Emergent Gameplay

[Patters]

Halo, particularly 1 and 2, friends and I spent hours upon hours exploring the environments, trying and often succeeding in getting past barriers which were similar to invisible walls, kill barriers. Particularly the following things:

The Silent Cartographer (H1): you could take a Warthog when you went inside. From there it was possible to jump said warthog over a gap, when bailing from the 'hog you could land on some part of the environment. From here you could make your way further down making use of the co-op spawn system.

Headlong: It was possible to force your way through the invisible ceiling by having one player stand on top of a banshee, This climbing could be continued by having one player stand on top of another getting the top player to jump, then the bottom, then the top to jump again when he lands on the bottom.

[juv3nal]

Without fail, at least 2 journalists would talk about some amazing experience they had that seemed amazing and emergent. Eg: Red Dead Redemption has a point where a prostitute is being attacked by a man with a knife. If you kill the guy after he's killed her, then YOU get chased by the law.

I love Red Dead Redemption to pieces, but that example doesn't sound amazing/emergent at all. It sounds like shoddy scripting.

To clarify: the rules of the world should be consistent/make sense.

Either

1) the law comes after you no matter when you kill the guy because killing a man for committing a crime (or killing a man to prevent a crime) is the sheriff's job and they will brook no vigilante-ism.

or

2) the guy is a prostitute attacker therefore it's always ok to kill him because, hey, it's the wild west and the sheriff needs all the help he can get.

[Forbin]

Right, but the point being is that I've heard like 3 people talk about that moment as if it were a unique experience for themselves that the sandbox generated.

In situations like that, I'm more inclined to credit the developers for their presentation than label it emergent.

If I were a map designer, working on a sandbox game. And I decided to put a diving board at the top of the highest point in the world, with a fountain at the plaza on the ground. And I didn't give any motivation for the player to jump off it beyond their own will, does it still qualify as emergent? I manipulated this player into a position, that they're very likely to play my game, but there's no meta-layer telling them to do it.

[Joflar]

I love Red Dead Redemption to pieces, but that example doesn't sound amazing/emergent at all. It sounds like shoddy scripting.

To clarify: the rules of the world should be consistent/make sense.

Either

1) the law comes after you no matter when you kill the guy because killing a man for committing a crime (or killing a man to prevent a crime) is the sheriff's job and they will brook no vigilante-ism.

or

2) the guy is a prostitute attacker therefore it's always ok to kill him because, hey, it's the wild west and the sheriff needs all the help he can get.

3) Killing the bad guy leaves no witnesses, and therefore the law blames you for a crime you didn't commit?!

(I have no idea if this is the case but that would be badass)

[Patters]

The entirety of fighting games are based upon emergence, the 2-1 combo was a glitch. If you look at MvC2 it's clear that with the core of high level play is based upon glitches, allowing infinite combos etc.

[Garple]

If you look at MvC2 it's clear that with the core of high level play is based upon glitches, allowing infinite combos etc.

That would NEVER have been clear to me, if I hadn't heard someone say so. I feel like a dummy sometimes on Idle Thumbs or at least a layman...you guys know so much about science and tech and shit, and I don't understand that stuff at all. I don't know how I ever managed to shoehorn myself into this community, but I'm glad I did.

[Jayel]

Emergent Gameplay! (As seen on the front page of reddit)

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[toblix]

I thought that was pretty lame as it was just some Japanese dudes playing, but then the green mushroom came out of the wall and I almost screamed in terror. It's funny how such arbitrary rules can be so engaging, even when the punishment for losing is an extra life.

[gdf]

Noby Noby Boy is the only game I've ever played that's one hundred per cent "emergent". Every event that occurs is the direct and unique result of your input, and it's fascinating as well as hilarious. If you give yourself an hour or so to get accustomed to its controls and realise that it's a tool with which you can make your own fun just by experimenting you'll have a blast. I've seen people dump on it because there's "no point" and it basically requires effort, but it's more open-ended than even Far Cry 2 et al., though they're obviously still marvellous in their own ways.

Far Cry 2 is certainly the game that best straddles the traditional and the emergent, and it does it fantastically well. Every time I play it another hilarious/sad/mindblowing thing happens. Last time I played I was chasing a weapons convoy, managing to get rid of the protection vehicles first time as the actual truck got away. I set up on a ridge ready for the next time it passed by but realised I had no ammo, so I drove to the nearest weapons store as quickly as possible. In the jungly bit I ran over what I thought was a tree stump, it was too dark to see, and I continued, grabbing some munitions and checking my map. It looked as though I'd missed the truck again, but when I checked my map it had stopped. I drove back up the road and saw it in the exact place I had hit whatever it was. Turns out it was a rhino, and the weapons truck had collided with the corpse, ending up leaning on top of the beast with two wheels in the air. I chucked a grenade and ran away laughing my ass off. That's an hilarious one. Maybe Far Cry 2 is one big argument for determinism, and I'd wager that lines of code are way easier to observe than atoms.

