Emergent Gameplay (Introductory Guide)

Overview of the concept of emergent gameplay in game design and how to create the conditions for more occurrences of emergence.

What is emergent gameplay?

Emergent gameplay refers to situations in games where players can do things that come from the mechanics of the game but weren’t planned for by the game designers.

It involves the facilitating the creation of novel and unexpected outcomes through the combination of game mechanics and player choices.

Overall games with emergent gameplay tend to have better player retention and more replayability.

Emergent gameplay examples

Example 1: Hide ‘n Seek in Among Us

The game is built to be a traitor-sussing puzzle game. Here is what the Among Us game dev’s intended gameplay looks like:

If you turn the imposter’s vision radius all the way down and disable certain rules (e.g., no emergency meetings), you can play a version of the game where the Imposter is playing a digital game of tag to eat everyone up – the last one standing is the winner!

Here is what the emergent Hide ‘n Seek mode gameplay looks like

The players messing around with the settings discovered this childhood game living inside the structure of Among Us is exactly what gives the gameplay experience the little “extra” spark.

Example 2: Picking pockets in Fallout (1997)

Tim Cain, the game designer who implemented the pickpocketing mechanic by reusing the bartering code:

He didn’t anticipate that this allowed players to steal items from NPCs and place items in their inventory.

But ultimately…

He decided to leave it in because he thought it was a neat and unexpected way for players to interact with the game world.

Example 3: Bucket over NPC’s head in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Here the players discovered they could place a bucket over an NPC’s head to block their line of sight, allowing them to steal or pick locks without being caught like this:

In this emergent gameplay, these two systems interact in an unintended way:

1. NPC vision
2. Object physics

This demonstrates again how complex systems can create unexpected and creative player solutions.

What is it that enables emergent gameplay?

Ultimately, it’s a mindset by the designers to “let things slip” rather than seal up every unexpected hole in the game or game engine.

Tim Cain ran into this again with the ending of Fallout 1. He realized players could beat the game in a couple of minutes by ignoring the water chip quest line and simply killing the final boss.

This person actually beat the whole game in less than 5 minutes:

Again, this wasn’t something they planned for.

However, they decided to allow it, which keeps the game open-ended enough for players the true agency to find their own solutions.

Think of emergent gameplay as that “aha” moment brought to life when the players realize the game supports their choices in a way that isn’t the path the designers intend them to go.

How is this different from brute-force game design?

Emergent gameplay isn’t really that different from brute-force game design.

If you have followed the development of Baldur’s Gate 3, then you know the term Brute-Force Game Design refers to Larian’s strategy:

• Put the game on early access
• See what the players actually do
• Support dialogue and moments based on unexpected things players decide to try

Now, the Writers and Designers at Larian aren’t slouches — who no doubt, thought of a large number of these paths themselves. One part of what makes it “brute-force” is that they supported all of these paths in the game.

The sheer amount of writing, coding, and voice acting needed to support this is the other part of what makes it brute-force.

In this talk, Jason Latino, Larian’s cinematic director shares all the work that goes into the cinematics production of Baldur’s Gate 3:

Ultimately, Baldur’s Gate 3 embraces those emergent moments and recognizes them as part of the game. When the game feels that it recognizes and sees you — you feel more connected to the game and the story.

This is something DnD Dungeon Masters across the planet have done for ages.

So, where emergence reveals opportunity, brute-force game design relies on player discovery of these moments, then a massive staff of game writers and designers to support and acknowledge those moments.

3 biggest factors that facilitate emergent gameplay

Emergent gameplay happens when the game designers allow players to expand upon these three factors:

1. Intrinsic motivation – Is related to something players wanted to do, without external guidance
2. Unpredictablility – The players and developers shouldn’t expect to see it
3. Systemic gameplay – Built atop mechanics and interaction opportunities provided by the game

Let’s break this up!

1. Intrinsic motivation: At a basic level, having intrinsic motivation involves players wanting to achieve something in the game in a way they conceived. This happens in games that favor player agency.

Player agency is all about giving players the keys to the kingdom and letting them loose. It’s the freedom to experiment, mess around, and make choices that impact the story.

It also offers the players:

• Multiple solutions where the player can approach challenges in unique ways.
• Open-ended gameplay with an array of tools or mechanics that players can use in unexpected ways.
• Replayability where players can experience the game differently with each playthrough, as different choices lead to unique outcomes and stories.

Pokémon can sometimes serve as an excellent example of player agency.

The Pokémon community thrives on creating self-imposed challenges that go beyond the game’s core objectives. These challenges are intrinsically interesting to the community by forcing additional constraints on their adventure.

For instance, Nuzlocke Runs. This challenge typically involves these rules:

• Nicknaming every Pokémon to create a bond.
• Players can only catch the first encounter in each area.
• If a Pokémon faints, it’s considered “dead” and cannot be used anymore.
• The run is over once all Pokémon “die,” and you must restart.

Here’s an overview of it from the self-described “greatest Pokémon player of all time”:

Some Nuzlocke player will go even further to add “hardcore rules,” such as not allowing the use of items in battle that could otherwise heal or revive Pokémon. They also can’t overlevel their Pokémon past the next gem’s strongest Pokémon’s level.

2. Unpredictablility: Lack of certainty is what makes emergent gameplay moments so exciting. It’s the “anything can happen” feeling you get when playing certain games.

The world isn’t scripted. Things just take place that frustrate, delight, and surprise you.

It’s this emotional turbulence that intrigues players. However, it’s important to emphasize this is different from bugs that are inconsistent, irritating, and add little or nothing to the experience.

