It's been posted in the main DX thread, but it deserves its own thread for certain. What a job. I'd love to play through the pseudo-level if it's contiguous & playable.
justanotherfan wrote:Does the Safety Dance count as emergent gameplay?
I'm have no idea, to be honest I'm not sure what "emergent gameplay" really means...
(sorry english is not my native tongue, the translation makes no sense )
wbr
DX_Blaster
sorry for my bad English it is not my native tongue
Lol Jonas' course makes me scared of the course I just signed up for. Granted mine appears more on the 3D modeling side. No doubt my work will look good but play like shit. Or.. the other way around..
EDIT: read the article, very impressive stuff, I think you covered the arguments from both sides pretty well. It reads very objectively. I definitely agree with a lot of your dissection of those games, especially spore and where it succeeded and failed.
Personally I don't get why Minecraft is better than Spore. In the end both are sandbox games where the player has to fill in the blanks with a story and find for himself a goal as neither game has a goal. I'm also not really convinced by the bush-fire argument. It's dynamic and unpredictable but is this really emergent? If this would be true than any physics driven game would be emergent as the outcome is dynamic and unpredictable and caused by the player and can potentially influence AI (all the way to dying).
That's the point of separating emergence out into three different levels so you can distinguish between them. And hey, I'm not just pulling stuff out of my ass, it's an academic paper so it's based on... well, other people's bullshit. The bullshit of people with even more advanced degrees. You can take it up with them.
Take it easy there stallion. Never said that you pulled this out of your ass or that this is bullshit. It's an academic paper so it's open to discussion which is part of scientific work. And to come back on the discussion you compared Minecraft and Spore on the same level out of the three. Thus my question on why one is considered an excellent example and the other a bad one as from my point of view I don't see much of a difference there.
I'm going to argue that the reason why Minecraft is better than Spore is because Minecraft was a true sandbox. Spore was not (you cannot call it a sandbox because of how extremely linear the gameplay progression is... granted it does have branching paths.. but these amount to nothing.).
I'd also add that Emergence works on its own.. the second you put dodgy gameplay mechanics in that don't work, it weighs the entire thing down and undermines said emergence.. This is what Spore did, Minecraft we're yet to see what type of gameplay Notch is moving towards but it does appear to be a dungeon crawl RPG structured around a sandbox.. This doesn't surprise me due to it being inspired by Dwarf Fortress (honestly I'm surprised Jonas didn't reference it because its a far better example of Emergence than Minecraft.. since Minecraft doesn't have a gameplay structure, whereas Dwarf Fortress clearly does. The only reason why its difficult to analyse is because of its steep learning curve (and boy is it a biggy!) and its Ascii UI which is difficult to navigate, though I'd argue this is strictly an interface issue as it doesn't get in the way of the core idea that is its gameplay.)
Building a game which is purely blank canvas is better than building a game that is structured around flawed gameplay..
Rant on Spore:
Spore is incredibly flawed gameplay. Spore can be cut into two parts, 1. Its emergent editor, in which the player can create anything they wish even outside of the original developers scope and 2. The gameplay, divided into the main stages of evolution (Cell,Creature,Tribal,Civ,Space) The cell gameplay is where I feel Spore shines the most, you can definitely see the emergent design of the editor coming through the gameplay..
the gameplay isn't actually too bad. Creature is where it falls apart, since now you're basically throwing out old parts and adding new ones to simply over power yourself.. it leaves you with a very ugly as fuck character and has no connectivity with Tribal or later stages other than Aggressive vs Peaceful (which in all honesty Peaceful is a fucking waste of time as its boring as shit. Aggressive is at least somewhat fun), Tribal I felt was the worst stage where this part of the game was compared to Will Wright as being Age of Empires.. I didn't see that, if it had been age of empires it would've been great.. but no, all it is is a shitty "Build spear men hut... Spam spam spam", for a hardcore gamer this was the easiest mode as it offered no challenge at all, the resource gathering was gimicky as well, you could see they had the idea there for Age of Empires but in my eyes they royally fucked it up, it stands as spores weakest point.
