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[bvanevery]

In the thread "emergent gameplay is a lie", I claimed that emergent gameplay as commonly bandied about in game designer circles does not actually exist.  Rather, game designers explicitly create the realities that players experience 99% of the time.  The remaining 1% of "unintended" game events are uninteresting because there is no continuous, sustained pattern of general emergence.  If there were, we would have continuously new game experiences all the time.  Games of this sort actually do exist: traditional pencil and paper RPG, freeform no rules RPG, improvisational group writing, improvisational comedy acting, and the sum total of human historical experience known as Real Life.  However, these games are not computer games.

I think it is important to understand, on a theoretical basis, how paltry the so called "complex" rule systems are that we bandy about as "emergent" games.  If we accept that we as game designers are manually doing all the work, then at least we'll get better at the smoke and mirrors, the illusions of free action and open endedness that players respond positively to.

Formally, I stated that a game with truly emergent behavior shouldn't be limited to 0th or 1st order production rules.  It should continue ad infinitum to Nth order production rules.  A poster wanted a solid definition and a concrete example of this, to determine what such games are, or if they are indeed impossible to make with computers.  I said, we will have to actually play such a game, as theses things are too difficult to visualize with only theories.  Hence this thread.  I'm setting up the rules of the game and starting the game.

Some definitions:

• 0th order rules - are explicitly given by a game designer to a player.  For instance, in basketball you score 2 points for shooting a basket, you must dribble the ball when moving, and you're not allowed to deliberately knock down your opponents to accomplish your goals.
• 1st order rules - are systems a game designer gives to a player to interact with.  They may not have explicit rules for the player to follow, but they do have predictable actions and consequences within the system.  For instance, a game designer provides a basketball court with goals of a certain shape and height.  The game designer doesn't specify how to perform layups, alley-oops, picks, or other physical feats and tactics, but such things are direct consequences of the physical system the game designer provided.  If human beings are in motion on the court, it doesn't take rocket science to see that they're going to devise footwork to improve their gameplay.
• 2nd order rules - We're not sure what these are.  They may be tantamount to basketball slowly morphing into a related activity.  I don't see why this would happen in the closed system of traditional basketball.  Analyzing the history of the sport might help here.
• 3rd order rules and beyond - We really don't know.

0th order rules of this Nth order emergent game

• Don't debate the merits or demerits of this theory here.  Here, play the game.  Debate the theory in another thread.
• Play the game in good faith.  Don't disrupt the game just because you don't like the idea of the game, or don't like who created the game, or who posted in it, or whatever other meta reason you have for messing with the game instead of constructively participating in it.
• The game begins with a situation posed by the game's 1st player.  Subsequent players react to the situation posed by the 1st player, as a freeform writing exercise.  Players continue to contribute ad infinitum, in reaction to previous context.
• Players are expected to write with relevance to the context immediately preceeding their contribution.  Don't gratuitously disappear into la la land.  Contributions that do not retain much semblance of immediate context will be ignored by the other players, as if they hadn't been written at all.
• Make an effort to write something interesting.  Keeping it interesting is about the only goal we really have.  The game won't go on if people start falling asleep.
• Players will assuredly take the context in different directions as they contribute.  Don't get angry and confrontational about this.  Try to bring the contexts back together somehow if you can.  If that can't be done, try to sustain the contexts independently for a time, then bring them together later.  If that can't be done, don't worry about it.  The freeform writing exercise is going to have branches, and some of those branches are going to lead to dead ends.
• Players may engage in meta-discussion of how events could or should be organized.  For instance, freeform RPG often has each player in charge of "their character."  This particular emergent game has no a priori rules for who has responsibility for producing or tracking what.  At some point, you may not like how it's going, you may feel ignored, it may make you angry.  Don't get angry about it.  Accept the emergence for what it is, and the meta-discussions for what they are.  They may come to some consensus or they may derail and terminate the game.  That is fine, there can always be another game.
  
