 Chess has a relatively small number of rules, specifying a goal in the moves of different pieces, but out of its simple mechanics, an incredible number of strategies emerge. The game has existed in different forms across many civilizations, and continues to enthrall us to this day. Its complexity also inspired AI researchers to pursue solving it as the Holy Grail of Intelligence, culminating in the AI Deep Blue, which beat one of our chess champions Gary Kasparov. This depth is what we can call strategic emergence, a phenomena where the rules of a game generate a rich possibility space for strategic play. Different games have varying degrees of depth that are generated by their rules, whether it be the relatively simple state space of tic-tac-toe, to the endless possibilities afforded by Go. However, emergence can express itself in other ways. In the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, the player can freeze an object and propel it by striking it multiple times, an ability called stasis, but they also have the ability to climb any object in the world. If you combine these two rules, you can launch yourself over vast distances. This is a product of what we can call systemic emergence, an instance where the rules of a system can be combined in dynamic ways to generate novel outcomes. Finally, the seminal game missile command leverages another form of emergence, one we might call narrative emergence. In that game, you are tasked with protecting six cities from nuclear weapons. Over time, you have to make sacrifices, desperately trying to maintain order as chaos rears its ugly head. Inevitably though, you die, and the sequence of events creates a parable about the horrors and futility of nuclear war, just by using rules. Emergence is the phenomena where the entirety of a system exhibits properties that the parts that comprise it don't have. It is essential to our understanding of games, because games are ultimately systems built by rules. A colloquial expression that might simplify this is, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and is a heuristic that informs our understanding of emergence. In the seminal book Rules of Play, the authors use complexity theory and systems analysis to argue that emergence arises from complexity. Complex systems are those that have sufficient connections within them to generate discernible non-random phenomena, and arises when a certain threshold of connectivity is reached, whereas emergence is the product of this process that can exist in many forms. The emergence this generates not only creates interesting strategic and narrative dynamics, but can also reveal things about the universe we inhabit. In Toxy as given on the subject of emergent truth in games, Jonathan Blow outlines how a phenomena like the Mandelbroset, where a simple equation yields an infinite set of fractal patterns, and John Conway's Game of Life, where a set of simple rules produces self-replicating patterns, can serve as a template for how games, as systems made of simple rules, can explore the many truths of our universe. Emergence exists everywhere and at all scales of resolution. Individual ants have simple pheromone mediated directives, but an anthill has a hive intelligence that is capable of thermoregulation. Our brains are made of neurons, our computers out of binary units, and our universe out of physical laws, but out of all of these domains, massively complex computational systems manifest at a higher level. As Fritjof Kapra argues in his book, The Web of Life, the universe itself may have been built out of its own emergence, and have life be a part of this dynamic process. How is this important, the game design, you ask? Well, let's refer to three respected figures in the gaming industry, and how they use these different forms of emergence. Sid Meier, the creator of the Civilization Series, once said games are a series of interesting decisions. This maps most directly onto the strategic emergence of chess. He talks about decisions like risk versus reward and long-term versus short-term decisions. Risk and reward decisions can be seen in games like Tetris, as you choose between piling up blocks and clearing lines. And long-term decisions can be seen in civilization and the strategic intentionality that mediates when you should attack. There are also game theory configurations that preclude a dominant solution called a non-nash equilibrium game, seen in how most fighting games are rock paper scissors and most strategy games are a four-way mapping puzzle. However, the dynamic and fuzzy nature of games creates another emergent phenomena, Yomi, which is the art of reading your opponent's moves and counteracting them. Bluff's deception and information gathering becomes a part of the dynamic of play, seen in games like poker, chess, and Go. Another esteemed developer will write The Creator of SimCity, views games as dynamic interactive systems that allow us to create simulations and test out hypotheses. In SimCity, a set of systems that have their own rules interact with each other, creating dynamic outcomes in the play space. Will Wright asks us to conceptualize the design of games from the perspective of systems and complexity theory, which brings to bear tools like feedback loops, grouping dynamics, state spaces, and dynamic AI systems. Wright thinks that these tools can help fuel creativity, much like they have with their own games. Finally, Jonathan Blow, most known for his indie games, Braid and the Witness, speaks about the importance of what he calls dynamical meaning in a game, which is our instinct to graph stories onto rules and interactions. In his talk, The Main Conflicts in Modern Game Design, he breaks down how games need to pay attention to the meaning they convey, if we want to be taken seriously as an art form. In Braid, the mechanics are about time manipulation, so the story's themes are about regret and changing the past, aligning the motifs to the mechanical interaction. Here's the thing, though. The line between strategic, systemic, and narrative