I listened today to a talk by Warren Spector, the great computer game designer responsible for “Deus Ex”, “Thief”, and various other wonderful computer games.<\/p>\n
After the talk, there was a conversation which spiraled around to many topics, but came down to one point: Warren’s ideal is to create games that have a kind of emergence. What he means by “emergence” is a game or interactive experience that is rich enough so that a player will be able to do unexpected things – that is, come up with solutions to game-play challenges – which were not explicitly designed into the game.<\/p>\n
Warren bemoaned the fact that so far his favorite moments in computer games have been the ones that were tightly scripted – essentially cinematically crafted – such as the moment the giant tentacle reaches in and grabs the scientist in “Half Life I”, or when the dog bursts through the window in “Resident Evil”.<\/p>\n
Yes, it is certainly possible to create emergent games, games that allow the player to explore in a way that was not explicitly designed by the game designer. But can we make those games as emotionally powerful as games that follow a more linear, pre-scripted design?<\/p>\n
And then somehow the conversation got on the subject of crossword puzzles – which were held up as an exemplar of a non-emergent (ie: pre-scripted) interactive experience.<\/p>\n
Which left me wondering the following slightly wacky thought: Could we create an emergent crossword puzzle? And if so, what would that be like? I’ve already started trying out some ideas…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I listened today to a talk by Warren Spector, the great computer game designer responsible for “Deus Ex”, “Thief”, and various other wonderful computer games. After the talk, there was a conversation which spiraled around to many topics, but came down to one point: Warren’s ideal is to create games that have a kind of … Continue reading “Emergence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":937,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions\/937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}