• Please try to use a smaller, less obtrusive font for meta discussion, so as to keep the flow of the main text.  For instance, you might try an 8 point italicized font.
• Anyone may contribute to the game.  The game is never closed to anyone's participation.
• If you are a latecomer to the game, you will be expected to read a lot of what has been written beforehand.  You won't be expected to know every detail of what's happened, but especially, the most recent context of the game is important.  If your contribution is trampling someone's previously established framework for what's going on in the game, it may be ignored in favor of previously established framework.  That said, previous frameworks are not canon.  They can be morphed into something else, or discarded due to lack of use.

1st order rules of this Nth order emergent game

• Your ability to write.  Talk is cheap.
• This forum.  Your web browser.  Your keyboard.

[bvanevery]

Ascorba struck his staff upon the empty air, and a portal opened, as it had thousands of times before.  The seething yellow energy blinded him, limiting the view into the beyond.  Darkness; a lump of dawn; it matters not.  He steps through, to other worlds again.

Frey stood upon the battlefield of the fallen, corpses everywhere, the remnants of their blood upon him.  His face, masked in the reflective pink glow of his oval armor.  His hands, busy with the work of stacking that which moved no more.

Ascorba stepped across iron, twisted swords, detritus and detriment, to reach the God he once knew.  "And so, how has it come to this?"

[RCIX]

It came to him in a flash of understanding. The landscape shimmered around him, and suddenly the ruins were gone. Instead, there was a great valley before him, with two armies at either side decked out in full battle complements. Off in the distance at the far end of the valley, nearly too small too see, was a small altar or throne of some kind, upon which rested a brooch. A trumpet was sounded, and the armies charged at each other.

The fight was even to the end, and as the last combatants fell to the ground in a heap, two kings (previously hidden by the terrain and flora) appeared. They rode to a relatively clear spot in the carnage and dismounted. One was arrayed with an impressive set of pink armor, and the other had a solid and large dark blue shield  with the longest sword Ascorba had ever seen. They made as if to duel, and --

With a jolt, Ascorba returned to the present. He silently asked for more, but with no response. A few hours go by and nothing happens. Finally, he says to no one in particular, "I must learn more about these kings. Then, perhaps, I will see."

[bvanevery]

Frey stacked the last of the bodies into the ceremonial wall, and crossed iron bands upon it.  It stretched along the valley floor, to the reach of sight.  A faint wind echoed for the dead.

"What more must you know?  What more must you see?  You have walked for world upon world, for age upon age.  This man," he said, shoving the king's pink helmet roughly atop the heap, "walked in My image."

[RCIX]

"And so you killed him? that seems awfully cruel." Ascorba's voice was a whisper, as if uncertain a reply would come. A heavy wind blew, and with it the following words. "Yes. He tried to grasp immortality, and that would have been poison to him and those under his rule."

"In his resistance, he tossed his entire rule into attempting to grasp it. His last breath was spent attempting to defeat any who stood in the way of his supposed prize. A mere trinket (such as this one), " and an image of an ornately decorated jewelry, adorned with gold and diamonds and prominently featuring a strangely glowing carbuncle -- "laid on an inconsequential altar, and yet it destroyed this entire kingdom. Who, that would throw away a kingdom for poison, deserves to live?"

Frey stares at the pile, and waits for an answer.

[meta: So you're saying Frey is some sort of incarnation of God?]

[bvanevery]

[meta: Frey is described as a God in the 1st post.  I capitalized it for impact; he's not a dinky lower case god.  To me that does not imply that he is The God, or that this is a monotheistic universe.]


The pile, under the vexing gaze of the God, shrieks in protest.  "Murderer!  Sacker of bones!  Builder of Ten Mountains and Nine Places, what shall our families feed upon now??  Your tortured valley, your withered croplands, your endless warring!  We die for you, you live for none of us!"  Thousands of souls scream in agony, and the wall of the dead shakes across the valley, to the end of sight and mind.

