A few months ago I finished the last title in the Zelda series, Breath of the Wild . This installment has taken the classic mechanics to new levels and has been groundbreaking in many respects , but I will focus on one in particular: the temples.
The temples are small dungeons with puzzles or tests of all kinds in which our ingenuity and our handling of the different tools of the sheikah stone will be tested (something like a multipurpose knife that allows us to move objects by magnetism, paralyze any type of object or give them kinetic energy through blows so that they go off, among others). This cocktail of possibilities gives rise to an endless number of solutions limited to our lateral thinking , allowing us to solve each situation in a different way than the one proposed.
The puzzle of my temple consisted of using a maze that I could move through the gyroscope of my console (turning and moving the device). At the beginning, a ball fell from the sky and he had to drive it all the way to reach another platform where a button would be operated . After many attempts and much frustration after having been spinning the console erratically, I gave up and decided to try another more rudimentary method . I realized that if I turned the maze very fast while the ball was falling – like a catapult – the ball could reach the other side and activate the button. After trying a couple of times, the ball landed directly on the other platform, through the air. I used the possibilities and tools that the game gave me in a way that was not conceived, thus creating new mechanics and redesigning the gameplay.
When we start a game for the first time we are faced with a new universe, with its own rules and limitations. And the way of using them in ways not contemplated in its conception as if it were Macgyver himself, is what we call emergent gameplay .
Glitches are another avenue of emerging gameplay. As we already mentioned in our gaming dictionary, these are game failures that we can use to our advantage: get money or infinite ammunition, win all the fights, that the npcs start an improvised zumba show … They are not experiences that break the game, but they do create unique and unrepeatable situations in our game and offer us new ways to enjoy a title.
Another example that serves to understand the concept is the popular Pokémon Nuzlocke mode . This particular way of playing was born from a fan who, bored with the mechanics of the franchise, decided to set two basic rules for himself. First of all, if a Pokémon was weakened it couldn’t be used again; secondly, you can only catch the first Pokémon that appears on each route. This creates a previously non-existent difficulty curve and reinvents some little stimulating mechanics from top to bottom after so many deliveries, creating a new product that moves away from the base game.
Using the mechanics and elements of a game in a way that they were not intended for is what we will call pop-up gameplay. In turn, when these mechanics are not tied to a script or previously programmed scenes, we are also talking about emergent gameplay . Even online multiplayer is another very powerful emerging gameplay avenue: they are real people not controlled by the CPU, so they will act erratically and without any pattern or rule.
Emergent narrative
Another way to turn a video game into a more personal experience. The case of The Sims marks an unfathomable territory such as that of the emerging narrative. When we played with dolls and / or dolls, each had their own problems, jobs, and relationships, and none were the same . In The Sims you create your own individual or set of individuals with their aspirations, their positive and negative traits and each one is independently related to the universe. From the first moment you established what his profession was going to be and his goal in life, how he was going to get along with the rest of the neighbors or what unnecessary luxuries he was going to have in his property . In this game there is a whole process of writing characters and script on the fly that gives the title a lot of personality and endless stories within its community.
In this aspect, Western role-playing games (RPG when talking about video games) stand out as a genre. These base their mechanics on the model of Dragons and Dungeons , in which each player must assume their own personality and characteristics (a role, worth the redundancy) and see how these converge with respect to an existing universe .
Having a genre that is almost dedicated to this section thickens the list of titles to be highlighted ad infinitum , so we will not focus on any one in particular .
But apart from the fighting, the infinite inventories and other characteristics of this genre, it is our character himself that will create part of the gameplay of our adventure. What traits do we take, what personality are we going to want him to have, what romances … They are all decisions imposed by ourselves and that begin to weave a writing that will always move away from the original proposal of the developers . Thus, although most titles have a predetermined script with few variations, assuming a role always imbues each game with a unique air and leads to different adventures and experiences.
Skyrim or Fallout 3 and 4 are two excellent examples of these concepts . In both games we create a character with his own personality and appearance and develop a personal plot. At the same time, the bugs and glitches that populate Bethesda titles are well known and that, due to their size, have allowed us to tackle a mission from any angle (stealthily up on rocks, head-on, using spells …), shortcuts (such as forcibly jumping over mountains that were designed not to be crossed …) or witnessing the most bizarre situations (dragons crashing to the ground, npcs that climb on a table, others that speak to you from 5km away … ).
Both titles perfectly define the functioning of the gameplay and emergent narrative where, even if we design a game with a script or pre-established rules, the player becomes an author to give us another look outside our own, giving us an unpublished and non-transferable meaning to his departure and, therefore, to the video game itself.
