Emergent gameplay in Far Cry 2 and STALKER4

“Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in games that arise from simple mechanics. For example, in many FPS games the physics of a rocket launcher will cause things to be pushed away from it. For years gamers have been using the propulsion of a rockets explosion below them to increase jump height.”

        There’s a simple explanation, but the article goes on to really neat thing like AI and how awesome AI can affect how you react to the world of the game you’re playing. Hearing a guard talk with his buddy, then crawl away from you after you mercilessly begin gunning them down, makes a game feel less like a game and more like a world. When a game feels like a world, as in Far Cry 2 and STALKER, it lends itself to “living” in that world rather than merely “playing” it as a game. You can play Far Cry 2 as a game by messing around, reloading if you die, etc. etc. The usual stuff. You can “live” in the world by doing a perma-death run: if your character dies, you start over. No questions asked. So instead of just shooting rocket launchers at your feet, you have to pay attention, sneak through the jungle, and be sure not to piss anyone off too badly.

        Simpler, linear games don’t lend themselves to this kind of gameplay. Could you really “live” in the world of Final Fantasy XIII? Not really. The story just doesn’t allow you to do that. You might look at a game with a modern setting, like Grand Theft Auto, and think you could live in that world - but when you try to follow the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto, you suddenly realize that the game was designed for you to speed through traffic because everything is so incredibly far away. That’s why it’s so special that you can sit down with Far Cry 2 and simply be a mercenary in Africa. Whether or not it was designed that way, we’ll never know, but much like rocket jumping, chances are it wasn’t something the developers thought about as they were making the game. It’s just something that happened to pop up.

        So the fact that Far Cry 2 and STALKER have that kind of gameplay are why, in his opinion, they’re some of the most important games of this generation. I absolutely believe that we’ll see more sophisticated games in the same vein, with even more random realism (like guards helping their wounded comrades, or freaking out when they see you and you suddenly disappear into the trees) where simple little pieces of code change the game in a huge way. It’s just a question of when. I don’t know if it will be the norm, though, because it takes a lot less work to carefully restrict a player’s control and influence over the world so that you know exactly what they’ll experience. Pretty much everyone who plays Final Fantasy XIII will have the exact same experience as I did. But no playthrough of Far Cry 2 or STALKER will be exactly the same, and it has nothing to do with things like picking a different character class, race, or gender in the RPG vein. Some people may rush through the game and just play the key storyline missions, while others will do things like perma-death runs and enjoy the game in completely different ways.

        If you think about the way people react differently to novels, or paintings - socially accepted forms of “art” - based on their own personal experiences, you’d be hard-pressed not to qualify these games as art.