A sad story is about the time I shot an escaping enemy across a small valley. He was the last of the assailants and was clearly already injured and desperately trying to get away. Without even thinking I scoped him and shot him in the back. I thought about it for ten minutes. He was virtually unarmed, he was probably over a hundred yards away and, basically, no threat to me. I just killed him for no other reason than I was compelled to. No attempt to retroactively justify it - maybe he was fatally wounded and I just put him out of his misery? - was really convincing. I reflected on the monster this world, this game and by extension video games had made me. I exist only to kill, apparently.

The - possibly only - other truly great example of the latter is Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. It has a very traditional, rigid structure and a lot of people were put off by the "boring" challenges, but the reason they were kept simple was to allow your child Mechano brain to go mental and invent some krazy kontraptions. Some of my favourite emergent experiences have been with that game, though obviously the correlation between intention and outcome is much closer.

And there are others like Trine, Stalker and Fallout 3 and a couple of indie games that do these things to a lesser extent. I haven't played Spelunky very extensively because keyboards suck for it and I could never quite get a comfortable configuration on my wired 360 controller, but I think I'll get the Live Arcade version when it comes out.

Edit: Oh wow ultrapost. Sorry guys.

Ed2t: Also, that Red Dead Redemption thing happened to me literally about an hour ago and I found it incredibly lame and the only time that game has let me down in some way so far. It's entirely inconsistent with pretty much every other encounter of that nature.

[Patters]

That would NEVER have been clear to me, if I hadn't heard someone say so. I feel like a dummy sometimes on Idle Thumbs or at least a layman...you guys know so much about science and tech and shit, and I don't understand that stuff at all. I don't know how I ever managed to shoehorn myself into this community, but I'm glad I did.

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is one of the prime examples, of course they are situational.

gpjjV61jTEg

is an example of one in practice.

The game itself seems as if it weren't meant for competitive play, but the incredible multitude of techniques based upon bugs made it possible. In the same way Smash Bros. Melee, which Nintendo proceeded to destroy for the release of Brawl.

[Roderick]

That would NEVER have been clear to me, if I hadn't heard someone say so. I feel like a dummy sometimes on Idle Thumbs or at least a layman...you guys know so much about science and tech and shit, and I don't understand that stuff at all. I don't know how I ever managed to shoehorn myself into this community, but I'm glad I did.

Your avatar was all we ever needed to love you.

[Garple]

Your avatar was all we ever needed to love you.

Whenever you need an avatar...type "Jimmy Stewart +Vertigo" or "Vivaldi" into google images. You put that in and magic comes out.

[Snooglebum]

Whenever you need an avatar...type "Jimmy Stewart +Vertigo" or "Vivaldi" into google images. You put that in and magic comes out.

[Garple]

That's the one

[Snooglebum]

More on topic, here's an interesting (and frustrating) thing.

I had actually played Far Cry 2 before I started to listen to Idle Thumbs. I must have played it for a good 20 hours, but I can swear that nothing emergent happened to me. It was an enjoyable, well-built game, but that's all it felt like t me.

So when I hear people talk about all the crazy stuff that happened to them, and how emergent the gameplay is, I'm just confused. I feel similarly about other games that are supposed to have emergent systems.

Am I blind to emergence?

[Garple]

A bit of emergent narrative...in Red Dead Redemption, along the side of the road sometimes dudes will call out to you saying "I'm lost or something of that nature." The first time it happened I rode over and the guy pulled me off my horse and tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to steal it. Now, when those guys call out to me, I just shoot them because I know what's coming. This makes sense as a player of a Video game, but it doesn't make sense as a person in a world. In a narrative sense, it's a little weird for me to shoot a man who's asking for help based on the possibility that he might actually be hostile. I like to think it's a part of John Marston being disillusioned after being burned and cheated so often in the past. Then again, you wonder why he doesn't just ride past without a response instead of killing the guy. Well, I think he's learned that every time someone asks for help, he's going to get fucked, and it pisses him off, so he just kills the guy. Unfortunately that still doesn't explain why he's going to go along with all the story missions. Another thing about me and John Marston, is I feel we've become sort of otherworldly in our philosophy. We collect money and it piles up but we're just going through the motions, accumulating wealth because it's a mechanic of existence in our reality, but we don't actually want the money or have any use for it. I've never bought anything in the game other than a couple properties...I can't imagine what I would actually buy, I've never found myself in need of anything. Ammo is plentiful and it's also self-reproducing: I kill a man with two bullets, I get all the ammo he was carrying: The Circle of Life. So anyway, the money thing, it's like John Marston doesn't really belong in the material world. He's just drifting through it for lack of any good alternative.

