Besides the text in my game that you didn’t read? Nope, nothing I can think of…

I agree with Charley, in that both dynamic and static game design deal in varrying degrees of emergence, but that their shift in where that emergence takes them marks a difference in where their priorities lie. A static game can still be “elegant”, in that it can have few rules and many potential consequences, but that doesn’t make it any less of a controlled experience that a designer is explicitly manipulating behind-the-scenes.

I don’t agree with the whole idea of “elegance”, however, because I believe there’s a central lie at the heart of the whole “ruleset-scope < possibility-space = elegant-game” argument. At the end of the day, the ultimate possibility space of all games (if that’s what we want to call them) is still either winning or losing. In that strict, binary sense, unless your game has only one rule, elegance is an impossibility.

Now, sure, people are talking about the shape of how the game transpires BEFORE winning-or-losing kicks in when they wax poetic about how elegant it is or not, but overlooking the state of a game in favor of the shape of a game in its final state is contrary to the entire point of gaming in the first place. Sure, if I can win a game of “Risk” with my friends by sabotaging one of them in North America and keeping hold of Australia by attacking either side of the board through a Kamchatka gambit, that’s interesting– but not nearly as interesting as the fact that I WON.

Perhaps elegance, then, amounts to a double-bottleneck– small number of rules giving rise to an infinite number of possibilities that dwindles down into either winning or losing. There’s countless ways to win “Risk”, and perhaps that’s what makes it more intrinsically gamelike than, say, “Metal Gear”, where the only real variable leading up to the win-state is the type of weapon you use to beat the last boss (unless you’re playing “Metal Gear 2″, in which case you don’t even have that as a variable). However, the lack of elegance that most video-games accept is partly due to one of their primary natures, something they do which games, for the most part, tend to avoid on a classical level.

Video-games, for the most part, tell stories. Games, on the other hand, do not.

The modern video-game is more of a narrative-instrument than anything else. It’s a contained, fabricated experience with a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes it can have multiple beginnings, middles or ends, but it still survives on the strengths of that imposed narrative sequence– rising action, climax and denouement. Even the most basic games attempt to make the last section the most difficult, which isn’t something that always happens in classical games– at the end of a basketball game, whether or not your team is outmatched depends mostly on how well you’ve been playing up until the final minutes; at the end of, say, “Zelda”, on the other hand, you’re always going to be outmatched by Ganon, because it’s harder that way, and at that point the deciding factor in the game’s difficulty is that the story dictates it.

There is something artificial about that, but that’s why I like it. There are boundaries that I can see, boundaries that I can push and shape to my likings. The more games are used as storytelling tools, the more static and puzzle-like they become, which is where I prefer to stand. In the end, even puzzles are stories, because they arrive at the end with a solution. They ask a question, and arrive at an answer. The same can be said of all narrative-mediums, from film, literature and theater to riddles, mysteries and enigmas.

I’m afraid I’m sticking by my statement that all game designers deal in emergence. All game designers create rulesets out of which certain situations, possibility spaces, arise (or ‘emerge’). This is not something that is specific to game design, or necessarily all that a game designer does, but it is intrinsic.

My point is also not that puzzle design is somehow an illegitimate form of game design, just that it is not a very advanced form of it. I’m sorry, but designing a static puzzle is not as hard as designing a dynamic game.

I’ll leave with this: I do not believe that these are two categories (static and dynamic), because formally they are equivalent. To me Tic-Tac-Toe is a puzzle, but to a child it is a game. As I said at first, in the grand scheme it is likely that all games are really just puzzles that we haven’t solved yet.

Call me a Modernist, but I believe that the only rational basis for critiquing a game is based on what game designers frequently call ‘elegance’, the relationship between the scope of the ruleset and the size of the possibility space. Games where the possibility space is basically the size of the ruleset are not as elegant (so in my opinion not as good) as those where a small ruleset gives rise to a large possibility space.

Anyway, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this, as I think Bob and I are not going to meet on this subject. So tell me: Am I crazy? Am I missing something?

No, not exactly. But I know what you mean. A game designer tries to shape an experience (or a performance) for the player to explore. To say a game designer designs for emergence is true, but leaves the the definition of what a game designer aims to do short of its true essence. And I think the debate that’s “emergin’” on this comment thread showcases the two kinds of game designers: those that aim to give the player more space to explore (sort of dynamic game design) vs. those that aim to craft a specific experience (static). I’m with you Pratt, I prefer the former… but under the current umbrella of discourse, both styles are lumped together… although they are as closely related (or lack thereof) as improv theater and the novel, in my opinion. And both have their rewards for the consumer. I do believe this conversation highlights the deep need in game discourse for a new word (or two) to separate the forms of “games.” Afterall, we don’t always call improv and the novel both storytelling, now do we?

