Comments on: “The Emerging Emergence” & “Is interactive narrative an oxymoron?”

By: Aubrey

Aubrey — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 11:50:44 +0000

It’s funny how many people from different areas are coming to the same conclusions about the nature of emergence. Every time I read something new from Harvey, in particular, I’m thinking “Holy crap, I thought of that a while ago (because I am awesome) – are you reading my mind?”. I guess we’re all just reacting the same way to the same stimulous. Fatalism. Blah blah.

You know, there’s a lot of Object Orientated Design methodologies that are all about mastering the implications of emergence so that the designer can structure his message (if any) from a level of separation away from a static narrative – a message out of the machine. Interesting that there has been no crossover, considering how closely linked games and programming are (in that programming is a formal description of algorithms – game rules).

By: Jesper

Jesper — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 15:10:22 +0000

But in a way, emergence is not the new, but the old thing. Basically all traditional games are emergent (in one way or another). Or perhaps we tend to use emergence primarily for fairly realistic simulations with lots of object interactions? Is GTA more emergent than Chess or Go?

By: Mustapha Bismi

Mustapha Bismi — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 12:46:24 +0000

As Warren Spector pointed out, Emergence is nothing but a new idea :) It’s have been there for a while. I am still puzzled by the fact that it’s not used that much nowadays. Despite the success of some games, from GTA to the recently released Fable, there is still a vast majority of non-emergent gameplay games out there…

Maybe it’s because it’s so hard to control a production when you try to do emergent gameplay? Or maybe it’s because we dont have the appropriate tools to express emergence easily?