[thl]

When I hear emergent I immediately think back to Quake and rocket jumping. I think that's the first time I experienced a situation where a game allows for techniques that were not intended. Similarly, the quake done quick (and later speedruns in general) are good examples I think in that the game is exploited, but not cheated, to achieve something in a different manner than expected. I think team fortress also had this with grenade hopping or something... a lot of the early multiplayer shooters had emergent gameplay (or exploits) that people discovered in their quests to be the bests. Now, some of these were bugs, which i believe don't qualify.

I think the issue gets complicated because people loved finding new ways to play these games so much that game creators started coding for it. Most of the sandbox games I believe include series of systems to encourage and reward the same behavior that players exhibited in discovering things like rocket jumping. The effect in Bioshock of lighting an oil pool on fire and having the fire make the splicer burn was completely intended as a reward for the player experimenting.

I see Portal as the designed result of all that early emergence. With the portal gun (and to a lesser degree with the gravity gun in Half-Life 2), they were aware of the potential before the game shipped and therefore included the batshit insane challenges for fewest steps and whatever.

With Red Dead Redemption, an example of emergent gameplay might be if you figured out a specific circumstance to make your dead-eye refill as fast as it gets spent and therefore you can go around in multiplayer in constant dead-eye. then matches would change where each player had non-stop dead eye and therefore the strategy of the game would change. Experiences in single player mentioned above are, to me, just the programmed systems working as intended. They are not scripted, but completely intended and probably acknowledged and even tested by the developers.

[juv3nal]

A bit of emergent narrative...in Red Dead Redemption, along the side of the road sometimes dudes will call out to you saying "I'm lost or something of that nature." The first time it happened I rode over and the guy pulled me off my horse and tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to steal it. Now, when those guys call out to me, I just shoot them because I know what's coming.

Somebody over on the Gamers With Jobs forums claims that it can actually happen so that they get on the horse with you and you can give them a lift into town. I've personally never seen it happen, but it doesn't sound impossible. Which, if true, is kind of hilarious how rare an occurrence must be seeing as I've let every and anyone get on my horse since reading that comment just to see if it happens (besides which it's easy to whistle to buck them off).

[Gabbo]

When I hear emergent I immediately think back to Quake and rocket jumping. I think that's the first time I experienced a situation where a game allows for techniques that were not intended.

That's what I think of too, it's taking a gameplay mechanic and turning it on its head. I would say Rocket jumping races/obstacle courses myself, but that's maybe just added layers of complexity on top of a previous emergent element.

I don't see the Far Cry 2 rhino being hit by the car example above as necessarily 'emergent'. I see that more as a limitation of the game's code. I mean if you can hit the rhino, why shouldn't any other vehicle? That the reaction from an NPC ends up being goofy and unrealistic isn't any more emergent than an NPC getting stuck on a doorway, imo.

[Garple]

Ok then...let's clarify. I think emergent narrative, as defined earlier in the thread is more interesting because it goes beyond the limitations of the code, so let's shift the discussion to that. It's more along the lines of what I meant to ask about when I started the thread. Emergent gameplay doesn't seem that interesting, because it all boils down to the code on the disc, which I think means that it must be exceedingly rare, because the developers know the limitations of all their systems, so I can't imagine there's much that could happen that didn't occur to them during a year or two of rigorous testing.

[Lork]

I think the most useful definition of emergent gameplay is that it's what happens when game mechanics conspire to create a coherent, entertaining narrative. The kind that you can relate to your friends, or perhaps to The Idle Thumbs Podcast .

Trying to draw a distinction based on whether the events were intended or not just ends up being arbitrary; if an unintended mechanic interacts with an intended one, does that exclude it from being emergent? Apparently it does, if that rhino story doesn't count. But then, it's not possible to completely avoid brushing up against anything intended by the game designers, so you have to draw the line somewhere.

I think what's really important in all these stories is that something interesting emerged from gameplay. (See what I did there? No? OK. )

[Forbin]

Goon Squad are the kings of creating messed up situations in World of Warcraft. There used to be this debuff called "Mark of Shame" that characters would get if they failed a low level quest that would cause players to be unable to interact with their faction's NPCs. Blizzard used a hack causing the debuff to temporarily flag you as "at war" with the faction to accomplish that. So Goon Squad organized a raid to purposefully fail the quest and get the debuff, then went into the main city of the Horde and killed Thrall.