emergence is not impermeable, so these forms of emergence interact in fascinating ways. In Quake, there was a phenomena called rocket jumping, where the blast radius of a rocket would propel players, and this could be combined with the jump to enhance your mobility. This is a form of systemic emergence that turned into strategic emergence. In the game, This War of Mine, the strategic decisions you make in the game have narrative implications, which in turn affect your actions. Murdering and stealing may help you survive longer, but it often takes a psychological toll on your characters, who are trying to preserve their humanity in a war-torn environment. This is strategic, systemic, and narrative emergence all intertwined into one dynamic scenario. If we conceptualize this in the context of a popular framework, the Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics Framework, we see how emergence can exist both vertically and horizontally. Mechanics host the dynamics of play which meet the core aesthetics of play, but systemic emergence arises out of mechanics. Strategic emergence manifests out of dynamics, and narrative emergence is a core part of the aesthetics of play. All these forms are mutually reinforcing and intertwined, creating a nexus out of the many manifestations of emergence. The power of thinking in terms of emergence is that it can give game designers the tools to craft more deeper, systemic, and dynamically interactive games. Sid Meier, Will Wright, and Jonathan Blow are at the forefront of their respective forms of emergence, but if we think about combining these different elements, there might be new frontiers of design we have yet to explore. In her talk on the subject of systemic games, Alicia Lydacker, to find a systemic game, is one that has a set of individual components that can influence one another, because they have been designed to interact in specific ways. The main point here is that there are a series of precise and consistent rules. She insists that to design games like this, we need to start thinking in terms of how objects can interact with things other than just a player, and she also gives us the idea of enabling player-driven stories and choices through these systems. A game that did this well was Far Cry 4, a game system that was described by its creators as an anecdote factory. In that game, you can lure animals into bases because these entities interact with each other in predictable ways, creating strategic depth through systems, but also a dynamic player-driven narrative. A similar rule-based engine was created in the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, which started with the goal of enabling player freedom. The designers called this multiplicative design, which involved using systems to create scenarios that specify a goal, but then let players figure out how to accomplish it. They created what they called a chemistry engine for the game, which connects everything with each other. Rain douses fire, fire ignites grass, electricity enhances water, and even wind is incorporated. This created an amazing amount of strategic depth that enabled player expression. Another thing Zelda shows us is the importance of allowing an emergent possibility space to shine by incentivizing creativity through gameplay. The designers intentionally designed scenarios to ensure both that there was at least one solution and that there were multiple options simultaneously. Thinking of games as a set of interconnected elements is one way of approaching emergence, but in his talk entitled Dynamics for Game Designers, Will Wright gives us another way of framing the conundrum. He breaks games into agents, individual parts, networks, how those parts interact, and layers, which is an ossified set of rules within a network. There are a whole number of dynamics that mediate how these elements interact with each other, and it's interesting to take stock of how. In the multiplayer game battlefield, you are an individual soldier, an agent, but you are grouped into a squad, which can be thought of as a network. This network requires a specific configuration to be optimized, so you may need an engineer to repair your tank, a medic to make sure everyone lives, and an infantryman to cover you. The idea of having the elements of a game function in harmony is called synergies, and is a property that can be seen in how certain cards complement one another in a game of Hearthstone to how different roles in an MMO need to work together to triumph in difficult encounters. Another example of this can be seen in the Total War Real Time Strategy series. In that game, you have individual units you can create, but in the heat of war, you are actually thinking about them as groups. The AI system of Shogun was fascinating in this regard, as it has AI systems that functioned at the group level in accordance with principles outlined in Sun Sue's The Art of War. For example, the AI would do different things based on whether or not it was outnumbered. This kind of grouping phenomena doesn't just happen in large systemic games, as even games like Go Have Territorial segments that bunch together. In Will Wright's own game, Sim City, systems interacted in fascinating ways to create a model of urban decay. If the population increases, crime increases, which in turn decreases the value of the neighborhood. This forces people out of the area, reducing crime, which then triggers another cycle of population boom, and on it goes. Here we see narrative, strategic, and systemic emergence interact in fascinating ways, and this was completely unintended by the designer. This illustrates another aspect of systems, that being positive and negative feedback loops. Positive feedback loops include scenarios where an action feeds back into itself, creating reinforcement. For example, the killstreaks in Call of Duty make it even more likely you will acquire more kills, pushing the game towards imbalance. Conversely, negative feedback loops bring a system back towards balance, like how the rubberbanding AI in a racing