They represent the future in terms of how video-games follow analog games. If anything, the more non-linear games become, the more they owe to games of the past, where linear progression wasn’t there as much as successive rounds of the same thing.

Sandbox games like “GTA” owe more to “cops-and-robbers” than they do to “Zelda”, because they take the emphasis off of the designer’s sequence and onto the player’s freewheeling play. FPS games, especially in multiplayer, are less games of their own and more digital extensions of real-world war games– even by calling them “death match” or “capture the flag”, it’s basically an admission of that.

The more openworld and non-linear video games are, the more game-like they become, in a classical sense. The more restictive and linear, however, the more they become something else, which is what I find really interesting.

By the way, Charles, I know what emergence is. And I have a bracelet, too.

Bob, I’m not sure you know what ‘emergence’ means. One can definitely design emergence. In fact, that is exactly what a game designer does.

“Perhaps games with less emergence don’t have as much in common with the unique and historical tendencies of what we commonly think of as games– maybe puzzling-affairs like these represent something new:

The future.”

Actually, they kind of represent the past. All genres that have relied too heavily on puzzle-solving as their main draw have eventually died. Adventure games, both text and graphical, being the best example.

Even now we see RPGs, which are highly linear, basically faltering creatively, with their mechanics being applied much more interestingly in other genres.

Well, I’ve gone on long enough. If you want to keep talking about this outside of the comments send me an email, but I think it’s run it’s course in this venue.

Is this what it’s come to? That we’re arguing over the meaning of the word “good”?

Try “successful”. Try “effective”. Try “proven,” perhaps, as in certain games exploit the track-record of mandating a single way of winning. Is it shallow? Yes. But oftentimes, it works.

Take “You Have To Burn the Rope”– just from its title alone, its both a prime example of this phenomenon and a kind of ironic commentary on it. Besides following the advice of the title, there’s plenty you can do– jump around on the platforms, engage or avoid the enemy, throw your weapon, etc. All of those things, and hey, maybe even some more, are possible, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

Why? Because you have to burn the rope.

It’s the ultimate anti-emergent game, and even though it’s making fun of the convention of bottlenecking a player’s options to encourage only one real win-strategy, it’s also an example of how natural a fit it is for games. Spelling that strategy out for you from the very beginning deliberately robs you of the experience of finding it out for yourself, but also helps to underline its emphasis as an illustration of the fact that there’s enough game beyond finding-out the solution to a challenge in the act of actually carrying-out said solution.

Is that where a bit of emergence comes in? Perhaps, but honestly, it doesn’t mean much. Kojima’s notorious for building boss-battles around “burn-the-rope” style tricks– once you figure out you have to build the makeshift flamethrower, unplug the controller or inject the nano-bot syringe, there isn’t that much real challenge left to the fights against Big Boss, Psycho Mantis or Vamp. Not much emerges from those fights, but it doesn’t negate the cleverness they display and encourage the first time you play through them.

Emergent strategies are interesting when they make a difference between what’s hard, and what’s easy– What does it mean, in “Super Mario Bros.”, to throw fireballs at Bowser instead of running underneath when he jumps to destroy the bridge? Is the ease of the former a reward for the skill displayed at keeping your power-up for so long, or is the difficulty of the latter more fulfilling in the careful combination of timing and effort it dictates? Would Miyamoto have been saying more if Bowser had been invulnerable to fireballs, or was a little variety necessary for a task you’d have to do at the end of every castle?

What if you only fought Bowser once? Would fireballs be a little cheap, then?

Having multiple paths to success is all well and good, but it produces a different effect from only having just one. Sometimes linearity– in the macro and micro contexts– can be just as interesting to play, even if it’s only really challenging the first time, when you have to figure out the solution to the puzzle. True, if you have too few solutions, at times, it can be a little preachy, a little static, a little uninvolving if you finally succeed by mere trial-and-error, and therefore don’t really know exactly what it was to win. On the other hand, however, if you have too many solutions, the game can become unfocused, arbitary and irrelevant. Yes, it might mean something to you personally to say “This is how I beat the game,” but if the range of possibilities is too wide, then there isn’t much to say in the way of shared, common experiences.

“Another World” is the perfect example of a game built on “burn-the-rope” style challenges– the only way to beat the game is to play and lose enough times to figure out exactly what you have to do in any given situation, and then get your timing as perfect as possible. There’s no emergent gameplay in it whatsoever, as everything the player either can or has to do is clearly signaled by the game’s graphics or has to be discovered through trial-and-error. Once you’ve played and beaten it once, the only thing left to do, really, is try and remember exactly what you did, and playthrough it with as few deaths as possible.

In other words, to speed-run it.

