Systemic level design for emergent play– Harvey Smith at GDC

Emergent play seems very powerful to me. Something about the verisimilitude of characters imbued with goals left alone to achieve them really speaks to me. I think it's a sense of "Hamlet on the Holodeck" -- emphasis on the holodeck. However, our best contenporary example of that is the Sims, which forms micronarratives but no coherent story. Even from a ludic stand-point, I doubt such a free range of actions makes sense for much gameplay. So clearly, constraints are key.

Smith's talk is about that kind of balance, especially necessary for our imprecise mastery of artificial life. He diagrams a method that can employ modern best practices in software engineering to great convenience and effect. Things that are the same should behave the same by default, then get any special modifiers (environment, mood, motiviation, etc) added on. This is especially handy for inanimate objects. This is essentially Crawford's ratio of interactive excellence from The Art of Interactive Design (85), where the number of accessible states over the number of conceivable states should approach 1 for best results. Avoiding depicting doors that can't open (Prince of Persia, I'm looking at you!), and otherwise usable items that are actually just part of the background is a great start at reducing those conceivable states. Especially when some ledges are graspable, others are walkable, and others just painted onto walls for effect (and instant death when you try to jump onto them). And why can the Prince pick up a fallen foe's saber, but not a bow?

The challenge and need for balance comes from narrative considerations. To avoid "toy-like" environments (Sims etc) the player needs to be led/driven/coerced through some series of events/levels/whatever... because we construct narratives linearly, and if the designer cares what narrative we put together, then she cares what order we see these events/levels/whatever in. Even if we withdraw to a purely ludic point of view, challenging gameplay often calls for a change in states, increases of difficulty, or introductions of novel items. The challenge is -- how much of a special case are these?

From Smith's POV (and I too remember Deus Ex fondly), besides the software engineering benefits which I can affirm, his principles give direct benefits to the player. A sense of immersion in a consistent world. This allows for plan-making, understanding, and achievements. On the other hand, you still have those "one-ofs" that are required (for some definition of required) and stand alone as de facto special cases anyways, getting none of those benefits. And emergence, while creating powerful "second order consequences," is too unreliable to count on for important narrative events.

I think we need to find some formal constraint language for controlling emergence.