The God, caring no more, looks away.  The bones are still once more.

Ascorba has seen enough.  He strikes the thin air with his staff, and a portal opens.  Glowing yellow, as always, to another world.  Another empty world of Gods and their petty concerns.

[RCIX]

He steps through, and appears in space. A wavering blue glow around him seems to maintain a thin atmosphere, though allows him to see out. He looks, and sees two massive structures far to the left and right, with a backdrop of a sun and two earth-like planets forward and below him. Silently (for there is no sound in space), two small dots, resembling some sort of vehicle or weapon, are released from one of the structures and start streaking towards the other. Seeing that it'll be a while before they arrive, he ponders his past, and how he came to be what he is.

"Ascorba! Come on! It's time for dinner!"

[gimymblert]

sorry Bvanevery: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm

[RCIX]

sorry Bvanevery: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm

"Debate the theory in another thread."

I want more story! :D

[bento_smile]

Ascorba seated himself at the dinner table, to be treated to a paltry meal of some limp bread and hard cheese. He fancied he saw tiny traces of mold on the corners of both morsels.

"Is this the best you could rustle up?"

"Apologies," his host replied gently, "for I toiled too long arguing on the internet only to, at the very end of it, create a revolutionary concept, so new and unknown to those poor backwards citizens of cyberspace."

"And what is this?" Ascorba choked through the soggy bread.

"Why an interactive story in which the rules are one can do whatever one wants, as long as I like it. It's truly emergent! (Aside from the part where I banhammer trolls for taking it too far.)"

Ascorba snorted. It sounded just like the roleplaying games he used to play on old style bulletin boards, just with less hobbits and characters from Final Fantasy.

[RCIX]

[meta: Uh, well that was a bit silly... Dunno if we'll keep it though. Guess its up to you bvan.]

[bvanevery]

[meta: Uh, well that was a bit silly... Dunno if we'll keep it though. Guess its up to you bvan.]

[No, that will most certainly not be regarded as having occurred.  It is a direct violation of the 0th order rules of the game.  Namely, it discards relevant context in favor of being disruptive, disappears into la la land, and debates the theory of the Nth order game.  Take it to another thread if you think it's like some old BBS RPG.  I'm adding a rule to cover this kind of jerkery more explicitly in the future.]

[LemonScented]

"Why an interactive story in which the rules are one can do whatever one wants, as long as I like it. It's truly emergent! (Aside from the part where I banhammer trolls for taking it too far.)"

[No, that will most certainly not be regarded as having occurred.  It is a direct violation of the 0th order rules of the game.  Namely, it discards relevant context in favor of being disruptive, disappears into la la land, and debates the theory of the Nth order game.  Take it to another thread if you think it's like some old BBS RPG.  I'm adding a rule to cover this kind of jerkery more explicitly in the future.]

@bento_smile:

[bvanevery]

"Ascorba! Come on! It's time for dinner!"

He sat upon the porch, watching a quiet sunset.  He rocked slowly in his chair, feeling the age of the creaky wooden deck, and his own bones.  He mused absently on how long they had been together.  70 years?  They had married young, in a time when people didn't do such things.  'Till death do us part.

He wandered inside.  He sat at the table.  But his wife, was not there.

[Bandages]

So he summoned his wife using magic but instead of it being his wife it was a scary salamander!

"ah!" he said. "this is terrible,"

[bvanevery]

"you may wish my dinner but I must know what my wife is about.  Fine, it's yours."  Ascorba abandoned the delicious dinner to the voracious pest, whom he knew could not possibly understand a word he had said, but who certainly knew food.  He mused upon the olfactory sense of the beast, if it could smell well enough to appreciate the repast so carefully laid before it.  Now in ruins of china, shattered by a forked tongue and forked claws.

