn't mean it was anticipated.  That said, job of QA is inclusive of finding such things, and many might be found, they don't necessarily find everything, and neither can they always accurately predict how people will play the game.

(*and yes I know minecraft is still in alpha, but gimme a break )

[bvanevery]

Spleef, in minecraft counts as an example.

That's a game implemented on top of another game.  It doesn't emerge from the game itself.  I could make rules in Quake about how people can and can't shoot each other, like maybe you're only allowed to run backwards, or must shoot all your weapons in order from 1..9 on the keyboard.

Or one can have games where players can create their own scripted entities - second-life, for instance.  

Aren't they just the game designers then?  Well, it's an interesting question, if the player has raw game design capabilities.  It depends on how limited their API is.  Text MUD APIs can be pretty flexible.

Do you think gold-farming was anticipated by the people who made the first MMO that was abused by gold-farmers?  

Gold-farming doesn't change the game.  People have been doing tedious level-up in RPGs forever.  People have found plenty of ways to gain uber-powerful characters and then grief other players.  For instance, muleing. 

[bvanevery]

There are lots of examples. Stacking people/sentry guns in TFC for example, it's a game within a game. Did the designers intend it - I highly doubt it.

Stacking is known as a pretty common hack in 3D engines in general nowadays, possibly because a number of games are using the same 3D engines.  I know you could do it in Morrowind.  Who did the first stacking hack, and, does it really change the game all that much?  I'm going to say that stacking belongs to a class of gameplay called "cheats."  I can't think of an example of a cheat making a game greatly different than it already was.  Cheats can certainly imbalance a game though.

[bvanevery]

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

What does Life offer you as a player?  What variety of experience can you get from it?  You have some cells, you put in a pattern, things flip around, and then stabilize eventually.  You can do this as many times as you like.  You may see different patterns, but your experience as a player will always be pretty much the same.  The game designer may not be able to anticipate all the patterns, any more than I can anticipate the output of a random number generator, but the designer knows that your experience as a player is going to be watching these patterns and nothing more.

The fact that you're even asking about this shows a severe misunderstanding of the concept of emergent gameplay.  Take chess as an example.  The sheer possible number of ways for that game to play out.  Something on the range of 10^40, and that's if you put a limit on turn number.  This possibility space emerges out of a rather simple set of rules.  This is even more true for the game Go.  

There's nothing new in these variations of experience.  If you're an experienced chess player, you will experience similar games over and over again.  If you're an experienced football player, you will catch the ball in pretty much the same way over and over again, regardless of whether the atoms in the wind blow infinitely differently every time you play.

A game of X-COM or Civilization can play out in an amazing number of ways.  Emergence is simply the result of a system and interaction.

Can't speak for X-COM but there's nothing amazing about how the Civ genre plays out.  I've played most of them, and I still play Freeciv nearly every day.  I know as much about the possibility space of that game as can be known.

[increpare]

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

What does Life offer you as a player?  What variety of experience can you get from it?  You have some cells, you put in a pattern, things flip around, and then stabilize eventually.

That's not at all true.  GoL is turing-complete - one can try to perform any algorithm that a normal computer can do on it.  (I don't know how relevant GoL is to this discussion - I don't think that it is, but given that you responded I will take it that you do view it as a game).  In principle (though not in practice) if you learned a sufficiently elaborate interpretational framework internalized, you could program in it like most other languages - this means that even though "the designer knows that your experience as a player is going to be watching these patterns and nothing more", the pattern-watching bit encompasses a lot.  (Minesweeper has similar properties as a ruleset).

There's nothing new in these variations of experience.  If you're an experienced chess player, you will experience similar games over and over again.

Do you think the vocabulary that exists today for playing, thinking and strategizing about chess existed when it was originally conceived?  (which is what it can be inferred that you're claiming).

edit: It's also not clear to me what your working definition of emergent gameplay is - it's clearly different to wikipedia's (which is free from concerns about whether the designer anticipated a feature or not).  In general I don't care for definitions, but it is relevant to the topic of this thread that we understand what you understand the term to mean (given that it's clearly different from what appears to be the standard definition).

