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[Seth]

I don't see what's so 'emergent' about any of the new 'orders of rules'

[RCIX]

The only attempt to set rules past the OPs seemed to have been rebuffed. The only real rule seems to be to collaboratively write a story.  That is not a game, is it?

If it is i'm going to release a notepad clone 

There was good reason for that

[LemonScented]

RCIX, you've made me curious... Why did you engage in this particular game? Do you think there was something genuinely interesting in bvanevery's rules, or did you just feel like taking the opportunity to get involved in a bit of collaborative storytelling? Or some other reason?

[RCIX]

RCIX, you've made me curious... Why did you engage in this particular game? Do you think there was something genuinely interesting in bvanevery's rules, or did you just feel like taking the opportunity to get involved in a bit of collaborative storytelling? Or some other reason?

Well, the story looked cool, and since i figured no one else would join because of who started it, i decided to contribute.

[Alex May]

I like how for all his prevarication and pontification, the best thing this guy could come up with is a bloody forum fiction game, something people have been playing for ever, and was lame in the first place. Great going, bvanevery.

[Bones]

He should have just gone to www.gaiaonline.com if all he wanted to do was make role-playing stories.
That's a forum filled with people ready for emergent gameplay story time.

I don't find this much of a game, it just text, through collaboration.
You may as well be playing the childrens game "Tele-phone"
- Whisper someone a word
- They say whisper it to someone else, they then repeat, until everyone has heard the word
- See what the word or phrase it is at the end.

Which I guess is a game, thus contracting my entire statement that this couldn't be a game, but it's not much of a "Design" matter in my terms of "Game Design"
Since this is not apparently a pressing design issue or designing a meta-physical game.

If me and another artist sat down to a piece of paper, no matter what we were to draw it would be a co-operative emergent game, to us in Bvanevery's obviously solid term of "emergent"
Since neither of us would know the out-come until it was finished.

...and even if it was finished in our eyes, in the end is it really finished?

[Perrin]

I like how for all his prevarication and pontification, the best thing this guy could come up with is a bloody forum fiction game, something people have been playing for ever, and was lame in the first place. Great going, bvanevery.

Yeah I get forum role playing as a means of people taking part in interactive storytelling. But I failed to understand how it was an example of any game design lesson. Especially as this forum is primarily focused on video game design and development, as oppose to pen and paper role playing stuff. There are already tons of other forums where people play these kind of "games".

[gimymblert]

I believe the logic is that tabletop style RPGs (to which this is similar) can evolve in an infinite number of ways. Video games are constrained by the rules of their program.

Video games also tend to be extremely predictable. The method of play is usually decided for you, and it's really impossible to deviate from it by more than a bit (Civilization games, for example, ultimately always require you to weather the attacks from the other players). In this game, on the other hand, the direction and content of the game can shift greatly over time in directions unexpected when it was envisioned.

What we see as emergence in video games is not nearly as dynamic as a truly infinite system based in reality. They're both emergent, just games are not infinitely so.

The logic seems sound to me.

The idea sounds good, but in fact i can't see what games can't do (even if they are not doing it yet).

The problem is that there is a lot of implicit rules at work:

The first implicit rules is coherence, when you introduce character, there is implicit rules about how a character behave, think and evolve, whether they are realistic or fantastic. Ther is implicit rules of logic that constrain the way objects behave and react in the world. There is also a process of building up on existing event and following the flow of event. The theme is likely tied to the first set of events.

Creativity come into solving existing paradox, filling holes, extending the universe (by making use of hammer space or "fog of war" to pull out previously undefined things) and tying unrelated events into new set of informations. From an abstract perspective, it's very similar to a game of go, except with no boundaries. Each stone is akin to a fact, each set of connecting stone is comparable to a logic connexion.

Basically nothing you could not achieve with procedural construction based on some motivated generative grammar. The paradigm of game as language rather than closed system. If you have a strong set of modular template (mimicking the implicit rules and acting as the grammar) and a strong AI/player imaginations that fills the creativity actions list earlier, game can do it.

So far game only make static procedural generated contents (mine craft, spore) but you can argue that game rules define procedurally the experience (ai, gameplays). The problem is to what degree and with what. Think of traditional fixed board vs tile laying (like in Carcassone) in board games except for creating rules and creating token instead of space. I bet some board games are pretty close to this.

[SirNiko]

As an example of something a video game can't do, the worlds are limited. In Super Mario Bros, we can only explore the subsection of the Mushroom Kingdom that is contained within worlds 1-8. We can't visit Peach's palace, we can't see what's under the lava in Bowser's castle, we don't even see the interior of the little mini-castles at the end of each stage. The player is limited to exploring what the developer created.

By contrast, in the real world (or a pen-and-paper game) you can always continue to explore in any direction you choose.

A few procedurally generated games can escape from this, but then you run into problems associated with randomly generated content. Then, those games can be limited in other ways, like your ability to interact or converse with characters, or even how you can interact with stuff you find.

I could see a forum RPG having value to a video-game oriented community, in that you might use it test reactions to situations or explore simple mathematical mechanics (assuming the RPG has rules) but I don't see how this game really explored any of that.

I don't really want to speculate on Bvan's real reasons for making this thread, because I'd kinda like to put him in the past and forget about that mess.

[OneMoreGo]

But doesn't a game have to have more rules than "do whatever you want"?

[SirNiko]

I personally think it's better for a game to have more rules. It helps to direct the player. I think you could have no rules and be a game, but that would be an incredibly subjective assessment. There are webtoys and things about the net that don't have any rules, but they are certainly fun, like "Powder Game". I think it is fair to consider them 'games', though certainly they're a specific class of game with no rules other than the core physics.

Scribblenauts was a game where the player could do almost anything, but there wasn't much structure to it. It got a lot of black marks from reviewers and players from that, since the levels weren't really memorable or well-structured. Second Life falls in the same boat, it has almost unlimited potential, but not many people play it because there's 'nothing to do' there. Compare that to World of Warcraft which is almost draconian in rule in comparison, but it has exploded in popularity because there's a 'main game' to play in between trying to bend the system in unexpected ways.

Minecraft has a lot of potential for emergence, but it also has a core game of survival and material gathering. The two work together.

Being emergent isn't synonymous with being good. Games can have zero emergence, and still be great, I think. And then games can be totally, near-perfectly emergent and not be interesting or memorable at all.