Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
or in what order things will happen in the game? Since objects can be
combined by the player in any order, we also have no idea how all these
possible combinations will unfold over time as the player moves through
the game, and the music and sound ef ects must support this evolution. As
you can see, this process is very dif erent from linear media, like i lm or TV,
and this is just one example of interactivity in games.
Okay, so what does unintentional emergence look like? A game glitch
is a pretty good example of this type of emergent gameplay—objects
in a game restricted to simple rules somehow produce unintended
outcomes than what the designers had originally had in mind. Injecting
the human player into the game also contributes tremendously to
unintentionally emergent behavior. For example, players can take
advantage of these glitches in order to improve their score in a game.
Special controller button combinations in games like
Halo 2
would give
you faster gun access after being in a melée, giving you an edge over
other players. Emergent behavior can also result from using items in
unexpected ways. An example of this is using the rocket launcher in
Quake
to vault the player up into the air, by i ring it at the ground.
The cast of characters from
This Spartan Life:
a machinima
talk show set in the game world of Halo.
Another extremely artistic result of unintentional emergence in
gameplay is the phenomenon called
machinima
. Imagine your average
multiplayer i rst-person shooter game. Basically you're a camera, moving
around in the gamespace. Now, if you encounter another player in that
space, you are, in ef ect, i lming a 3D animated character as they are
moving around and if you don't simply kill the player, you just become
a cameraperson following them around. Games like
Quake
developed
small clubs of players who would tape their progress and sometimes
these led to little comedy bits. Eventually machinima developed out
