Emergent Gameplay

I am currently very interested in the idea of emergent gameplay, and more importantly in the idea of emergent narrative. In many games, some of them very simple, I find myself creative a narrative to fit the events of the game. When I was younger I could spend hours fiddling with Conway's Game of Life, fixing story to the life and death of the little pixels on my screen.

More recently, I find myself creating emergent narrative in Minecraft, and, strangely enough, in Dawn of War's skirmish mode. I find the process entertaining, and I derive as much pleasure from the story I create with the game, as I do from the gameplay itself.

I often want to design a game with emergent narrative. Most commonly, when this desire comes upon me, the idea takes the form of a space adventure game. The player is given some limited resources, mechanisms by which to increase those resources, and a procedurally generated world to use those mechanisms in.

One of these mechanisms would be the taking on of crew. Crew would have various traits and skills, positive and negative. For example, a potential crew member might be highly valuable because of a very high medical skill. But at the same time, he may have a large drawback in being a highly wanted fugitive. Such a potential crew member would be easy to generate procedurally, and a lot of story can emerge from this character. After all, this is essentially what Simon Tam is in Firefly, and he is a very deep and complex character. Most of his motivations spring from just two traits: his status as a doctor, and his desire to protect his sister (the reason he is a fugitive).

Other story-inducing things could be generated procedurally as well. Setting would be easy, for a space-based game. It would not be that hard to generate a star, surround it with planets, and put cities on those planets. Extra details, like asteroids, habitable moons around gas giants, and so on could be added without much difficulty.

My one major concern with this idea is with giving the player something to do. I worry that, without a built-in narrative, the player may feel that there is nothing to accomplish in the game. There is no over-arching story, no main goal to complete. With a game like Minecraft this is fine, because Minecraft is all about building, creating, and surviving. A game like what I am envisioning cannot even come close to Minecraft in terms of expressing creativity.

Still, I like the idea. My mind keeps coming back to this every few months, and every time I wonder how well it could turn out. So far I have not had the time or inclination to make this game a reality, but if that changes I'm interested in how it would be received.