Emergence and progression - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 24

emerGence and proGression outside Video Games

in Juul's categorization, all board games are games of emergence. Games that start with
randomized elements, such as cards or dominoes, also qualify. such games typically
have a small number of pieces and little or no predesigned data. The text on Monopoly's
chance and community chest cards are examples of predesigned data, but they require
less than 1KB to store.

a game of progression requires a large amount of data, prepared in advance by the
designer, that the player can access at arbitrary points (called random access ). This is
inconvenient for board games but easy for video games now that they can store many
gigabytes of data. Progression is the newer structure, starting with the text-adventure
games from the 1970s. however, progression is not limited to games running on computers.
Pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons offer published scenarios,
and these scenarios also constitute games of progression, as do the topics in the choose
Your Own adventure book series. Topics are another medium that can handle a large
amount of data and offer easy random access.

T IP don't confuse
the term games of
progression with other
ideas about progres-
sion in games, such as
leveling up, difficulty
curves, skill trees, and
so on. We use Juul's
definition of the term:
a game of progression
is one that offers pre-
designed challenges,
each of which often has
exactly one solution, in
a fixed (or only slightly
variable) sequence.

In contrast, games of progression offer many predesigned challenges that the
designer has ordered sequentially, usually through sophisticated level design.
Progression relies on a tightly controlled sequence of events. A game designer dic-
tates the challenges that a player encounters by designing levels in such a way that
the player must encounter these events in a particular sequence. According to Juul,
any game that has a walkthrough is a game of progression. In its most extreme
form, the player is “railroaded” through a game, going from one challenge to the
next or failing in the attempt. In a game of progression, the number of game states
is relatively small, and the designer has total control over what is put in the game.
This makes games of progression well suited to games that tell stories.

Comparing Emergence and Progression
In his original article, Juul expresses a preference for games that include emergence:
“On a theoretical level, emergence is the more interesting structure” (2002, p. 328).
He regards emergence as an approach that allows designers to create games in which
the freedom of the player is balanced with the control of the designer. In a game of
emergence, designers do not specify every event in detail before the game is pub-
lished, though the rules may make certain events very likely. In practice, however,
a game with an emergent structure often still follows fairly regular patterns. Juul
discusses the gun fights that almost always erupt in a game of Counter-Strike (p. 327).
Another example can be found in Risk, in which the players' territories are initially
scattered all over the map, but over the course of play their ownership changes, and
the players generally end up controlling one or a few areas of neighboring territories.