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.
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.