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"Emergent" Gameplay. Niche or the future?
JamesKeenan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Exactly as it sounds. I know 'emergent gameplay' has been more of a thrown around term for any kind of gameplay not strictly hard-coded into the game, but the idea, I feel, behind it is solid.
And when I use the term 'emergent gameplay' I mean gameplay mechanics and experiences beyond the idea of being able to do anything within a guide.
Billing the original Fable's AI as 'emergent' was a bit zealous, but we're fast approaching a time when games can deliver, with specific utilities, the kind of gameplay experiences the future generation can expect to become standard.
Here specifically I will reference Prey and Portal. These make use of similar new mechanics, though Portal is the obvious superior here.
But I look forward to a time when something like a portal gun isn't the star, but merely one actor among many probably even more talented on stage. My idea of what the evolution of gameplay will consist of will be a completely new focus on more utility mechanics. Methods to alter the very method of play. Not just cool new spells or guns. A gun is a gun whether it shoots shurikens, lightning or tits. But a gun that instantly teleports you to it's location? That's something entirely altering.
That's a very basic idea of what I want to see. Gameplay that involves more than just working within the structured experience, but of manipulating the base play itself. Even the new Zelda had a very rudimentary idea of this.
So, what have you? Any ideas? New games with similar focuses?
Am I batshit crazy living in a pipe dream?
And when I use the term 'emergent gameplay' I mean gameplay mechanics and experiences beyond the idea of being able to do anything within a guide.
Billing the original Fable's AI as 'emergent' was a bit zealous, but we're fast approaching a time when games can deliver, with specific utilities, the kind of gameplay experiences the future generation can expect to become standard.
Here specifically I will reference Prey and Portal. These make use of similar new mechanics, though Portal is the obvious superior here.
But I look forward to a time when something like a portal gun isn't the star, but merely one actor among many probably even more talented on stage. My idea of what the evolution of gameplay will consist of will be a completely new focus on more utility mechanics. Methods to alter the very method of play. Not just cool new spells or guns. A gun is a gun whether it shoots shurikens, lightning or tits. But a gun that instantly teleports you to it's location? That's something entirely altering.
That's a very basic idea of what I want to see. Gameplay that involves more than just working within the structured experience, but of manipulating the base play itself. Even the new Zelda had a very rudimentary idea of this.
So, what have you? Any ideas? New games with similar focuses?
Am I batshit crazy living in a pipe dream?
JamesKeenan on
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Define guide.
Portal is just a physics puzzle game with multiple solutions to puzzles. I don't see the difference between a "shuriken gun" and a "portal gun" - you're just engaging in a different, necessarily finite set of interactions with the environment. That a game has mechanics or gameplay possibilities that the physics model or code allows but wasn't foreseen by the developers, that's interesting, but it just expands the finite set of options a little bit further out.
"Emergent" is perpetually the new buzzword that "AI that learns from the player" used to be. A much more interesting development will be games that let you create your own objectives, narratives and narrative goals from a relatively plot-less, perhaps procedurally generated structure - EVE Online, Mount & Blade and Roguelikes are good examples of this. Fable was just a game that gave you multiple approaches to the same pre-defined goal or problem, like Deus Ex was.
I always thought "emergent" was when the player's goals/actions change due to game events that weren't predetermined. That doesn't really happen in Portal.
But for example, in Morrowind/Oblivion/GTA you could attack a civilian and suddenly you have to deal with the consequences of that. If you kill them quick and out of sight you might get away with it. If you run somewhere you have to worry about the guards/police, if you're going to try to hold out somewhere or escape, or serve prison time. The game had not planned on you attacking that specific person at that time and location, you just did it, and the world carries on around you. Maybe someone else gets caught in the crossfire and compounds the situation. Is that emergent?
Or as another example, a roguelike where everything is random. You can be walking along and a kobold finds a random wand on the ground and zaps it at you. Turns out it is a wand of monster creation and a greater demon appears. Frantically you dig downward through the floor and land in the middle of a shop. The shopkeeper is not pleased. He zaps his wand of magic missile at you, but the demon had followed and gets hit. You read a scroll at random and luckily it is a teleport scroll...unluckily you end up in an underground lake. etc. etc.
that sounds amazing o_O I shall have to look into these so called roguelikes.
The greatest stories result from roguelikes...but due to their complex-yet-homebrewed nature, they never have good graphics. Just a warning. But crazy stuff like that does happen all the time.