Usually, when people talk about speed-runs, they look at them as a primary emergent principle in games– the player discovering the shortest possible route from beginning to end and exploiting it to its fullest extent in a manner that the designers responsible for the game couldn’t have possibly anticipated. This is what happens when a game has a constant and consistently wide set of options at their disposal and a narrow range of challenges, and you can see it when people speed-run “Mega Man 3″– all the challenges in that game are rudimentary, consisting mostly of shooting enemies and jumping from platform to platform without falling into traps, and with all the weapons and items you acquire throughout the game, there’s an endless amount of ways you can approach each level, not even taking into account which order you play them in.

“Another World” is the opposite– you have a narrow set of options at your disposal, and an increasingly wide set of challenges which you must solve using that limited skillset. What it boils down to is finding the most expedient way of doing precisely what the designer wants you to do. It’s shallow, but it’s remarkable.

Is this what games, historically, have done? No, and that’s why games such as these, and the moments inside of them, aren’t quite games. They’re examples of what a game can do when it acts like a puzzle, instead of a game. “Ico” is a pretty shallow game, when you get right down to it, but it’s breathtaking. Ueda’s a big “Another World” fan, and it’s something that shows pretty plainly in the structure of his works. When “Shadow of the Colossus” came out, people even described each colossus as a boss-fight and a dungeon combined, essentially a walking, fighting puzzle, where the solution came in finding its weakpoint, a way to reach it, and exploiting it. Bossfights in general have been growing steadily and steadily more puzzle-like over the years, an occasion for the player to test their mind as well as their in-game proficiency, and usually that means boiling everthing down to one solution the player has to discover on their own.

In your opinion, all of these games have emergence, just not as much as other games. I’d argue that the shallow emergence they have isn’t quite that, because in each case the emergence is something the designers design for, and emergence isn’t really something that you can design, exactly. Disagree with me if you like, but it’s more of an organic reaction to the player’s performance with the game’s mechanics. Perhaps it can be provoked, like all natural phenomena, but just like all experiments, when that happens the most important thing isn’t the phenomena itself, but the experiemnt the men in white lab-coats are carrying out with it.

As a rule, this is how it feels to me– the deeper a game’s emergence is, the more the player is in control, and the more shallow a game’s emergence is, the more the designer is in control. I’m more interested in games that follow the latter’s example, but that’s not at the expense of the former. Perhaps games with less emergence don’t have as much in common with the unique and historical tendencies of what we commonly think of as games– maybe puzzling-affairs like these represent something new:

The future.

How are you qualifying these games (which ever ones they are) as ‘good’?

Either way, all systems have emergence, it’s simply a matter of how much. Even puzzles have a possibility space that emerges from their ruleset, it’s just that it’s very shallow.

I’d be happy to go example by example at some point with you, but needless to say it’s a good rule of thumb that a game with more possible paths to success is better (as in it better fulfills the unique and historical potential of games) than one with fewer.

Also, don’t think of ‘possibilities’ in only the macro sense, as in you always have to beat Air Man before you get to Wily’s Castle. A possibility space can also be found in the granularity or physics of an avatar’s movement (see Flywrench).

Emergence is not essential because there are plenty of good games (if that’s what we want to call them) wherein there are challenges that can only be passed by a single strategy. Yes, that strategy can be gleaned and discovered quite naturally by the player, without outside intervention, but at the end of the day, it represents an example of the player doing what the designer whanted them to do, not the designer allowing the player to do what they wanted.

How do I define emergence? To me, emergence is what happens when the player succeeds by doing something the designer hadn’t anticipated. In that basic sense, as long as the designer is smart enough to see as many possibilities for how somebody could use the tools they’ve provided, emergence is something that never really happens.

Playtesting is all about experimenting to find what a game is capable of, and then editing and adjusting it to make sure it’s only capable of what the designers want– emergent strategies may arise during test-sessions that they weren’t initially aware of, but at the end of the day, only the emergent strategies they approve of will be supported by the final rule-set.

Not all games are puzzles– only the ones where the range of emergence is contained by the designer’s scope of authorial vision. As long as you can’t discover a new way to beat a game that the designer didn’t already know about, it’s a puzzle– whatever that may be– because it represents an example of a game as an act of artistic expression, of the designer successfully comunicating an idea to the player. In the grand scheme of things, there’s nothing more meaningful than that.

There are single player games that are not ‘puzzles’, in the sense that I am using the term. Ironically, Tetris is one of them. There are also two player games that are ‘puzzles’. One such game is Tic-Tac-Toe, where the possibility space is so small that solving it is trivial.

On the grand scheme there is a chance that all games are puzzles, but that scheme is so grand that it might be meaningless.

Emergence is important, it is not simply a flavor, because it is the critical standard of our artform. Making a puzzle is easy, making a good puzzle is a little more difficult, but neither is near as hard as making a good game.