The Video Game Revue

Emergent Behaviour

So I did a little bit more thinking on Gridgame and Nanaca Crash (only a little more, mind you), and I remembered something fairly obvious that I feel is worth mentioning. One of my favourite books is Kevin Kelly's Out of Control (you can read it for free online) which deals extensively with the subject of emergent behaviour--or, simply put, the idea that a small system of hard and fast rules can lead to wildly unpredictable results, a.k.a. chaos. In a nutshell, that's what games like Gridgame and Nanaca Crash are about: you know the rules, and yet every time you throw the switch to start the game, you see something different. Now, I'm not saying that these games are endlessly entertaining, but you have to admit that they are surprisingly entertaining for such small productions. It's amusing to contemplate just how simple these games really are, and yet they still manage to generate unpredictablity--behaviour that "emerges" from rules that are each rigid and predictable. In Gridgame, you can work out what will happen to each tile as it is rotated (which neighbours will be triggered), but the resulting chain reactions are fascinating and constitute new rules of play unto themselves.

This is a topic that affects games in general on a large scale. Computer games by definition are systems of hard-and-fast rules, because they are written as computer programs. Perhaps a game could be written where the player can change the rules as the game goes along, but even then there would have to be absolute rules that dictate the ways in which the rules can be changed. The only way to generate chaos in such a restrictive system is to cultivate unpredictability through interacting rules, which is exactly what many video games do. Gridgame and Nanaca Crash (along with countless other little Flash games) demonstrate this concept clearly because they are so narrow and focused in scope. Larger productions tend to deal with much larger sets of rules, but they still try to create interactions between the rules such that larger trends in the game emerge.

Another way to think about emergent behaviour is in terms of fighting game combos. These days, modern fighting games build a system of combos right into the game; the game designers are aware of possible combos and design the game accordingly. Back when Street Fighter II was first released, however, the notion of a fighting game "combo" had not been coined yet. The game was so wildly popular and ferociously played that players started to discover sequences of moves that could be chained together very quickly, and those became the first combos. Combos in Street Fighter II are a property of the game that the designers may not have originally predicted, but the rules of Street Fighter II had enough interplay that something as sophisticated as a combo became possible.

Or, to take a more clear-cut example, the game Magic the Gathering (okay, not a video game, but bear with me) is all about combos. Each card has well defined abilities (at least, the designers try to define those abilities well) that on the surface do not appear to leave much to the imagination. When you probe deeper, however, you discover that the interactions between the cards can become quite sophisticated, and a particular card might end up being far more powerful than anyone intially predicted. Veteran Magic players understand that this is the core property of the game that makes it so interesting and addictive.

So the next time you're really hooked on a game and feel like philosophising a bit, consider the role that emergent behaviour plays in adding to that game's mechanics. Once you start looking for it, you'll see it everywhere.

posted by Parappa @ 12:24 PM