Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Although emergence and progression are considered two different ways of creating
challenges in games, many games have elements of both. By integrating emergence
and progression, designers strive to combine the best of both worlds: freedom and
openness of play through emergence and the structured storylike experience through
progression. Progression is normally used for storytelling, but it is difficult to create
a coherent plot if the player has great freedom of action, as in emergent games. In
practice, these generally alternate: An emergent level or mission unlocks a little story
progress between levels, followed by another emergent level, and so on. The
Grand
Theft Auto
games provide good examples. In those games, players may achieve victory
in a mission by a wide variety of means, but their gameplay choices don't really
affect the story; it occurs only between missions. So far, not many games have suc-
ceeded in integrating the two different structures so that players experience them
simultaneously. There are many reasons for this:
n
Video games are still a relatively young medium. No one can expect all these
problems to be solved already.
n
As Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues (see the “A Mismatch in the Mechanics of Games
and Stories” sidebar), there is a disparity between the level of sophistication of the
mechanics of progression and emergence: Mechanics of emergence have evolved
much further and quicker in the past years than mechanics of progression have.
n
In the past, the lack of solid formal theory of what game mechanics are and how
they are structured made it difficult to approach such problems. One of the goals
of this topic is to present a methodological approach to designing game mechanics
and to use this method to deal with these sorts of problems.
In addition, in the short history of video games there are a few interesting examples
of games that have come up with ways to combine the two structures. Let's take a
look at one of the more recent examples.
a mismatch in the mechanics oF Games and stories
in his book
Expressive Processing
(2009), noah Wardrip-Fruin observes that the mechanics
that govern a game's interactive story have not evolved as much as the mechanics to
handle movement, combat, and other aspects of the game's (physics) simulation. simulation
mechanics are currently very evolved and detailed, but the player's progress through a
story is simply tracked by setting up a few bottlenecks or gates to act as milestones. Once
the player fulfills the task associated with a milestone, the story advances. as Wardrip-Fruin
argues, the underlying shape of these story progression mechanics is not as interesting
as the underlying shape of the mechanics of the rest of the game.