Civ stage was next, honestly I feel Civ stage worked pretty well actually, the only real issue with it was that it was too easy and it didn't go long enough. There was actual diplomacy which was really impressive, you actually got to use abilities from previous eras. Building Choices actually mattered, you could customize all the housing, vehicles ect.. there was resource management and territorial conquest. If this were my game, I would've extended this part so that it was longer, and incorporate it more into space stage. Easily the best part of the game, much more non-linear than previous parts, since it gave you Peaceful, Neutral and Aggressive, more often than not I found myself doing a mix of all three.
Space stage.. Wow.. just wow.. this was a huge disappointment for myself, all they really did was put Creature Stage on a space ship, this is basically all they did but they added a resource mini-game to it and some light diplomacy. Unfortunately the game was unbalanced as hell.. as it was too difficult at the start, and then too easy at the end. The pirate raids really annoyed the shit out of me but if you managed to prevent them then it was rare you'd even see combat. The only real gameplay that was there was trading and diplomacy. Overall really boring stuff. If they had incorporated it more into the Civ style gameplay, it would've been more acceptable. Why they changed it I have no idea.. but it was a dumb move, having only 1 ship to control annoyed me.
As for Galactic Adventures, that at least added some Emergence to the gameplay itself given that players could create their own quests. However really all it is, is just a recycle of Creature Stage with guns.. Given that I disliked creature stage.. I was extremely disappointed with this. Given that the devs should've been fixing previous mistakes instead, for them to have released this on top of it was just lazy mainly because it was a way of saying "yep spore is broken, we'll never fix it.. here's a level editor.. ENJOY!" If they were going to do that, they should've done that from the start and not got everyone's hopes up. What they were planning was one of the most ambitious games ever made, and it was completely fucked up by poor planning and inexperienced game designers. Add this to the fact that Will Wright rarely even contributed to the project as he was always doing PR.
I really wanted to like the game... but it sucks.. As an 3D modeling program though its pretty awesome. They should've repackaged Spore with just the editor and sold it was an education tool and continued to support it. Hell even better, turn it into a 3D Claymation-like Film Creator kit (not dismiliar to what Microsoft did with 3d Movie Maker back in the 90s). Although Peter Molyeneux tried that with "The Movies" and it was completely crap... course most of his stuff is nowadays.
.. Back on minecraft and as I said early, Minecraft's strongest points were inherited from Dwarf Fortress. What Dwarf Fortress does better than Minecraft is that its a City Builder/RPG, those types of games tend to be heavily emergent/dynamic and addictive as hell. Anything can happen, You can do what ever you want, each player's experience will be different and no playthrough is ever the same. I definitely think that those two games will eventually lead the indies into creating much better games through being inspired by those. The best thing of all is that their terrain and pathing systems are extremely simplistic which is where a lot of AAA games fail because they over complicate it (granted though they look prettier, Minecraft is really blocky.)
It looked fairly certain to be in-game, but there was stuff like highlighting and the takedown scenes, as well as edits between areas, so I couldn't tell if it was playable. That's awesome, a parody mod. Kinda wish this Ceski was on the forums here.
justanotherfan wrote:It looked fairly certain to be in-game, but there was stuff like highlighting and the takedown scenes, as well as edits between areas, so I couldn't tell if it was playable. That's awesome, a parody mod. Kinda wish this Ceski was on the forums here.
Pretty small in the amount of gameplay, but a pretty good run and statement on gaming and some of the poor points of DX:HR. The stupid comments on all the items and the ending are pretty spot-on funny. The only real things missing AFAIK, to make it complete is inserting some stupid tutorial sequence ("You have found a pistol. To use the pistol, select it... etc") and lampooning the take-down a little more (maybe school yard stuff - Indian Burn, Tittie Twister followed by Atomic Wedgie). Maybe even a parody of the cover system (I'm thinking something Time Crisis oriented, everytime you come out of cover, it says "Action!" with the word across the screen).
I think Alex comment is already good enough: "if you want to fight... take cover... if you want to a silent approach... take cover... if you feel like it... take cover" (or something like that) .
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