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Games that emphasize emergent narrative

emergentmage.com

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Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#31

Post by cdirkx »

smusamashah wrote: post #19

Author hasn't listed Noita which is a recent game. Levels are fully destructible and procedurally generated. Every play through feels different mostly because you discover some item you never had before. Pixel Dungeon is an Open Source roguelike dungeon crawler with procedurally generated maps. It also has high replay value because every play through feels different.

With Noita another narrative aspect of the game is the extremely hidden lore and extra game mechanics. They are never explained and the developers encouraged players to work together to figure it out. I believe they even encouraged datamining and manipulating game files as part of the "powers" of your knowledge seeking alchemist.

(mild spoilers)

Once you figure out that the world is actually much bigger than the normal levels you go through the game also has a big exploration element: you not only need to find spells to defeat enemies, but also to traverse the terrain and access secrets. There are cryptic messages hidden in places behind terrain, hidden combinations of liquids that have powerfull effects, secret artifacts that have to be interacted with in a certain way.

Nowadays if you see someone playing this game online you'll see them do all these things, know where to go and what to do. But when the game just came out almost none of this was known; people had to figure things out on their own and worked together in the Noita lore discord. I really liked being a part of it.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#32

Post by red_trumpet »

antupis wrote: post #27
ekianjo wrote: post #24

Surprising that the author completely "missed" sports games. Sports games (like soccer or other team sports) are by nature "emergent" as every single game is different. Trying to narrow down the definition to everything that's like Dwarf Fortress and Rim World is incredibly reductive.

Also minecraft which is not best but definitely biggest.

Yeah, at least minecraft made it into the list of Other Games.

Imo, minecraft has more emergent gameplay than some roguelike as Tales of Maj'Eyal, which has a story and mostly the same map / similar dungeons.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#33

Post by thewakalix »

stubish wrote: post #22
gfxgirl wrote: post #12

I have a hard time seeing most of these as "emergent narrative". They're just random level generation. By that metric Asteroids is "emergent narrative". 5 astroids approached, 2 from the left, one from the top, 2 from the right. I decided to target the one on the top. It broke in 2 but my quick reflexes swiftly took care of the one heading toward me. I gave chase to the other clearing the universe of one of its origi…

I tend to agree. The choice to label this as narrative is a mind trick. A when a procedurally generated level spits out something completely bizarre and game breaking, you have a laugh at the developer and maybe file a bug report. When generated narrative is completely bizarre and game breaking, you engage with the unique experience and see where it leads. When a game has a poor story, you wish they bothered to emplo…

> When a game has a poor story, you wish they bothered to employ a writer and not just graphics programmers.

At least this criticism can’t apply to Dwarf Fortress — IBM VGA-9 makes for some pretty cheap graphics!

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#34

Post by hoseja »

jameshart wrote: post #14
Rd6n6 wrote: post #10

Personally, as a writer and game designer, I find most emergent narrative is actually simulation, and the ones that work depend on the players imagination injecting meaning into the game events. Another version is basically just social media, with game rules and a sandbox aspect. That’s cool, and it can pay off massively, but narrative just feels like a strange word for it. World of natural consequences without impos…

Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of playe…

And the gameplay suffers greatly for it. If he strove to build a good game first, the stories would eventually be much more robust.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#35

Post by kharak »

ekianjo wrote: post #24

Surprising that the author completely "missed" sports games. Sports games (like soccer or other team sports) are by nature "emergent" as every single game is different. Trying to narrow down the definition to everything that's like Dwarf Fortress and Rim World is incredibly reductive.

I have to say that even after reading your post, I don´t understand how sport games could offer any narrative. But I´ve disliked every team sport I´ve encountered and never gotten the appeal at all. Maybe the author is the same.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#36

Post by avtolik »

stefs wrote: post #7

urban dead, a humans vs. zombies mmo browser game has not a single of the stated features and was one of the most emergent story generation games i've ever seen, pushed by the players in external wikis. i think it's almost 15 years since in played it, so no idea what became of it. https://www.urbandead.com/

Wow, blast from the past indeed. The community in this game was great. A bit later a similar game spawned - Nexus Wars, which was also great, but sadly closed down.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#37

Post by ksia »

p1necone wrote: post #13
Rd6n6 wrote: post #10

Personally, as a writer and game designer, I find most emergent narrative is actually simulation, and the ones that work depend on the players imagination injecting meaning into the game events. Another version is basically just social media, with game rules and a sandbox aspect. That’s cool, and it can pay off massively, but narrative just feels like a strange word for it. World of natural consequences without impos…

I think there's sort of three broad categories here: Narrative "emerging" because the level of risk, broad array of "ways to fail" and/or simulation complexity enables players to tell the story of their playthrough in an interesting way. (See: 'boatmurdered', Kenshi). Narrative "emerging" out of inter player conflict and politics in large multiplayer games. See guild politics in PvP-with-consequences focused MMORPGS…

Interesting. So the more risk...more ways to fail...more suffering produces narratives...religion -> religious wars -> drama -> fun.

Thanks for the categories. Havent thought about the differences too much before.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#38

Post by p1necone »

ksia wrote: post #37
p1necone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's sort of three broad categories here: Narrative "emerging" because the level of risk, broad array of "ways to fail" and/or simulation complexity enables players to tell the story of their playthrough in an interesting way. (See: 'boatmurdered', Kenshi). Narrative "emerging" out of inter player conflict and politics in large multiplayer games. See guild politics in PvP-with-consequences focused MMORPGS…

Interesting. So the more risk...more ways to fail...more suffering produces narratives...religion -> religious wars -> drama -> fun. Thanks for the categories. Havent thought about the differences too much before.

I think also because of that rich possibility for failure, heroic successes are also much more interesting tales in those same games.

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#39

Post by dijksterhuis »

jefc1111 wrote: post #5

Fun read, but for me misses a pretty crucial 'feature to look for': Having multiple human players. Surely that is a great route to emergent gameplay? Reading the title of this post I just assumed DayZ and Arma 3 would be in there somewhere. Cool list anyway :)

> Emergent story is the story that is generated during play by the interaction of game mechanics and players

Totally agree, is DayZ in a nutshell. Creates some down right weird, funny and intense interactions between randomly paired humans. Excited to see what all the new updates bring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdedScYi5yE

Re: Games that emphasize emergent narrative

#40

Post by p1necone »

hoseja wrote: post #34
jameshart wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of playe…

And the gameplay suffers greatly for it. If he strove to build a good game first, the stories would eventually be much more robust.

I'm not sure I agree with this, I had a great time playing Rimworld. It might not be to your taste, but it doesn't feel like there's any objective sacrifice to gameplay just for the sake of making the stories better - are there particular design choices you're thinking of?.

Although I do get a nagging feeling that I would get more out of playing Dwarf Fortress instead every time I play Rimworld, and usually end up binging that for much longer.

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