[magnum_opus]

A rocket launcher that makes you go airborne isn't emergent gameplay.  It's a consequence of implementing a physics system, and a fairly straightforward one at that.

No actually that is emergent gameplay, so long as it's a consequence of the game engine and not an explicitly coded feature.

[s0]

Game design is a lie!

So-called "developers" just randomly bash on keyboards and then release the result. You know it's true.

[Hangedman]

So-called "developers" just randomly bash on keyboards and then release the result. You know it's true.

I personally roll my face back and forth across the keyboard while hitting my mouse with a golf club, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

[Ego_Shiner]

i'm surprised fighters haven't come up yet, people get so into them that they exploit things developers never began to think of. stuff like wavedashing, tiers, all that shit. i really doubt developers intended to make MvC2 so unbalanced, they just didn't put that much effort into balancing.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

there's a difference between 'emergent gameplay' and 'gameplay the developers didn't anticipate' though

[Hangedman]

Ascended glitches and etc like in fighting games could be said to be emergent gameplay, but they are not emergent gameplay design. They were not intended to be such, and though one could say they are by definition emergent they aren't really a developing continuous progression.

EDIT: Actually, you know what? I'm not even going to bother. Have fun.

[gimymblert]

Well game can be design as "language",  the permutation it allow create the emergence. The creator of language cannot anticipate what you can tell with that language, neither the abuse of the syntax for other purpose. Minecraft is design to be emergent. Some game are not design to be emergent, but allow emergent things to happen. Physics system really work like syntax and grammar (see halo forge).

Spleef, in minecraft counts as an example.

That's a game implemented on top of another game.  It doesn't emerge from the game itself.  I could make rules in Quake about how people can and can't shoot each other, like maybe you're only allowed to run backwards, or must shoot all your weapons in order from 1..9 on the keyboard.

Or one can have games where players can create their own scripted entities - second-life, for instance. 

Aren't they just the game designers then?  Well, it's an interesting question, if the player has raw game design capabilities.  It depends on how limited their API is.  Text MUD APIs can be pretty flexible.

Do you think gold-farming was anticipated by the people who made the first MMO that was abused by gold-farmers? 

Gold-farming doesn't change the game.  People have been doing tedious level-up in RPGs forever.  People have found plenty of ways to gain uber-powerful characters and then grief other players.  For instance, muleing. 

Your answer are the very definition of emergent gameplay, the possibility for a game to support a wide range of new game inside him (see how to make non goal game thread i made and the conclusion i had reach ). It's about power as possibility.

Otherwise, it's just you don't have the same definition as me, we can't argue on different axiom.

[Montoli]

I feel like there is a fundamental disconnect in this thread.  It reads to me sort of like:

bvanevery:  Emergent Gameplay doesn't happen!  Prove me wrong!

Everyone else:  [examples!!!]

bvanevery:  Those aren't emergent gameplay, those are just games in which new and interesting gameplay patterns emerged as the result of the interaction between in-game systems, in a way that the designers never intended!



At this point, my theory is that bvanevery is using a different definition of "emergent gameplay" from everyone else.

[Kunal]

Wouldn't the proximity-mine-climbing thing in Deus Ex qualify as emergent gameplay ? AFAIK the designers were never aware that such a thing could be done, and it was discovered by the players.

[s0]

Otherwise, it's just you don't have the same definition as me, we can't argue on different axiom.

I think this is the root of the problem here.

[OneMoreGo]

I feel like there is a fundamental disconnect in this thread.  It reads to me sort of like:

bvanevery:  Emergent Gameplay doesn't happen!  Prove me wrong!

Everyone else:  [examples!!!]

bvanevery:  Those aren't emergent gameplay, those are just games in which new and interesting gameplay patterns emerged as the result of the interaction between in-game systems, in a way that the designers never intended!

At this point, my theory is that bvanevery is using a different definition of "emergent gameplay" from everyone else.

And the more examples we provide the more will be added to the "I don't define that as emergent" pile. 

[J. R. Hill]

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.