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Designing Surprise
How do the concepts of complexity and emergence relate to game design? It is clear that games are systems and that complexity and emergence affect meaningful play. But how do emergence and complexity impact the process of design? How can understanding games as complex systems assist in making games? Complexity is intrinsically linked to meaningful play. Playing a game is synonymous with exploring a game's space of possibility. If a system is fixed, periodic, or chaotic, it does not provide a space of possibility large or flexible enough for players to inhabit and explore through meaningful play. On the other hand, if a system is emergent, exploring possible relationships among game elements is continually engaging. Players will play a game again and again if something about the experience continues to engage them with "variety, novelty, and surprise." In the business of online content development, it is well-known that a good game is the "stickiest" kind of content available. A fan of an animated web series might watch the latest episode two or three times, but someone addicted to a game will play it dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times. The infinite possibility that arises out of an emergent system is a key design strategy to encourage repeat play. A successfully emergent game system will continue to offer new experiences, as players explore the permutations of the system's behavior. Peter Molyneaux's Populous: The Beginning offers a great exampleof game emergence. Game designers Rollings and Morris vividly illustrate how a complex game system unexpectedly creates new play possibilities: In Populous: The Beginning, when enemy warriors run up to one of your preacher characters, they will stop at a short distance as the preacher starts chanting. For a while, they sit listening. If the process is not interrupted, they will then convert to the preacher's side. That's one rule. Another is that if enemy warriors have started fighting, a preacher cannot convert them. What this means in practice is that you can leave your preachers in a perimeter defense around your settlement. The first wave of enemy warriors will be converted. This is automatic, and the player is free to get on with other things. But now consider the second wave of enemy warriors. They come running up, and the first thing they encounter is not the preacher's conversion radius but the attack radius of the last lot of warriors to be converted. A fight breaks out between the groups of warriors, and the preachers cannot intervene to convert the second wave. The feature that emerges is that you cannot leave your defenses unmanaged. From time to time, you need to scroll around your settlement and move newly converted warriors behind the preachers. I have no idea whether this was what the designer intended or not. Very possibly it was. However, it is a good example of emergence because it is not immediately obvious that those two rules would give rise to this feature.[9]
According to Rollings and Morris, emergence in Populous occurs on two levels: within the local context of interaction between game units, as well as on the larger level of player behavior. The local interactions between player-controlled preachers and interloping enemy warriors produced context-dependent results. The first interaction between these game elements— with no converted warriors present—converts the enemy warriors. But if a second wave of enemy warriors appears, the altered context containing converted warriors creates a new situation entirely, in which a battle ensues. The rules determining the behavior of these units are relatively simple: preachers convert enemy warriors within a certain radius. But because warriors have their own simple behaviors (they fight enemy warriors and are immune to conversion while fighting), the intersection of these simple rules produces emergent behaviors, which change according to the context in which they are placed. Emergence occurs on a second level as well: the player's larger behavior within the game. As Rollings and Morris point out, a player needs periodically to "scroll around [his] settlement and move newly converted warriors behind the preachers," managing these emergent relationships throughout the play of a game. The effect of the preacher/warrior interaction ripples outwards, growing from merely local behavior to become incorporated into the larger fabric of the overall play. One lesson to learn from this example is the specificity with which relationships between elements need to be designed.The emergent behaviors Rollings and Morris observed were only possible because of exactingly particular attributes of the preacher and warrior units. What is the radius within which the preachers can convert enemy warriors? How long does conversion take? What is the range at which enemy warriors can notice preachers, and vice-versa? How fast do the enemy warriors travel? When are they immune to conversion? The attributes of the game units are in a careful balance. If enemy warriors travel too quickly, or if the conversion process takes too long, then enemy warriors might reach the preacher and slay the unit before there is time for the preacher to convert them. If fighting warriors were not immune to conversion, then the second wave of enemy warriors would be converted, thus reducing the player's need to monitor the settlement's preachers. It was only through careful attention to game rules in the design of Populous that these behaviors emerged. [9]Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris, Game Architecture and Design (Scottsdale: Coriolis Group, 1999), p. 26.