The issue they had with these early versions is that the more evil inclined NPCs would regularly seek out the weak and murder them. This often lead to quest crushing deaths of important charicters the player had not even met. That type of AI is what I would consider "emergent" as the game is making decisions not based on a set script, but rather a fluid, ever-changing situation.
Steam/PSN/XBox Live:LutExIV
Emergent gameplay is not gameplay that isn't hard coded into a game but the ingenuity of the player finding alternate ways to play the game. Hard coding has nothing to do with it.
The gun idea you've put forth has less to do with emergent gameplay than hard coding. The gun idea seems like just another gun and not the player finding some creative way to use what is already there.
(P.S. not trying to harsh the vibe, just putting forth my own opinion).
Dwarf Fortress I think is a good example of a game with emergent gameplay.
I see someone is a Zero Punctuation fan.
The Painkiller review was indeed awesome.
As an example, while playing GTA4, in one of the early missions, I'm supposed to chase down a biker and gun him down. He eventually meets up with his buddies, and they gun it into a park.
Well, one time I did the mission, a cop car showed up and chased them into the park. Somehow, these guys had pissed off the cop AI such that it pursued them. I followed closely, and watched as the NPCs had a gun fight between them. Then, after the two cops died, I cleaned up the rest of the gang.
That had never happened before in the previous times I did the mission. And it didn't happen when I did it again (forgot to turn on auto save). As far as I know, it was a random occurance that felt...real in the gameworld.
Will Wright's favorite example was the Sims. The original Sims had no explicit goal, any goal that a particular sim had was set by the player. "This guy wants to get rich", or "This guy wants to be able to afford a swimming pool moat around his house", or "this lady wants 12 kids". The game gives you a means to accomplish your goal, and it - in a way- gives you a visual status of your goals (simoleon count, number of relationship, pool half-done). Most peoples lives have a tremendous number of interesting points, and that same quality comes across in the Sims, where Wright found that players loved to create stories for their characters' adventures.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to match that same sort of game flow in non-simulation type games (even then it's very rare). Oblivion's been mentioned before, but due to game limitations it doesn't have as much emergent gameplay as it could. It would need dynamic quests, NPC repopulation, item repopulation and likely a functional economy - among other things. I think we recently have seen a trend towards encouraging emergent gameplay with the multitude of 'open world' games we've seen recently. Many of them do breed interesting stories and alternative gameplay; things just don't happen often enough or are too structured to develop further.
It's writer is kinda cheesy, but if you can dig out the gameplay from between the words, it sounds like it's full of unexpected moments born out of interacting AI systems and delayed, Rube Goldberg-style results of player actions.
Games like that only think about your immediate vicinity of a couple of city blocks, it's not like as you were driving around it processed a scene internally where this family left their base, loaded into a car, drove to the appliance store...
Maybe, maybe not. There are two other examples in the article that make me think it's more random.
The moblin was still alive after the bomb went off, but it turned and walloped another moblin with its spear. The second moblin hit the first one back, and then they turned around and walked away from each other.
It was short and it wasn't like they fought to the death or anything, but I was surprised and impressed that this event occurred at all.
It depends on what you mean by that.
Technically it's always up to the player to make something happen because if they stand there and don't go around looking for something interesting, nothing will happen. But that is true for all games. If the above Godfather 2 example is true, then you don't really have to be doing anything in particular in order to experience a spontaneous firefight. And I guess there are games like San Andreas where you can even have fun just standing still if a plane decides to fall on your head.
I wonder how complex it has to be to call it emergent gameplay. Almost every game has some element of randomness to it, some reactionary AI that makes the player deal with a slightly different situation than before. If you're going along underwater in Mario 1 and some cheep cheeps get in your way (assuming they're at all random), is it emergence when you have to take a different route than you had to last time?
Anything emergent (including gameplay), results from the interaction of independent subsystems to display behavior of an uncoordinated whole. The classic example is a flock of birds in flight. There is no "flock mind" coordinating them all, but their combined efforts create the appearance of a coordinated cloud.
Edit:
As for gameplay, I would say that it depends on how stringent you are with the definition "emergent". Some people use it to describe dynamic events like the GTA4 story earlier on the page, whereas others peg the requirements a little higher, as in Oblivion's Radiant AI (which was later removed, because the NPCs became too independent).
