Everybody’s talking about emergent gameplay. This is usually taken to mean something like “creative player actions that weren’t anticipated or explicitly designed by the creators of the game”.
Without getting into a technical discussion, it occurs to me that many non-game situations contain something that could be seen as emergent gameplay.
Biology: For example, (most) spices add to our experience of food without actually adding nutritional value. Though evolution does not have an intention, our sense of taste is evolved due to its capability of distinguishing between poisonous, nutritious and non-nutritious food, but we have figured out how to use spices to “tickle” this sense in order to experience pleasure when eating. This is emergent gameplay in relation to our own biology.
Culture: In culture, laws or technology are usually designed with an intention, but that intention can often be subverted by clever people. Tax loopholes are a prime example of emergent gameplay in culture.
So here are some examples of emergent gameplay in real life:
Biology
Music (arguably)
Writing
Computers
Telephones
Houses
Clothes
Spices
Masturbation
Contraception
Games
Jogging, fitness
Perfume
Robberies at gunpoint
Culture
Tax loopholes
Fake ID cards
Lying
Spam
Video games
Bad video games based on film licenses
Making a living doing video game theory
Frivolous lawsuits
World Wide Web (in relation to the internet)
Churches demanding that you pay them money in order to get into heaven
(Harvey Smith on emergent gameplay here and here. I also wrote something about it here.)
Any other examples?
This post!
What is life, but the complex result of an interplay of far simpler constituent factors? The universe is emergent.
Definitely goes hand-in-hand with the Newtonian clock-maker conception of a supreme being, eh?
Interestingly, there’s a certain correlation between spices & herbs of various kinds and antiseptic properties; those seasonings with stronger germ-slaying action (garlic, for instance) are not only used across more cultures, but in larget quantities within those cultures as well, as a general pattern.
JP: Life is emergent, but I think emergent gameplay at least requires a conscious entity using something preexisting in a new way. In that perspective, life isn’t emergent gameplay, but life is the precondition that emergent gameplay can exist…
Spices: That’s an interesting angle.
Would you consider unpredicted collaborative actions of AI entities emergent behaviour?