game manages the speed of your opponents in accordance with how far they are from you, making the race more competitive. To properly conceptualize emergence, though, two books have gone further than any others in trying to deconstruct what it means within the context of games. In the book, Game Mechanics, Advanced Game Design, Ernest Adams delineates how the mechanics of a game, the physics, internal economy elements, rules, and systems all conspire to create a network with its own emergent dynamics. He then introduces the Machinations framework, which aims to generate a formal language for understanding systems. The internal economy of a game is comprised of four elements, sources, drains, converters, and traders. Sources are any entity that produces a resource, drains are functions that deplete them, and converters and traders are mechanisms that either automatically or through player action allow for the conversion of one resource to another. Any game, including something as rudimentary as Pac-Man, can be conceptualized using this framework, which allows us to lay bare the relationship between different entities in a system. For example, the dots are a resource Pac-Man can convert into points, and the power-up pill is a convert that transitions the state of the game into a new one, a powered up state, which is then drained over time. These components then converge to generate certain systemic patterns, which can be employed in a variety of different ways. One pervasive pattern is an engine, which involves the stockpiling of a resource to be used for an action now, or be conserved for later use. And these feed into the emergence of a game. In most strategy games, there is an extended period of resource gathering, which the player later has to decide how to allocate. For example, in civilization, players initially try to gather enough food to feed their cities, and then collect enough resources to build defensive units. Later, though, they need to start producing goal to fuel research and development. This creates an array of interesting decisions for players, but it also generates feedback loops and systemic dynamics that emerge from the field of play. If you step back even further, you might even be able to see the contours of narrative emergence, where the gaming codes of value about the exogenous nature of history, and how expansion and progress are inherently good things. This brings up another excellent book on the subject, Advanced Game Design, A Systems Approach, by Michael Sellers. The book takes a much broader perspective on systemic thinking, and argues that games are actually instrumental in educating people to think more systemic, because they reveal the internal workings of them in precise and measurable ways. He then goes on to outline some powerful ideas about core loops in games. He speaks about low-level loops in player feel and engagement, but he also expands this into three systemic devices. Engines, economies, and ecologies. An engine is the act of reinforcing or balancing with the same resource. For example, the boost system of burnout, where you can choose to store boost or use it now, is a simple boosting engine. An economy is any system dominated by a reinforcing loop where the increase in resources or value comes not from internal investment of a resource, as with boosting engines, but from exchanging one resource for another. This maps onto the example of civilization I brought up earlier. Finally, an ecology is very similar to an economy, but resources are exchanged such that each part ultimately balances rather than reinforces the other. One can look at the entire economy of a massively online game like Eve Online, where an entire economy with niches, supply and demand, jobs, corporations and supply chains manifest out of its rules, and how all these somehow balance one another in a dynamic universe. When we combine this assortment of tools from the sources, syncs, traders and converters of the machinations framework to the dynamic patterns they generate, to the engines, economies and ecosystems that they are built on, we can assemble some profoundly interesting meta patterns, including resource systems, combat systems, construction systems and socio-political systems. Let's bring the discussion back to the implementation of systemic design in games. What are some other genres that are known for being systemic in a colloquial sense? The immersive sim, a genre popularized by Deus Ex, System Shock and Thief, gives players a set of interconnected systems they can use in dynamic ways to play the game however they want. In Deus Ex, you can choose between stealthy, diplomatic or aggressive strategies, or you can craft your own bizarre solutions. Another genre is the roguelike, named after the popular game rogue, which used procedural generation and systemic design to create novel experiences for players. If we take a game like Spelunky, it is a precise set of rules that always interact with each other in specific ways. However, an often neglected genre in understanding systemic design is stealth games, and this is something Nels Andersen brought up in his talk on the subject. Ever since Castle Wolfenstein and the original Metal Gear, games about avoiding entities in the world had to focus on systems because you had to find ways of creating gameplay through indirect means. Enemies have awareness meters, sound detection profiles, and are aware of things in their environment more so than in other games. In Metal Gear Solid, you can make noises to distract guards, manipulating their pathfinding AI, and in Mark of the Ninja, you can play with light and interesting ways to create a path for yourself through the level. Stealth has crept into all genres now because it creates profound avenues of strategic death using systems. Stealth games also illustrate two other design issues when it comes to creating systemic games, that being getting players to think creatively and also giving them a space to plan strategies. Puzzle games show the power of constraints in forcing a player to think