What I meant to say there is very foggy. As if there's a sliding scale of predictability where 1 means the sort of scenarios you expect a game to create over time - like those of a strategy game - and 10 is batshit insanity where you can't predict a thing. A combination of the most unlikely coincidences if you will, sometimes even bugs. And when you experience one of those, well I'm often really gripped.
Actually, I'd say it's much better when unpredictable situations occur due to components given a lot of room to interact and player given enough freedom, with components still behaving exactly as they're meant to, than when they arise from programmers screwing up their basic shit.
I don't think glitch abuse should generally be mentioned when discussing the emergent gameplay in a polite company (
) for the same reason excessive deaths by RNG shouldn't be brought up as examples of gameplay challenge.
You people are reading too much into this. Emergent gameplay is when cool things happen in a game, with its different system interacting in some unpredicatable or not obvious manner. Like that screen with the books in Morrowind. You're just using the tools that the game has given you in some creative fashion with some cool results. Or just happen to stumble upon this by accident.
Of course everything is programmed into a game, that's the point of emergent gameplay.
Basically this, albeit that screen with books depicts something with no gameplay significance that arises only because game doesn't physics, so it's at best mildly pathological.
P.S. Sorry to say that, but you're still addled. Too little, too late.
What do you mean by the examples not meaning hardcoded behaviour? In the example of Thief, the devs intentionally programmed candles to be inflammable.
It means stuff that isn't forced by either scripting or being basic mechanics.
For example let's say you have a game where fire sources can ignite stuff like wooden objects, and have some torches or candles in one, predominately wooden area where they are meant to be used as possible source of mayhem.
Then you have an area much later in game with serious opposition, lots of wooden structures, but no fire sources of any kind. Possibly people doing this area are different team, or have already forgotten that other area.
Then player manages to get a fire source all the way from area A to area B and manages to set shit aflame and ease his progression immensely without it breaking the quests or the AI (because reacting to the fire is done as part of generic AI instead of one shot scripted response).
That's emergent gameplay and it is awesome.
And while you may not explicitly implement the whole array of emergent situations, you can design with emergent gameplay in mind.
To enable emergent gameplay: Have multitude of systems, include a lot of room (both physical and in terms of mechanics) to let player and systems do their thing (no, state of the art physics won't help if your game is a rigidly scripted corridor shooter), avoid constraining player agency, try not guessing - ever - what player may want or not want to do, don't overthink or overdo solutions - just ensure some exist and script those logical ones your mechanics cannot handle, sprinkle your game with some spontaneously ocurring randomness.
To avoid having emergent gameplay wreck your game: Assume as little as you can about what can or cannot happen and what had to happen in order for something else to have happened - check every state variable explicitly if it's in the slightest bit relevant to what you want to trigger, try to make things happen using the highest order mechanics available, try to design your systems so that they can deal with the results of other systems doing their job, don't try to design or script rigid setpieces, questlines and so on, make your AI flexible, think in broad rather than narrow terms.
