Game Design Ideas

Game Design, Artificial Intelligence, Complex Systems

Browsing Posts tagged Emergence

Author: Penny Sweetser

Publisher: Charles River Media

ISBN 10: 1-58450551-6

Companion Site: http://www.emergenceingames.com/

My Rating: 6/10 (Interesting)

Summary: This book is a compendium of information on methods of increasing interactivity in your games, and even though it does not deliver on the promise of developing methodologies to design for emergence in games or offer analyses of complex dynamic game systems, it does a good job of introducing the reader to the field, especially if you are willing to read all the reference material introduced in the book.

Review:

Emergence and complexity in game systems are my main research interest, so when i got my hands on this book, I was overjoyed by the prospect of reading up on innovative methods to design for emergence, and gauge the types and extent of emergent behaviors based on design templates. I picked up a hot tea, and sat down, expecting to find original ideas and a gain deep understanding of complexity in games. As always, I jotted down notes about my experience with the book, as I read on. This review is a summary of those notes.

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I finally had some time to play some of the “weirder” games out there-and I must say I found a favorite: Dwarf Fortress!  It is hard to believe that an ASCII-based simulation can offer so much depth in gameplay. If I was to pick only one factor that distinguishes DF from other games (besides the obvious “geek appeal” its MS-DOS style interface creates) it would have to be the emergent, very complex interactions that the dwarves have with each other and their  environment. In this article I will discuss the concepts of complexity and emergence citing DF and other games as examples…

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