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.

The book is definitely a nice primer in the key terms of emergent behavior. It covers areas like “active game environments”, that allow emergence to arise, and zooms all across the spectrum to topics like “emergent narrative/storytelling” and “social emergence” (like the guilds, communities and economies that arise from MMO games). Most senior game developers will probably already have had a few thoughts on most of these topics, and won’t be strangers to the key points. Still, the book nicely covers all the bases and sums up what is known about emergence, from a game designers perspective.

That being said, it often feels like the actual content that all the “defining” relates to is almost wedged in, and you’ve read an entire chapter just to get three very simple (and obvious) terms defined in “academic grown-up language”, then those terms were extrapolated, and then summed up again. Some chapters feel like they put very little meat on the plate, for anyone except the completely uninitiated.

Halfway through the book I was still waiting for it to “get in gear” and deliver some fresh and creative insights into emergence. The book goes on to present a suggested framework for emergent behavior. The system is (understandably) very simple, since it serves as a basic example, but it seems like it could have been explained on a single page, instead of taking up a whole chapter with detailed examples and pseudo-code. I was thinking “yes, I get it – the cells can interact with each other according to simple rules – now get on it it”, but it never shows anything other than very basic fundamental interactions.

The rest of the book keeps on defining the entities that go into various emergent systems, and you realize that its core mission isn’t to be creative, but rather to establish a “language” with which to discuss emergence. While that’s an honest mission, it also serves to make it much less interesting as a tool for creative development, and more like a basic dictionary of terms. It seems a bit of a shame that it spends hundreds of pages teaching a “language”, but then doesn’t venture into the area of creating creative “sentences” with it.

For a creative, non-academic like me, it can at times be a very dry read, and it doesn’t help that there are very few examples from real-world games, to show you what all the big words relate to. This kind of stacking definitions on top of each other might be very appropriate for an analysis of a topic, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

If emergence is a brand new topic for you, and you want a wide-spanning introduction to the fundamentals of emergence, as seen from a game deveoplers perspective, you should give it a shot. If you are looking for a creative cook-book with inspiration for emergent game design, this most likely isn’t the book for you.

Tags: books, emergence, emergent behavior, review

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm and is filed under game design, reviews.