Systems can reach a level of complexity where a "complexity barrier" is crossed. The systems that cross this barrier are complex systems and exhibit special behaviors.
Christopher Langton identifies four categories of systems that represent types of complexity:
Fixed systems remain the same forever, the relationships between their elements never changing.
Periodic systems are simple systems that repeat the same patterns endlessly.
Complex systems lie between periodic and chaotic systems, exhibiting patterns of behavior more complex than the repetition of periodic systems.
Chaotic systems behave in a completely random fashion.
Complex systems can be the result of many complex interrelated elements. However, sometimes a complex system can contain just a few elements that relate to each other in very intricate ways.
When a game lacks complexity, it also lacks meaningful play. When meaningful play is present in a game, some aspect of the game has achieved complexity. Complexity ensures that the space of possibility of a game is large enough to support meaningful play.
Systems that are emergent systems generate unpredictable patterns of complexity from a limited set of rules. In an emergent system, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For example, the limited set of the rules of grammar cannot account for all of the possible statements that might be made in a language.
In an emergent system, the interactions between objects in the system are coupled and context-dependent. Coupled interactions affect the overall space and pattern of a system as each interaction links to others, which in turn link to others. Context-dependent interactions change from moment to moment depending on what is happening in other parts of the system, creating patterns that change dynamically over time.
Bottom-up behavior in an emergent system refers to the ways that emergent behaviors arise from the local rules of a system to spread up through the system, creating global patterns. For example, The Game of Life is a bottom-up system that produces phenomena such as glider guns, which are not explicitly described in the rules of the system, but which are patterns produced by the bottom-up functioning of its simple rules.
Emergence in games results from the formal system of the game put to use by players. Bluffing in Poker, for example, is not explicitly stated in the rules of the game, but it is a pattern of player behavior that emerges from the game.
The way that emergence arises in a game cannot always be intuited from the rules. Go has much simpler rules than Chess, but due to emergence, it is a game with a higher number of mathematical permutations.
If a game is emergent, it has a space of possibility large enough to reward players for exploring all of the possible ways to play the game. For example, in games with different kinds of units or objects, players can create engines by using units in unexpected combinations. Designing a game that can support these kinds of engines generates rich emergence and increases the game's space of possibility.
Game design is a second-order design problem. A game designer designs the rules of the game directly but designs the player's experience only indirectly. A system-based understanding of how games function can greatly improve a game designer's ability to anticipate how changes in a game's rule-structure will ramify into a play experience.
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