Ascorba wandered to the basement, to the zone of magical exclusions.  Long ago, he had tapped the energy of the cosmos and learned to make a portion of the world mundane.  The method was not his, but a treatise of an artifact in a temple devoted to some long forgotten God, on a now distant world.  It had taken many months to decipher the bas reliefs, but he had prevailed, over the cold stone.  Lichen and age had unlocked the door of worlds, how they open, and how they are closed again.

To close a door, one ensures that it may not open.  In so doing, one gains respite from magic and prying wizardry.  This was the secret of life, of balance, that the ancients had imparted to him.  For his wife to spend time here was not unusual; it was her way of reminding him that she mattered, that wizardry must rest for love and bread.

But in the basement, a great yellow portal lay open, and now he was truly alarmed.  Not in 40 years had one opened where he had not wished it.  It could only mean a being so powerful, that he, the greatest wizard of his age, was a mere toy beside it.

"Where is my wife?" he trembled, asking the void.

[RCIX]

Listening intently, the only sound Ascorba could hear was a faint sucking sound as the air pressure between his basement and whatever world was on the other side equalized. Realizing he had no other choice if he was to see his wife again, he looked around the dusty room and saw his staff. Taking it up, he stepped into the portal.

The sensation of traveling through one of these portals is quite unusual and hard to describe, but imagine being simultaneously dunked into a vat of ice water and lava. The effect is somewhat similar.

Once through, the portal closed behind Ascorba. Looking around, he sees ruins of columns leading to some sort of chipped temple. The light is somewhat dim and sepia-toned, and the air is so still you could swear time has stopped. In the distance are mountains, and behind Ascorba is a river. The temple itself has a chilling familiarity. Off in the distance, he hears a familiar melody.

As Ascorba concentrates on the melody, he remembers his task and snaps back to the present. The structures and vehicles are of little concern to him, however it feels as if he was drawn to the planet for a reason. He pokes his staff outside of the blue glow, and summons another portal.

[Seth]

Once Gertrude saw the portal close after Ascorba, she came out from her hiding place from behind a bookshelf.  At the edges of her hands she still felt the remnants of the energy she had used to summon the portal.  It was the first time in 68 years she had attempted to control magic, the last time being when Ascorba humored her by showing her a few party tricks.  Now she felt contaminated; she had grown to hate Ascorba's magic.  He loved it more than he loved her, and she had only begun to accept this fact in her later years.  He treated the magic as sacred, and refused to cast any spell that had the slightest suggestion of selfishness--not even a simple erection spell.

Gertrude was surprised that she was able to call the portal forward at all; she wondered if being with Ascorba for 70 years increased the magical energy she had by proximity alone.  She shuddered at the thought; she hated knowing that she probably owed the magic her longevity.  But even though Gertrude was able to cast the spell, she had no idea where the portal led.  It didn't matter--she had to make use of all the time she had.  Despite her good health she could not move quickly.

Outside, she recalled the one other spell she had memorized for her plan.  Whispering the incantation, swirls of energy appear on the ground before her and a motorcycle appeared.  Ascorba would have hated the spell, even more than he hated technology.  But to Gertrude it was perfectly fitting, using magic to escape the very thing itself, and entering the world of the mundane.  Gertrude hobbled over to the motorcycle, struggled onto the seat, and, starting the engine, rode on.

[RCIX]

[meta:, uh, i ended the flashback with the last paragraph... :S]

[bvanevery]

[meta: not a prob]

The task... the reason... what possible reason?  It was foolish to imagine this planet would be any different than the hundreds that had come before.  When he lost his wife, he wandered for 10 years trying to find her.  He did what the Gods had asked, but no wife came of it.  And so he wandered for 10 years more, to understand promises that the Gods would not keep.  And 10 years more, for his safety.  And 10 years more, for his sanity.  And 10 years more... because it was what he had been doing.  Now, this planet, this world... what God would torment it this time?

He stepped, unseen, into a modern shopping mall.  Outside, a motorcycle gang made a low paid security guard cringe.