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Emergent gameplay


Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or table top role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.

Designers have attempted to encourage emergent play by providing tools to players such as placing web browsers within the game engine (such as in Eve Online, The Matrix Online), providing XML integration tools and programming languages (Second Life), fixing exchange rates (Entropia Universe), and allowing a player to spawn any object that they desire to solve a puzzle (Scribblenauts).

Intentional emergence occurs when some creative uses of the game are intended by the game designers. Since the 1970s and 1980s board games and table top role playing games such as Cosmic Encounter or Dungeons & Dragons have featured intentional emergence as a primary game function by supplying players with relatively simple rules or frameworks for play that intentionally encouraged them to explore creative strategies or interactions and exploit them toward victory or goal achievement.

In games with complex physics and flexible object interaction it may be possible to complete in-game problems using solutions that the game designers did not foresee. Deus Ex is often cited as a game responsible for promoting the idea of emergent gameplay, with players developing interesting solutions such as using wall-mounted mines as pitons for climbing walls.

Such emergence may also occur in games through open-ended gameplay and sheer weight of simulated content, in Dwarf Fortress for example.


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