A choice offers a definite, finite number of alternatives which have been wholly fixed; in a choose-your-own adventure book, you choose to flip to paragraph 17 or 136, and what happens then is you either die or don’t. Naturally those books tried to implement a portion of randomness with hit points and ability scores and dice rolls and whatnot, but the core of the argument remains valid.

Up from choice-based interactivity is repertoire-based interactivity, where the rules are themselves scripted, but the low-level actions are not pre-scripted. In Super Mario Bros., a jump takes you up 6 squares and forward 6 squares (for instance, I didn’t measure exactly), bricks block your path, and if you fall below the horizontal lower limit of the screen, you die. If you encounter a pit, none of your possible actions are pre-scripted; a jump is a jump is a jump, wherever you decide to jump. We still, however, metaphorically refer to the various tactics one can adopt to get across a pit (walk on the uppermost blocks and face a koopa, jump under them and risk falling to death, break the bricks with Super Mario, let the koopa fall before jumping, etc.) as “choices”. But these various possibilities are not coded in the game engine as “choices”; the player must come up with the strategies, instead of them being presented to him “on a silver platter”, so to speak.

So through all this, my point was that every game not based on an interactivity of explicit choices has some form of emergence, because that is how rules are meant to be. But with games like Super Mario Bros., God of War, Guitar Hero, Ikaruga, etc., though the low-level possibilities afforded to the player by his repertoire of actions are emergent, the structure of the game is pre-scripted: the challenges are introduced in a specific order. There are different ways to overcome the obstacles (the aporias, in Aarseth’s terms), but they themselves are fixed. In contrast, in Chess, Solitaire, Soccer, or Deathmatch in all FPS’es, etc., the challenges vary with the player’s actions.

Naturally, this opens up “what’s a challenge”, etc., and I think it’s a thornier issue, that I’m sure I don’t want to tackle right now. I should be playing, this is week-end! :)

However, to what extent would you consider God of War or Guitar Hero to be “games of progression”? It seems to me that in the end, we’re simply discussing different games within the same category of emergence; Ouendan is not that different from Guitar Hero, for instance. I think we can all agree that challenge is an important type of experience, but not the only one, and possibly not even the most important one. That being said, I wonder about the supposed difficulty spikes in Guitar Hero (disclaimer: haven’t played it). Is it really a problem if you take 20 tries to complete a song, as long as you can see yourself gradually improving as you play? Perhaps the frustration is not so much in the hardness of the song, but rather in the fact that the following song is easier. Perhaps it is also in the fact that success in one song does not always transfer to increased aptitude for other songs.

Which leads me to a few other observations.

1. Long-form games are often short repeatable games of (semi-)emergence strung together along a progression arc. But this is something of a truism. The problem with long games and games of chance, when attempting to deliver the experience of “challenge”, is that there are so many extenuating factors which may impede the player’s ability to “read” the influence of their skills on the outcome. Did I get an A rank on this boss fight because my skill has improved? Was it because I got a new sword? Or because the boss is just easier than the previous one? Nobody knows.

2. Impeding the player’s ability to judge their own skill level can often frustrate the experience of growth. If the boss is too random (Trauma Center, I’m looking at you), players will experience frequent setbacks and may feel that they won “because of luck”. Likewise, if there are too many factors to consider (equipment, opponents, etc), then that also can have a detrimental impact. Which is why I like what some designers do; late in the game, they bring back an early-game boss as an opponent, to show the player how far he’s progressed. If you really want to be a Kojima, I suppose you could divest the player of all additional accoutrements (via the usual “you got captured” expedient, or something more creative) and have them fight the boss with the same, or fewer, resources that they had in the earlier fight.

I have been playing Soulcalibur 4, even though I am a poor player of fighting games at best, and I find it to be interesting but also frustrating in some ways. Sometimes the reflection of improvement comes through very clearly; for instance, when playing through the Story with the same character, the parameters are similar enough that any personal skill growth I have experienced is actually tangible. However, the randomness of the AI and the system of weapon/equipment/skill progression both work against that (although the latter is, on its own, quite interesting).

As for Ikaruga, I think it has a fairly high degree of emergence for what is essentially a linear game, because there are so many different ways to tackle each situation. However, the number of “right ways” is often limited, which to a certain extent limits the emergence. (More truisms!) For example, in the middle part of stage 2, there’s a bit where the path splits into two. Although both paths are about the same and thus a non-choice, an ambitious player might choose to destroy the blocks which separate them, hence exposing themselves to fire from the other side but also being able to fly to the other side and attack enemies on both sides. Does the player destroy the blocks? When? How many? What approach does he take to avoid the consequent problem of being exposed to interlocking fields of fire? Beyond the simple problem of execution lies this series of questions, and the answers can change the outcome in quite fundamental ways.

