Letting the player do what they want won't matter if the game only has one or two ways of beating it. Second, the game's objectives (if any) must make allowances for and possibly reward the player for using Emergent gameplay strategies. Satellite Reign may be open-ended, but features linear tools and objectives which doesn't make it all that emergent The result is that the player can solve challenges or create things with a completely unique solution and the game mechanics have a wide enough berth for this to work.īut here's the problem: Emergent gameplay is built around open-ended games, but not every open-ended game is an example of Emergent gameplay. The point is that the mechanics are flexible enough that they can be combined by the player to produce unintended actions that the developer may or may not have specifically designd the game around. Despite that definition, Emergent gameplay is hard to properly define, because of how tied it is to open-world or open-ended gameplay. Emergent Gameplay will be defined for this post as the following:Įmergent Gameplay: A title where the mechanics afford the player to create new strategies and utility beyond their original intent or utilizationĮmergent gameplay as mentioned at the start is one of those dream concepts that developers love to explore just like a game with endless replayability.

King of the hill gameplay