Another week, another topic. I think I will settle into alternating a game genre with a game concept, it seems to have been working well so far.
This week we will be talking about Emergent Gameplay. This term is, like the previous week’s, fairly self explanatory; it describes gameplay (puzzle solving, narratives, etc.) that arises naturally as a result of combinatory game mechanics and systems rather than having been hardcoded or otherwise directly intended. It is most common in simulation-based games and games involving procedural generation, but can crop up anywhere. Immersive Sims are known for this, and it is one of their core design philosophies - to give the player tools and let them come up with their own solution, one that works as the logical consequence of a series of actions rather than hardcoded. Emergent Narrative is a term used as a subset of Emergent Gameplay, to specifically describe when a story or narrative sequence of events is born naturally through gameplay, often driven by the player’s involvement but not deliberately implemented by the devs.
Here are some questions and subtopics that I encourage people to discuss:
- What are some of your favorite games that encourage emergent gameplay and/or emergent narrative?
- What instances of emergent gameplay have you been most proud of executing?
- What emergent narratives have you encountered and/or engineered that you found particularly interesting or compelling?
- What game design elements do you feel are most conducive toward generating emergent gameplay? What hinders it?
- Have you had any instances of emergent gameplay crop up from games that you wouldn’t’ve expected it to occur in?
Also feel free to bring up anything you like related to the topic! If you have suggestions for future discussion topics, leave them in the suggestion thread.
Additional Resources
- None this time! If you have something that would be good to put here, let me know.
Emergent gameplay is a big part of what makes video games unique as a medium. I’d say a good example I’ve played recently is Death Stranding. One of my favorite games of all time at this point, it really is best and worst described as a walking simulator. Or moreso, a delivery simulator. At its core, you’ll take on missions involving the delivery of different amounts and sizes/weights of packages to destinations near and far. Sometimes there are invisible ghosts that want to kill you, sometimes there’s visible, inanimate landscape that wants to kill you.
What takes it from ‘walking simulator’ to ‘walking simulator’ is the fact that the walking is complex. The smoothness or roughness of terrain can directly influence the stability of your character. Even small rocks can be marginally trickier to traverse than truly flat ground. You may find pavement, dirt, rocky terrain, snow, or deep rivers, which require considerations. You can brace yourself for stability to help, and your movement speed, momentum when changing direction, and whether you’re standing or crouching all affect your likelihood to slip or trip. Many items help you to move off the beaten path and find shorter routes, with ladders or climbing rope & anchors allowing the scaling or descent of steep cliffs.
Through experimentation, sliding helplessly down a mountain, and having all your important shit get washed away in a river as you scramble around like an infant, you come to understand your mobility and limitations. Enter: the packages and your hubris. You can accept multiple missions at a time. Some missions require few or relatively light packages. Some ask you to move an amount of goods that ought to be palletized. Through understanding your limitations, and attempting to slap different amounts of cargo on your person, you can possess Icarus and fly as close to the sun as you want.
But, there’s more than just your person. You can use floating sci fi wheelbarrows that trail behind you, carrying a large amount of goods, but restricting your ability to use climbing ropes or ladders. You could use a motorcycle, allowing for speedy traversal and some light offroading with small storage on “saddlebags”, or even a huge ass truck which affords incredible storage potential, at the cost of a squirrelly and incline averse driving model.
And I haven’t even really gotten into all of the equipment or strategies required to handle the “ghosts”, whose unique abilities and behavior provide an interesting additional challenge where being caught by one could easily mean the loss of your cargo, or even your life. Even in the big ass truck, you aren’t truly safe. The intermittent and locational time-accelerating rainfall means even cargo you haven’t dropped or bumped can have its durability rusted away given some time.
Though the game, of course, has a story, it sits alongside a story of the player’s experience, limited only by the bravery and recklessness with which you, essentially, don’t want to make three trips to the car to bring groceries in, so you load up yourself and two linked floating carriers to carry nearly 1,000 kilograms of cargo, and make a winding, manually waypointed journey through the desolate and oppressive landscape, stopping to deliver parts of your massive load as you come to each post-apocalyptic shelter in your list of deliveries.
Your successes and failures within are unique to the way you chose to plan and execute your trips. Shit, man, I like this game.
I think I’ve realized some of my favorite games recently have involved a lot of walking up to objects and holding the E key to fill a meter.
That sounds like a terribly bad-modern style of game, but of course the context of decisionmaking and effects to those actions can be very important. Going to a terminal that takes 10 seconds to hack may mean 10 seconds you’re very vulnerable to attacks, and that a success means you successfully distracted, or trapped out, any adversaries that may not want you to hold E.
And then of course, it’s also fun sometimes for singleplayer games when you don’t want the tension of outsmarting opponents, just rewards for good positional decisionmaking.
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The Zelda timeline is an interesting example of emergent narrative, at least until recently. Before the Hyrule Historia, fans could see underlying clues of a general history of Hyrule and an order in which the games take place, but developers themselves wouldn’t confirm the existence of a definitive timeline. Even so, the fans speculated endlessly about where the games fit in - were all games canon or only some, was there a split or a unified timeline, and were these the same Link, Zelda and Ganondorf or were they continually reincarnated? Finally the Hyrule Historia gave a confirmed canon timeline with not one but two splits, all games canon, and with confirmation of several reincarnations of at least Link and Zelda. Considering how resistant to doing something like this Nintendo and the Zelda team were at first, I’d pretty well guarantee that the release was in response to the emergent narrative that developed and not something they had initially planned from the outset of the series, especially not before Ocarina of Time.