In my gut-feeling view, Ikaruga is not really emergent for the reasons you stated. But we can agree that it is more “emergent” (in the low-level sense) than 1942, for instance, as could be argued that the Choose-your-own-adventure books of the Fighting Fantasy series are more emergent than those of the Lone Wolf series.

On a somewhat related note – if you’re familiar, would you call Ikaruga progression, emergence, or both?

Speed runs and FF7 no-materia single-character low-level challenges are all good, and nobody would dispute that people can create their own games by taking a game as a starting point (what Bernard Perron termed ‘gameplayers’). I can time myself when cooking my potato-and-ham omelette and try to get better, and award myself a second glass of wine with my dinner if I succeed in not spilling any egg shells on the counter. But that has nothing to do with the omelette, except that I am using it in a specific purpose.

FF7 is not emergent and not any less linear because you and your friends decided to do challenges using it. Just as frisbees are not suddenly amazingly emergent for haute cuisine because yesterday I flipped one over and ate my omelette in it. (Not a true story…it was actually a steak.)

I would claim that while FF7 is a game of progression, it contains emergence on a low-level basis, but this emergence is reshaped by the higher-level principle that it is first and foremost a long game where you progress through events to reach a definite goal.

Actually, it seems to me now that you’re using “linear” in a different sense than what I mean. I am on the structural level: a game is linear in the sense that you have to complete zone A before going to point B, then when you enter the cave past the Midgard Zolom you are going to see a cut-scene with the Turks that is fixed, etc. Whereas you seem to be implying that FF7 is non-linear because it can be played using different strategies – i.e. no summons, no magic, using always the same three characters, etc. But this fact pertains to all games. Play Soccer defensively or agressively. Use 4 tall&thin guys in Ice Hockey or a balanced team. Down Flash Man or Metal Man first. Spam DOTs and run away or spam Pyros and run in. Etc.

A game of progression may still be played many times over (sometimes as “speed runs”), and the player will eventually develop a sense of how well they are doing versus previous playthroughs.

Additionally, in playing the game through over and over the game may exhibit some unexpected emergent behavior. In my college days some friends and I hosted/participated in several Final Fantasy VII races – the idea being to complete the game as quick as possible over the course of a weekend, with set stopping points for breaks. It was interesting to see how different strategies developed and evolved with each new race. But if you just play through the game once, it will probably seem very linear (the relative worth of spending your time playing FFVII over and over and over again is a discussion for another time :-)

What I meant is that there are many possible player postures, which can be determined for starters by what a player wants from a game – to satisfy a desire for mastery, to satisfy a desire for curiosity, or for fiction, for aesthetics, for comedy, simply a pastime, etc. And recognizing these player postures means that what a “challenge” is and how it will be perceived may be a question of kind as well as degree.

I think most people would agree it is OK to blame the game if I told them that after playing God of War on Normal for the whole game, dying around 3-4 times each boss battle and once or twice in a while (usually due to falling down a pit), I get killed 20+ times by Ares at the end and have to downgrade difficulty to easy – and still die 4-5 times!- to narrowly beat him. This is clearly a difference in degree, an imbalance. Likewise with the uneven difficulty curve between songs in Guitar Hero which many reported.

However, if I were to blame Myst for being a game that is obtuse and does not present any puzzles or tasks that are readily identifiable, many fans of the game would reply that it is what makes it challenging, and that the puzzles of the game are really good because they don’t hold your hand and tell you what to do. They are right in blaming me as not being good/patient enough, and I am right in blaming the game as not being forward/clear enough. This difference is in kind, and I believe in this respect, absolute relativity will always points its head on what constitutes a challenge or not, and whether it is any good. The most we can hope to achieve is semi-generalized statements to the effect that “Game 1 offers a good challenge to player types A and B, but merely annoys player types C and D”.

Also, I may just be thinking out loud, but the examples you give, n.n, are short games intended to be replayed many times. I would think that the mode of challenge is very different in games of emergence than in games of progression (as the Blogmaster termed them). You can definitely see the improvement you get between two games of game X, but when a game of game X takes 10-20 hours and you’re only going to play it once, you cannot know whether you are doing good or bad. Maybe you die a lot, but maybe the game is super hard, so in the end you’re pretty good. Maybe you’re breezing through the game, only to discover at the end boss that you had to kill the zombies with your knife to conserve pistol ammo and now you’re stuck (as in RE: Code Veronica).

Well, that was a digression. I would just like to say that I feel games are perfectly entitled to be challenging! As long as they are fair, and not like those rigged carnival and fair games where you must throw a baseball in a basket inclined at 50 degrees, except the basket has been fitted with springs inside so the ball always bounces back.