Emergent Gameplay: the future of online gaming societies

Suspension of disbelief is an important thing, it allows you (or rather involuntarily forces you) to see and feel past the fourth wall of the monitor and become immersed in the world beyond, this is a very important aspect as it captivates the audience and allows them a certain, if not superficial synergy with the game. This factor can be achieved through various different methods which usually involve impeccable gameplay execution and smooth, unobtrusive progress, allowing the player to merge with the games flow, sparing rigid disjointed occurences. However, the method i’d like to talk about today is through a phenomenon know as emergent gameplay.

Say for instance an MMORPG featured a system that allowed users to trade items for cash and/ or other items, and this game also allowed players to purchases dwellings, an example of emergent gameplay could involve a particularly prolific trader advertising their base of operations to be in this building, causing a sudden “shop” mechanic to be born; this mechanic may be by no means necessary, but it could for instance, allow the player to store vast amounts of loose items in the house in order to increase the stock they could hold, boosting the players ability to persue their chosen “career”. This move is by no means necessary, but the player to it upon themself to discover this particular avenue of possibility and use it to their advantage. This may be a rather contrived example, but nonetheless it outlines the basic principals of this particular gameplay feature which can be defined as “An element that was never originally intended by the developers but has been embraced by the players”.

Now what if an entire game was based of this principal? What if the developers provided players with a world that initially had structure but was slowly peeled away until the player base could autonomously control the functions of the world with the provided utilities, possibly forming private militaries and political heirarchies by their own devices. This evolution would surely tear down the fourth wall and allow for suspension of disbelief to come naturally, so what haven’t we seen such an advancement? The issue would seem to be resources. Physically contructing a game to support a complete clientside management of the games resources is an inherently problematic issue, it would be more that the players would just go nuts and abuse the hell out of the provided utilities, but they’d soon realised that it was counter productive. I believe the true way to accomplish this is to create at least two “teams”, call them what ever you want. These teams must constantly compete against each other for a goal that can never permanently be completed, but short term victories must be possible. This would stimulate the players to back each other up and work together in the name of a common interest, whilst perpetuating their personal advancements in order to hold, or obtain victory for as long, and as many times as possible. The second important feature is diplomatic alligence, if the opposing teams are on occasions put in a situation where given parties must meet, there should be no arbitrary means of stopping them, this would usually mean no NPC (non player character ie bots) which would obviously obstruct this by randomly attempting to kill the opposition in the midst of a peace gathering. The third point would be allowing for unnoficial organisations to be started within the game which branch off, and even by choice can remove themselves from the predetermined teams. The advantage of this is that they can act as lone operatives who would obviously have more options considering that they aren’t tied to a particular alliance meaning that they would have additional options involving interaction with the world and it’s inhabitants. This is just the beginning, creating a game that is so complex in feature must have a simple core fundemental on which it is build otherwise the game could easily go off un an uncontrolled tangent (not necessarily a bad thing, but can be to the developers detriment) or simply cease to function.

These are by know means the perfect rules to running such a game, but i have observed through my work that they are ways of running a game with such parameters to a certain level of effectiveness. Of course creating this style of gameplay is riddled with fudemental flaws, but i believe that with experimentation and work, they would dramatically enhance player co-operation and rapport, forming social networks that actually care for each others existence as apposed to being pawns in a very colourful game of chess with a set purpose and very limited ability to make a lasting impact on the world in which they reside.