divergently, as since there is only one solution more often than not, they have to search the possibility space more diligently. However, as the puzzle designers at Zaktronics have argued for, having multiple solutions to puzzles can also force player agency and creativity. Nells Anderson argues players nowadays have a form of learned helplessness, where they rigidly abide by tutorials and established conventions. How do we break players free of this though? Apart from empowering through systems or forcing constraints, another way might be to withhold information. In the GDC talk Leave Players Room, the speaker argues that not explicitly commanding the player to do anything leaves them with enough room for experimentation, something a game like SimCity did exceptionally well. In his talk entitled Holistic Level Design, Steve Yee argues that to create holistic levels for systemic games, you need to design levels that enable player intentionality. This is the ability to make conscious choices with specific goals and tools in mind. Players need choice, information, motivation and time to be able to leverage systems in ways that enable creative solutions. He gives the example of the edge of the world mission in Dishonored 2, a level that, through its very design, enables player intentionality. It is clear affordances, something Don Norman argued for in his book The Design of Everyday Things, or things in the environment that communicate their function intrinsically, activating a player to think about the possibilities. Additionally, specifying long-term goals without explicit instruction as to how to accomplish it, gives players the room to explore the possible means of realizing it. This can be as simple as creating landmarks in the environment, or like in Hitman, giving players an assassination target, but then stepping back and letting them figure things out. In his paper, The Open and the Closed, Games of Emergence and Games of Progression, Jasper Eul argued that there exists a fundamental dichotomy in games, that being the divide between progression based linear games like Mario, and emergent games like Go. However, the line between these two is not impermeable, with systemic design and linear progression existing in different ways in most games. We can incorporate systems into the design of more traditionally linear games, or graft a linear progression onto a systemic one. For example, Zelda Breath of the Wild builds emergence into its gameplay, while still having a somewhat linear progression, reconciling linear and emergent elements. Consistent rules, horizons of intentional action, and not explicitly outlining a player's path are all powerful methods to get a player to think systemically. However, this needs to be infused into the structure of design. Sidmar shifted the civilization games from real-time to turn-based play to enable player intentionality, and Warren Spector deliberately crafted multiple solutions to each problem in Deus Ex to allow for player expression. We also see how systemic and strategic emergence can coincide with narrative emergence and how this can sometimes conflict as well. In Tynan Silvester's Rimworld, he had to alter the assumptions of players that skills should be rewarded in his games and get them to view death as a part of the game's dynamic narrative. Forcing players to think systemically means we might have to fundamentally alter how they approach games in general. In this particularly harrowing scene and speck-offs to line, the player has to choose between killing one of two individuals for crimes forced by circumstance. However, if you think laterally, you realize you have other options, including attacking the snipers in the background. Now, the outcomes are always the same, but just giving players the ability to make choices within that context makes them think systemically. Showing the consequences of your actions can also engender a deeper sense of systemic thinking. In The Witcher 3, if you choose to romance both Triss and Yennefer, a scene plays where both of them reject you in humorous fashion, creating a dynamic narrative response to the player's actions through the game. This can be fused into the core rhetoric of a game as well, much like how Undertale shifts the story it tells you. In any case, systemic, strategic and narrative emergence all fuse once more to create a dynamic narrative experience. Much like what strategic intentionality, Stevie argues narrative intentionality is about having clear and consistent rules and the ability for players to plan for the future. In Dark Souls, every NPC in the world can be killed, so you have to be very wary of attacking them lest you impact both your strategic and narrative possibilities. Being able to interact with the world and affect its course imbues the player with a sense that their actions mean something. Aligning the player's state of mind to that of the avatar can also help, like how Half-Life 2 makes you hate the guards as much as Gordon by forcing you to endure their abuse. Dark Souls also highlights the importance of persistence in games to create systemic narrative. In the much heralded nemesis system of Shadow of Mordor, orcs that kill you in the course of battle get promoted in their hierarchies, incorporating your failure into a dynamic narrative that plays out something like a militaristic sports drama. Understanding narrative emergence can get very confusing, so it's worth taking a few steps back to understand it. The idea with narrative emergence as I highlighted before is that our actions in games have intrinsic narrative weight to them. The first form of this is using mechanics as a metaphor, like how eco expresses empathy through its mechanics by tying your health to Yorda. The second form of this is creating stories through systems, like how the different systems in Rimworld creates bizarre dynamic narratives using emergence. The final form of emergent narrative is more interactive, where we either have the ability to affect a world with some degree of intentionality or the world responds