Wired wrote an article about some of the stuff these guys get into. In general I think griefing is an area of emergent gameplay that's super interesting.

More griefing:

[morslok]

Somebody over on the Gamers With Jobs forums claims that it can actually happen so that they get on the horse with you and you can give them a lift into town. I've personally never seen it happen, but it doesn't sound impossible. Which, if true, is kind of hilarious how rare an occurrence must be seeing as I've let every and anyone get on my horse since reading that comment just to see if it happens (besides which it's easy to whistle to buck them off).

I've actually come across this, it is somewhat less common than the people trying to steal your horse. They tend to be on the side of the road, instead of just any random place. Basically, the way you can tell they are different is that they don't come running after you, they just stand and wait for you to come to them, and they are usually beside a broken down wagon. They say that their wagon broke down and they need a lift to town.

[Gabbo]

I think the most useful definition of emergent gameplay is that it's what happens when game mechanics conspire to create a coherent, entertaining narrative. The kind that you can relate to your friends, or perhaps to The Idle Thumbs Podcast .

Trying to draw a distinction based on whether the events were intended or not just ends up being arbitrary; if an unintended mechanic interacts with an intended one, does that exclude it from being emergent? Apparently it does, if that rhino story doesn't count. But then, it's not possible to completely avoid brushing up against anything intended by the game designers, so you have to draw the line somewhere.

I think what's really important in all these stories is that something interesting emerged from gameplay. (See what I did there? No? OK. )

I didn't want my opinion to be taken as gospel here, as it was just my opinion. To me that particular story doesn't seem to be 'emergent gameplay', but it could very well be and I'm the one that's off base.

[gdf]

That's what I think of too, it's taking a gameplay mechanic and turning it on its head. I would say Rocket jumping races/obstacle courses myself, but that's maybe just added layers of complexity on top of a previous emergent element.

I don't see the Far Cry 2 rhino being hit by the car example above as necessarily 'emergent'. I see that more as a limitation of the game's code. I mean if you can hit the rhino, why shouldn't any other vehicle? That the reaction from an NPC ends up being goofy and unrealistic isn't any more emergent than an NPC getting stuck on a doorway, imo.

But that's the way the real world would interact, you know; that's what most emergent experiences are right? I'm mostly with Lork on this one: some elements of the game combine based entirely on the player's actions, intentional or unintentional, to produce an outcome that wasn't hard coded in by the designers. Maybe they foresaw a similar outcome, but it will seem like a unique event. In the case of Far Cry 2, the game is constructed in such a way as to be conducive to such outcomes because of the volume and consistency of interactions. I believe it was Remo that said its brilliance was down to a lot of the player's experience being "so plausible". I'd probably call it plausibly implausible, the kind of stuff that doesn't usually happen but theoretically could.

The most common one is driving a car off a bridge whilst looking at the map in Far Cry 2. It won't happen to everyone, but that's a situation made possible by several aspects and sub-aspects of the design working in concert with player input. Maybe we can break it down into broad but largely accurate points.

A) Design

1) Driving (play mechanic) - cars are pretty fast and the handling is fairly tight.

2) Physics (passive mechanic) - this allows the wood on the bridge to be smashed when driven through.

3) The map (play mechanic) - sufficiently large to obscure the player's view of the road.

Intended input

4) Destination (mid-high level interaction) - player is heading to objective in vehicle.

5) Current location (mid level interaction) - player is navigating the immediate route, which happens to be a bridge.

6) Orientation (low level interaction) - player is viewing map in order to effectively navigate to 4).

C) Emergent interaction

7) Loss of concentration - some of the above factors combine to make the player lose concentration. The "emergence" happens here - in some ways it is "immersion", because the player's unintentional mistake results in something that could plausibly happen were this scenario replicated in real life. It's not the outcome, but this that is emergent because it's the eye of the storm of contributing factors. The player and the game have "fused" to produce something. Not sure how well I'm communicating this, I'm struggling to describe it well. In my rhino example there may be several emergent interactions.

D) Outcome

8) The player ends up flying off the bridge and crashing into the stream or, if very unlucky, river valley below. This has not been "scripted" into the game.

You see where I'm coming from? I'd add an extra qualification that it has to be both uncommon and relatively significant to be "emergent". It needn't be unexpected, because the player could deliberately interact with a game in such a manner as to produce an outcome that was expected in real world logic, but isn't often part of game logic. This has possibly never happened, but is theoretically possible.

All of this is IMHO, of course, but I'm confident that most people would agree.