I'd just thought I share a quick thought on a topic that I believe to be critically important to Pantheon's development.
Emergence is the phenomenon whereby unique and unpredictible properties of an interactive group of entities spontaneously and unpredictibly arise despite knowing everything about the independent entities themselves. This is the notion of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". Emergence is pervasive in our universe, spanning from philosophy, various fields of science, and even art. Some prototypical examples include; a single water molecule does not poesses the property of "wetness", only when numerous interacting quantities of water molecules can be wet. Similarly, a single fish's motion can be exhaustively tracked and studied in response to a predator, but when multiple, interacting fish respond to the presence of a predator the phenomenon of "schooling" emerges.
What does this have to do with Pantheon? In my opinion, everything.
Every social mechanic, every combat mechanic, every placement of NPCs, every geographical nuace, even the stat point allocations of NPCs, engineered into the world of Terminus will ultimately effect the probabilities that an emergent behavior will arise. One of my favorite examples of emergence in gaming has to be the natural emergence of EC tunnels of everquest as a trade hub. EC tunnels wasn't strictly engineered by the developers to become a hub, but it's location to nearby cities and relatively low level aggressive NPCs caused people to naturally accumulate there to trade.
Another trivial, but important example of an emergent behavior is the formation of groups. We aren't forced to group up, but because there are some locations where the mobs are too dificult to take down by ourselves, due to their engineered properties, and the fact that we have communication tools, groups will naturally form.
Another example is the career of being a porter in EverQuest. EQ developers provided the ability for Wizards and Druids to port groups of people, but the market of buying and selling ports naturally emerged.
A forth example of emergence are the various career paths which naturally emerged in EVE online. Based on which mechanic you find most interesting, there are a slew of emergent behaviors which can result in you being profitable. If you like PvE and exploring, the mechanics of scanning and hacking can be a form of income for you. If you like PvP, you can be a scammer, a pirate, join a corporation, ect. These careers are not explicitly engineered into the game, but the mechanics and skills provided by EVE developers facilitated their emergence.
In the language of emergence, the "old school" MMO design philosophy could be stated as: Let's supply a sufficient amount of mechanics of which the users will be able to utilize at their will which best enables emergent behavior, resulting in a more social and organic gameplay. The lack of awareness of emergence is where I feel like the newer MMOs are fatally flawed. Newer MMOs seem to force player/player behaviors by developing specific mechanics, or constraints, which bottleneck how players view the game. Most of the time, this results in MMOs becoming single player themeparks, as the newer MMOs try to appease every single player's needs without recognizing the potential for players to solve their issues naturally through emergence.
At its core, emergence requires player/player interaction, a natural fit for Pantheon's stress of social gameplay. So while we continue to debate whether or not a reputation system should hardwired into the game, or how fleshed out a mentoring system should be, or whether or not banking should be global or local... let's keep in mind the impact emergence has had on our gaming experience.
What are some of your favorite emergent behaviors/properties in your gaming past and what are some that you are looking forward to in Pantheon?
I hope hope that banks and marketplaces aren't linked so that trade routes geographically emerge and the "career" of hauling items from one market to another for maximum profit naturally emerges.
Syntro said:What are some of your favorite emergence behaviors/properites in your gaming past and what are some that you are looking forward to in Pantheon?
Quad Kiting, FD pulling/splitting, Boss cornering, Buff stacking, Complete Heal rotation, Root rotting, Fear kiting, just to name a few.
I'd like to new emergent behaviors appear though I suspect people will try all of these out to see if they work then adjust as needed.
on EQ1:
bard swarming,
i dont know the term off the top of my head, but when a charming class has a group of mobs and charms one until the other beat it down until its almost dead then the charmer breaks charm and charms another mob to kill it and get beat down itself, and so on.
kiting fear to make break-ins easier
jump up terrain to gain advantage over mobs'(later turned in to "jump puzzles" in other games) pathing abilities, or bypass locked doors/hard content/etc
no z-axis check on /corpse or (i think) heals
aggro kiting
on WoW(my experience is limited):
a high level runs a low level through a dungeon to power level them(or something like this)
on SC2:
kiting slower units(zealots) with ultralisks
Good post on emergence. The problem with these types of behaviors is they often get flagged as exploitations and get you in trouble.
I hope for an emergent property with the devs as they develop the progeny system, where that results in a world being dynamic and evolving (rather then changing) to keep stuff alive.
The idea of 'zones of no return' in another thread could result in mass endevours.
What if language was not easely learned; would you "hire" a translator to come along?
Root-rotting, pet pulling, FD pulling, just about every trial-and-error raid mechanic, open world PoTime raid flagging, tradeskill component farming, EC Tunnel marketplace, fabled lists (getting a phone call at 3AM that it's my turn for Fabled Najena).
It also gives arise to unsavory emergent behavior like powerleveling, etc.
I think emergent gameplay can be classified in three ways by its effects. The challenge, however, lies in knowing which one of the three it is.
Positive - The gameplay enhances the experience of the game for everyone, and makes the world seem more real and alive.
Exploitative - The gameplay allows people to trivialize content or minimize risk in extreme ways.
Risky - In the short-term, the gameplay has positive effects. However, if institutionalized by players over time, it can damage immersion or begin to trivialize content and damage risk/reward.
The first two are pretty easy for the game's live team to spot and respond to. Support the positive stuff and limit or stop the exploitative stuff. The third category is hard though. The live team will have to look at how players are using things and then (cynically) ask the question about whether this could eventually cause problems or not, and base their response on that.
My examples of the three:
Positive - in SWG, groups of player entertainers formed bands and would do regular tours between player cities. This was players taking the music system of the game to a level that the original developers hadn't really expected, but it enhanced the game for everyone.
Exploitative - In lots of games without very much in the way of death penalties, death became an acceptable form of travel.
Risky - In EVE, when cloaking was introduced, players began using cloaked scouts. This added a dimension to combat and seemed like a good thing. However, over the years, as it became easier to run multiple game clients, and cloaking became more and more ubiquitious within the game, those cloaked scouts became alts running on second/third accounts, that could just sit cloaked in a system for extended periods of time. This, in turn, ratcheted up the level of paranoia and preparation involved in holding space to levels where it began to drive away players.
Nephele said:I think emergent gameplay can be classified in three ways by its effects. The challenge, however, lies in knowing which one of the three it is.
...
Positive - in SWG, groups of player entertainers formed bands and would do regular tours between player cities. This was players taking the music system of the game to a level that the original developers hadn't really expected, but it enhanced the game for everyone.
One of the best examples of emergent play was in EQN Landmark. Players were constantly inventing techniques for voxel manipulation and discovering interactions between voxels and tools that were wildly unexpected. The player community was inventing new techniques and even new terminology which was often officially adopted and incorporated by the devs in subsequent patches.