I might even apply it to Spore's dynamic content creation, given that the content "emerges" from real-time data building, rather than pre-crafted content. I would not apply the label to Portal.
Edit2:
Some MMOs claim to have emergent AI. Most of them have emergent economies. Though it's usually more a social emergent phenomenon between human players, even Ultima Online originally took economic trends into account when NPC shopkeepers adjusted prices on their products. I'm pretty sure that got axed for ridiculous inflation and unstable economies.
And yet MMO developers do their damnest to squash it in the name of "balance." Discover a strategy that the developers didn't intend? Expect it to be nerfed in the next patch.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I meant to use it only to illustrate games with mechanics that go beyond the typical restrictions in movement and action.
Please forgive me, it was late and I couldn't think of particularly good examples.
Even Morrowind, with it's jumping and levitation spells might have fit into what I was trying to say.
But yes, I mean emergent both in gameplay that results in something completely unintended, and gameplay that simply results in an experience beyond the typical gameworld interactions you get now. I'm not necessarily speaking of something fantastically revolutionary or difficult to understand, I believe I may just be explaining myself poorly.
Something that allows you to simply talk with some villagers would be one thing. A game that lets you control them personally and have 'em do whatever you want? Something totally better. That's a far more interesting and 'utilizable' ability.
But the idea behind it isn't just amazing, it's where I truly see games will inevitably head. Just as games now are getting more freeform and open-ended, and 'GTA clone' is becoming more and more meaningless, eventually developers will more and more be developing toward games like Mount & Blade.
No, because cheep cheeps are added by the developer to be an obstacle. Normal games attempt to guide the player through a particular experience from beginning to end. Emergent gameplay is when the player creates his own game experience in ways the developer didn't intend. Like in multiplayer games when players make up rules to play their own unofficial gametype. Or just running around in GTA trying to see how many people you can kill before the cops bring you down. It doesn't necessarily mean the devs never thought of it, but it's not where the game is guiding you.
...I just realized what you are implying and I am doing this tonight.
Then there's the type where players exploit game mechanics to make their own game out of it. Halo 3's rocket race is an easy example, but pretty much any game with a physics engine has had similar incidents. The CS:S zombie mods were like this too, which gave us room for fully fledged titles like L4D. Even MMO's have this sort of behavior, "raids" were born out of developers trying to put in "unkillable" NPC's, forcing players to band together in large groups to prove the developers wrong. Now we have entire MMO's built around the concept of raiding.
Both are valuable but I think the "Dwarf Fortress type" is going to remain a lot less common for a long time due to the scale of the problem. Several years of development and DF is still an ascii-based game and the NPC's can't even produce correct sentences. Downside being, I think this is what most people are looking for when they hear the term "emergent gameplay".
The sudden change from PVE to PVP once the Bat is obtained in Double Dragon?
Game-within-the-game emergent gameplay, where the player finds new ways to have fun using the systems already within the game:
Halo Warthog Jump
Unintended emergent gameplay, where the game's many systems interact with each other independently of the player, and the player may or may not have to deal with it:
San Andreas Jump Accident
Those are the two examples that seemed most obvious to me.
Like my mind controlling scenario. A properly designed, deep mind-controlling tactic could be used to do just about anything, even things the developers didn't/couldn't forsee.
And again I reiterate that games like Mount & Blade are where I truly see games heading.
"Open ended" is becoming the norm, and that is a very good thing. And as "open ended" begins to get more refined as standards are raised and gameplay methods refined, we'll see more games with wider choices and more freedom within the world.
It's exciting to think about, but I'm also curious what other people think, and maybe they know more than I do about that's on the horizon.
Fallout 3 is a good example of, for me, "in the right direction."
I love the way that Dwarf Fortress has got to the point where gripes like "NPCs don't have day/night schedules" have been replaced with "NPCs can't pass a Turing Test" :P
But they don't have day/night schedules unless a season has like 3 days in it.
Check out a human town as an adventurer. There's day/night schedules.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
It's not really a gripe, I understand the game is authored by one man and he's done a stunning job of it.
It's simply a statement of fact.. giving us something like Fallout 3 will "emergent gameplay" that does what DF does and not ever break immersion would be an impossibly large task. I don't think we'll see it in our lifetime.
We can't even get computers to do voice synthesis properly yet, much less have them construct conversations.