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Emergence
A modest number of rules applied again and again to a limited collection of objects leads to variety, novelty, and surprise. One can describe all the rules, but not necessarily all the products of the rules—not the set of all whole numbers, not every sentence in a language, not all the organisms which may arise from evolution.— Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man
Emergence is a crucial facet of understanding how the system of a game becomes meaningful for players. In the quote above, Jeremy Campbell describes how emergence arises from complexity. Campbell's first sentence points to the key features of emergence: that a simple set of rules applied to a limited set of objects in a system leads to unpredictable results. This is precisely what happens in the three Heads and Tails variants. The number of different ways that the Talking Variant might play out is virtually infinite. But the game itself is so simple! This is the key to emergence in games: complex possibilities are the result of a simple set of rules. Most games share these features. The rules of Pong are relatively simple, but if you imagine all of the ways that a game can play out, from a quick-win match where one player dominates, to an extended, dramatic finish, it is clear that the system of Pong demonstrates emergence. Even a game with a much more complicated ruleset, such as Warcraft II, contains emergence. Although the game seems very complex compared to Pong, in essence Warcraft II only has a few dozen different kinds of elements, and the ways that they can interact are quite limited. If two enemy units meet, they won't strike up a conversation or start to dance together—they will either fight or not fight. Despite the complexity of the code, there is still arguably a "modest number of rules" applied to a "limited collection of objects".The system of the game, when it plays out, results in unpredictable patterns of emergence. In including such a wide range of game phenomena under the heading of emergence, we are admittedly diverging from orthodox complexity theory. Theorists of emergence often make a distinction between "weak" and "strong" emergence— for example, unless the Pong ball was an autonomous, adaptive agent that learned to avoid or follow the paddles, the game would not be considered a case of "strong" emergence. For our purposes, however, we collapse these distinctions to consider emergence in a more general sense. Emergence can come about through complex programmed mechanisms that simulate adaptive agents and systems, but it can also happen on an experiential level, where extremely simple rules give rise to complex social or psychological relationships among players.