to our actions in dynamic ways. This ties back to something Alicia Leidacher said in her talk, which was to enable player-mediated narrative possibilities through systems. Designing narrative emergence requires we anticipate the entire possibility space and then find ways to highlight, enhance, or contextualize these. Nells Anderson talks about how games like papers, please, and cart life allow you to make strategic decisions within the bounds of the game that also have narrative weight to them. For example, in papers, please, you are playing a border agent who has to make decisions between feeding your family or capitulating to the will of an authoritarian state. Strategic optimization within the game requires you to make tough decisions and this also conflicts with your values outside of it. By embedding these decisions in a narrative context, the strategic actions you take in a game tell a story of moral ambiguity, complicity, and impossible choices. In his book, Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost argues that games can use their mechanics, rules, and systems to communicate ideas and convince people about particular points of view. For example, September 12 is a game that shows the futility of interventionist foreign policy by showing how attacking insurgents in other countries leads to collateral damage. It leverages a form of narrative emergence that breaks out of its rules to convey a particular idea. Now extend this symbolic reasoning to more modern games and how civilization tells an implicit tale of how progress is inherently good or how SimCity actually implicitly advocates for public transit because using it makes it easier for you to expand your city. SimCity also models urban decay and argues for a social democratic pro-transit state that is rooted in commercialism. There are meanings and values embedded in all kinds of systems and we have to start seeing things procedurally if we want to properly encode narrative emergence. However, as we move towards games that actually craft a story in accordance with the player's actions, we are going to have to not only leverage all these tools but create systemic story structures that actually respond to the player. This has been explored in rudimentary ways in games like Detroit become human. But for right now, academics are still working on the problem. The problem is that player agency creates all kinds of permutation problems. Scholars like Janet Murray think that games are bound to become story factories like the holodeck in Star Trek which allows players to dynamically exist in emergent worlds. Many feel that the only way we can solve this is if we start designing AI systems that can manage and guide emergence. Ken Levine has spoken about the importance of modular design and storytelling. Jesse Shell the need for voice and face recognition and AI systems like facade's narrative director shows us how we can author dynamic scenarios in a modular way. With a game like Rimworld, we can choose a narrative director who infuses the play space with dynamic events. One of the most powerful systemic narrative simulators we have is Dwarf Fortress. One bizarre but illustrative example is when cats started getting drunk in the game. Building a tavern causes dwarfs to enter the premises and start drinking which then brought rats as well. The rats brought in cats who now were splashed by alcohol by the dwarfs and their automated behavior to lick themselves led to them getting drunk. This sequence is a little absurd and the future will require we manage the meaning of systems better but I think you get the point. If we want to design high fidelity narrative worlds that respond to players we're going to have to create systemic strategic and narrative emergence in ways that very few can even conceptualize today. In Jonathan Blow's game The Witness he aimed to leverage emergence to explore ideas like truth, beauty and purpose by using the strategic and systemic dynamics of games. Within the bounds of the game the pattern tracing mechanic of The Witness creates fascinating strategic and systemic emergence but by coupling this with audiologs and other narrative framing devices Blow attempted to convey concepts he thinks are built into the universe. Crafting meaning does not have to be explicit as the very active play tells its own story and this brings us back to where we started. The strategic emergence of chess creates a dynamic story between the players one that is unique to every player in game and even artists like Marcel Duchamp appreciated the artistry of the game. Similarly, Clint Hawking argues that every game of Go has its own internal story with one famous game in particular serving as a metaphor between tradition and progress. A dynamic narrative about ideals can emerge from the rules of a game and this in turn can reveal truths about ourselves. Frank Lance echoes these ideas about the truth and beauty in games and further asserts that video games are the medium of thought they make thought visible to itself by making an aesthetic of it. Game designers are the artists who think about thinking and emergence is the tool we have to reveal truths about ourselves and the world around us. Breaking down the barriers we have built around thinking systemically requires we break free of a mold of thinking that has existed for a few hundred years now. Scientific thinking has driven us into a propensity for reductionism but as many now realize the 21st century both in the sciences and the arts are going to have more to do with emergence with games emergence allows us to create deeper strategic games more robust simulation software and craft our own dynamic stories to explore what it means to be human. To properly leverage systems though we are going to need a vocabulary for how to design these things and train ourselves to think more systemically. Emergence may give us the power to create more fun, deep, meaningful and educational games but it can also change the way we see reality itself revealing the inherently systemic nature of the universe