Unpredictability is not about inconsistent rules — rather it’s that the rules grant you the freedom to solve problems in unconventional ways.

You first need a modular but interconnected system that allows for unexpected combinations or interactions.

RimWorld’s core systems (like needs, weather, combat, relationships, etc.) are an excellent example of how designers should do this. These systems mean changing one aspect, like a cold snap, can ripple through the others like hypothermia or crops dying.

The game then throws one or more of these events (sometimes simultaneously) at the player:

• Raids – Enemies attacking the base.
• Infestations – Massive insects surfacing in a mountain base.
• Animal attacks – Predators attacking colonists or pets.
• Solar flares – Shuts down all electricity
• Illnesses – Colonists come down with malaria, heart attacks, etc.And more…

Here’s an example of a toxic fallout and a colonist getting dementia while another colonist is going on a fire starting spree in the background in RimWorld:

The frequency of an event is a bit predictable in some cases.

For instance, if you go with the AI storyteller Cassandra, she’ll spawn more events as your colony’s wealth increases. The particular events that happen — and whether they co-occur — are random, though.

RimWorld’s typical “win” (without expansions) is to build a ship and leave the planet.

The expansions, mods, and player agency allow the players to set goals like building a massive colony, escaping the planet, or 100-day challenges on insane difficulties like this:

Which leads to…

3. Systemic gameplay: This design approach tends to be the best at creating emergent gameplay moments. They do this by:

• Providing guidelines without limiting creativity
• Ensuring the game remains engaging and coherent

To facilitate emergent gameplay while maintaining coherence and engagement, you need to establish a solid foundation of core mechanics and rules that govern interactions within the game world.

However, It’s crucial to strike a balance between freedom and structure.

Players should have the autonomy to experiment and discover emergent gameplay. Though, the game should also provide clear goals and challenges to maintain a sense of purpose and direction.

You can also incorporate feedback mechanisms that respond to player actions and choices. Dynamically adjusting the game world to create new challenges and opportunities.

This can help prevent the game from becoming stale or repetitive, ensuring that emergent gameplay remains engaging and rewarding.

How to design emergent gameplay in games?

You do this by creating fertile grounds for higher probability of emergent gameplay to occur by intentionally:

• Create (many) systemic interactions
• Encourage player exploration
• Embrace unexpected moments

It’s just a poor allocation of the forever scarce dev resources to intentionally create exact emergent gameplay scenarios that by off chance may (or may not) happen.

Although you can predict some. For example, the original Fallout team where predicted emergency usage from having explosives that can damage anything in their AoE:

In addition, if you create mechanics you intended for the players to interact a certain way, then it’s not emergent gameplay by definition.

Let’s break down how you can do each in detail.

How to create systemic interactions

You do this by creating many interactable systems and minimize forcing specific interactions following the principle of necesary complex systems and simple interactions.

For example, Micraft at its core, operates on mechanics with straightforward interactions:

• Players interact with the world primarily by placing and breaking blocks. This forms the foundation for all construction and manipulation within the game.
• Common materials like wood and stone are easily accessible, requiring minimal effort to gather.
• A straightforward crafting system allows players to combine basic resources into tools, weapons, and other useful items.

Players may eventually get sick of strip mining in super-high mountains to get a bit of iron, which may lead them to YouTube videos with outlandish titles like “farm 1 million iron bars per hour EASY.” From there, they’ll likely learn how to create iron golem farms.

As they dig deeper into the rabbit hole, they’ll realize they can make the farm more efficient by adding redstone dust or other devices.

Redstone is a unique material that introduces the concept of electrical circuits. By placing and connecting redstone components, players can create contraptions like automated farms, hidden doors, and computers.

For instance, this person made it so the player could play Minecraft inside of Minecraft:

This project alone resulted in 7 months of work from an individual. One of the perks of having higher likelihood of emergent gameplay.

How to encourage player exploration

You do this with the paradigm of designing the world to be more like a toy box or playground than the typical box-and-hallway design of modern games.

As long as you design the gameplay under the guidance of a philosophy of embracing player exploration, then different approaches will work.

For example, Tears of the Kingdom team’s approach of designing all elements to interact effective sprouts many emergent gameplay potentials:

Or Baldur’s Gate 3 team’s brute-force content design will also facilitate high probability of emergent gameplay.

How to embrace unexpected moments

In Ori and the Blind Forest, the team noticed that players would find clever ways to skip parts of the game using physics glitches or oddities of their character controller.

Here’s an example of someone beating the game in less than 10 minutes using a combination of physics, visual and audio cues, and save state manipulation:

Rather than try to prevent these situations, they instead focused on doing just enough to ensure the game wouldn’t break if they did these tricks — called sequence breaks — and let the game flow on to its conclusion.

The end result was that speedrunners had more fun exploring the game, while most players never tried these exploits or felt like they were mandatory to have a good time.

Final thoughts on emergent gameplay

Emergent gameplay is encouraged by a toy box mindset inside of a systemically supported game.

However, these games tend to be expensive to create intentionally. And trying to achieve emergent gameplay is usually a waste of time and resources. For instance, it took Mojang Studios more than 10 years to “perfect” Minecraft.

Focus on the game you want to create — then just be a little lighter on the reins when players find creative ideas.

Note that this works best with single-player or player-versus-enemy-style games. Player versus player ecosystems that are full of exploits tend to undermine the experience for everyone.

I’d like to hear from you. Let us know if you have any insights with designing emergent gameplay.