Reviewed by Thomas Løfgren

Emergence is a highly interesting topic, which is closely intertwined with the future of gameplay and game development. How basic entities interact to form new unpredictable and “creative” high-level behaviors is one of the keys to understanding complex systems, like societies or biological systems (from swarms to ant colonies) – Yes, even how our brains work – So naturally it has great interest for game developers, who are trying to simulate or create interesting environments, for the player to experience and have fun in.

“Emergent Behavior” has been a buzzword in game development for what seems like more than a decade now, and has become even more popular with the huge success of “sandbox games”, like the Grand Theft Auto series. But more linear games can also benefit from emergent systems, like physics or flocking. It seems like a topic that every serious game developer should look into, and consider designing for, when building the framework for their games.

With this in mind, I was pretty thrilled to get my hands on a copy of “Emergence in Games“. And immediately started tearing through it. Reading the book it quickly became clear that it’s a lot closer related to a scientific or academic paper, than a creative “cookbook”. The book spends a huge amount of the whitespace defining key terms, making bullet point lists, putting things in boxes with labels on, citing sources, and then summing it all up again. Sometimes this makes you ask yourself what the actual content of what you just read was.

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