Understanding Video Games – Week 3 – Emergent and progressive gameplay
Continuing my online learning quest, I’m moving on to week 3 of “Understanding Video Games“, a University of Alberta Course offered by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera. This week was devoted to the differences between progressive and emergent game play. The basic divergence from the video lecture part of the week seems okay at first.
Progressive game play would be games with relatively linear steps from beginning to end, achieving sub-goal after sub-goal until the final goal is achieved. Not unlike doing a puzzle, progress is limited to exact steps as the designers intended, a linear game with potentially little “replay value” once the puzzles and the game are solved.
Emergent games might also have overall goals or a quest, but unlike in progressive, the player has the ability to set their own goals, or do side quests with the main quest optional. Or, alternatively, there are multiple options on how to complete the overall goal. They use Grand Theft Auto as an example, emphasizing the seamless nature of the quest, with no levels to achieve and realistic simulations (night/day, weather, people with simulated lives in the game). They then expand on emergent games as being about freedom for the gamer where the rules spark creativity vs. progressive that has the rules being limiting.
The reading for this week from Jesper Juul was not that great, in my view. I see what the writer is trying to do, building the argument that Hackman and Gouglas do in the lecture, but it doesn’t work for me. First of all, one of the “tips” to decide if something is progressive or emergent is to look at the guides that people develop afterwards — progressive games have walkthroughs, showing step by step how you can win, while emergent game guides are tips and tricks about possible strategic behaviours. Except that a post-hoc guide is not what defines the categories, just an indicator. People have done strategy guides for Tomb Raider which is mostly progressive, and walk-throughs of one scenario approach to Grand Theft Auto. It didn’t define the genre of the game, just the genre of that person’s approach to the game.
Personally, I like instead the idea of linear and non-linear as the descriptive categories, or linear vs. open. Unfortunately, even that doesn’t work for some games. Tomb Raider, for example, is a 2.5D format and is rather open format. But there are strong goals you have to achieve in each level and an expected way in the game design to achieve it. Some people have found unintended hacks though that you could bounce off a wall in the middle of a jump and land close enough to the final goal to allow you to bypass some jumping sequences, not unlike the hacks mentioned in Deus Ex for proximity mine climbing.
I’m also completely lost in the written article where Juul says “all pre-electronic games are games of emergence” because they are simple rules with multiple complexities afterwards. Really? So Snakes and Ladders would be emergent? Hardly. I think Juul confuses truly emergent (the Harvey Smith talk in 2001 partially nailed it as being situations or player behaviours that were not predicted by the game designers) with just linear games with cascading decision trees of limited options each time but unending variation within those limits.
For me, I think it is more a two-variable matrix for video games:
Linear goals, single player (PacMan, Metroid) |
Linear goals, multi-player (Adventure / fighting games) |
Open ended, single player (SimCity, etc.) |
Open ended, multi-player (MMORPGs) |
I kind of see the “emergent” games as really only being in the lower right quadrant, and is more related to the fact that it requires multiple players for something beyond the base rules of the game to “emerge” from their interactions — in short, what the players bring to the game.
I don’t think the examples they had in the lecture about griefing (harassing other characters) qualifies as emergent game play because it isn’t really game play so much as frustrating game play. I do think, however, that speed runs are a good area for study because you can do speed runs for multiple quadrants above, transforming even the open-ended into a close-ended game with defined goals … in essence, reducing the open-endedness to say “If we added a specific sub-goal of x, how fast could one achieve it?”.
![](https://www.thepolyblog.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/signature-01-happy-reading-e1618075564751-300x127.png)